John Maass
The 1780s Reconstruction and Reconciliation Efforts in North Carolina
The U.S. Constitution was approved by North Carolina in 1789, having failed to pass the year before. Scholars have tended to focus on the exertions of North Carolina Federalists to secure the ratification of this new plan of government. Less scholarly attention has been paid to the political “losers” in this struggle, the Anti-federalists. Historians’ standard depiction of the postwar years as a narrative that proceeds from the war years to recovery to the adoption of the Constitution has something of a teleological bent to it. Overlooked has been the fact that the 1780s were not just about getting to the Constitution; they were about the effects of war on society. Carolinians had just endured a bitter struggle fought in their own communities, which informed their postwar political actions. The story of the 1780s is that of a reaction to the war and how the war influenced the decade. This paper provides alternative factors in North Carolina’s opposition to the new union and the federal Constitution of 1787, including jealousy of the national government, western lands, wartime ineptitude of the Continental forces, financial disputes, the 1783 Treaty of Paris, and the Loyalist question.
John R. Maass is a historian with the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C. His publications include “‘Humanity Mourns Over Such a Site’: The Army’s Disaster at Terre aux Boeufs, 1809,” Army History (2012); “Nathanael Greene and the Politics of Moderation, 1781-1783,” in General Nathanael Greene and the American Revolution in the South, ed. by James Piecuch and Gregory Massey (2012); “‘The Cure for All Our Political Calamities’: Archibald Maclaine and the Politics of Moderation in Revolutionary North Carolina,” The North Carolina Historical Review (2008); and “‘From Principles of Humanity and Virtue’: Moderation and the Revolutionary Settlement in North Carolina,”Journal of Backcountry Studies (2007). He is currently working on a book about North Carolina and the French and Indian War (1754–1763).
