North Carolina's Settlers Had Humble Beginnings, Says Irvin Cobb, Nov. 2,1923

Irvin Cobb on Our Ancestors. . . Noted Writer Doesn’t Believe There Were Many “Gentlemen” Among First Settlers

Folks who brag about their early Colonial ancestors should put on the soft pedal around Irvin S. Cobb who thinks our first settlers were in the main just ordinary run of folks and nothing to brag about.

Mr. Cobb has written an interesting article about North Carolina in the current number of Hearst’s International in which he says that North Carolina is the greatest state South of Maxon & Dixon and ten some; but he isn’t enthused over the early aristocracy. Mr. Cobb says:

“In the first place, back at the beginnings of the English-speaking white man’s state of things on the continent, her soil was squatted upon by types of men and women whose descendants today form a population that makes North Carolina perhaps the most typically American of the Southern States, just as Indians, by virtue of similar blends in her original composition, is undeniably the most typically American of all the so-called Middle Western States, and just as Oregon, from similar causes, is probably the most distinctively American of all those States which indubitably—and geographically—are Western. These first settlers almost exclusively were of Anglo-Saxon stocks—artisans, farmers, small traders—a sturdy, hard-headed, money-poor, land-greedy race, very shortly to be enriched by groups of Irish refugees and Highlander Jacobites and at a somewhat later period by a valuable stream of trekkers across the mountains from up Pennsylvania way—Quakers an Dutchmen and Welshmen, mainly: still later came Swiss and a few Sweets out of Delaware and New Jersey. So, you see, both in the strains of her immigrating and her emigrating additions, the young country signally was favored.

“She did not carry the outset the burden of an aristocratic institution which her high-headed neighbors on either flank—Virginia and South Carolina—already were carrying. It may sound like treason in some ears for me to say it, I being Southern born myself, but it seems to me the South rather has overworked the Cavalier fetish just as New England has overdone the Puritan Father fetish.

“I am constrained to believe that there were not nearly so many gentlefolk among the Southern ?? as one might be led to believe from reading of the histories, ?? as a rule, do not cross… unchartered sea to …wild and savage land. The elect, wherever found, are prone to stay on at home. They are doing pretty well there, or else they would not be rated as belonging among the elect.

“It is the traveling tailor, the runaway apprentice, the petty tradesman in debt, the down-at-heels schoolmaster, the itinerant preacher, the briefless barrister, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker who compose the mass of settlers in far places, and these soon absorb the trickling admixtures of adventurous younger sons and gentleman soldiers of fortune who come with them overseas. Later, with prosperity, the pleasing romance of an aristocratic ancestry is created.

“At any rate, this largely was true of North Carolina’s settlement. Her first citizens did not build many mansions, but with bush hook and axe blade they hacked their way to the heart of the wilderness there to set up their log homesteads.”

From the front page of the Elizabeth City Independent, Friday, Nov. 2, 1923