From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Travel Notes: What’s a Tar Heel?

Travel Notes: What’s a Tar Heel? North Carolina has a strange nickname—the Tar Heel State. What, exactly, is a Tar Heel? Medical condition? Maybe, but probably not. Is it one word or two? Generally, two. More importantly, why do these people go by that name? The derivation of Tar Heel is murky. It somehow originates from North Carolina’s primary export during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—naval stores. From before the American Revolution through the end of the Civil War, North Carolina sent more naval stores to its sister colonies and England than any other place. Pine trees were burned to produce tar and pitch, and pine sap was collected to produce turpentine . All three products were necessary to keep wooden ships seaworthy and productive. All three were very dirty, nasty enterprises. In his 1941 book Tar Heels: Portrait of North Carolina, Jonathan Daniels writes that the English soldiers gave the people of North Carolina the nickname during the Revolutionary War. Supposedly the North Carolina colonists dumped their tar into the Tar River to keep it from falling into British hands. The colonists threw so much tar into the river that when the British soldiers crossed, they got tar on their feet. As the native North Carolinian Daniels says: I got North Carolina dirt on my feet, if not tar on my heels that will be there till I die. The North Carolina earth sticks to its sons at least as adhesively as that tar, thrown into a river to keep it out of Lord Cornwallis’ hands, which his soldiers got on their heels when they forded the stream. They gave us our queer nickname then. And it has stayed with us longer than the original pine forests from which so much tar and turpentine came. Modern-day historians dismiss this story as legend. Most now believe that Tar Heel was an insult directed at Rebel soldiers from North Carolina. The term was used by Virginians either to deride the North Carolinians as backwoods hicks or to chide them because North Carolina 44 took so long to secede from the Union. (Only Tennessee took longer.) Modern historians note that the first written reference to Tar Heel comes from a February 1863 entry in a Rebel soldier’s diary: “I know now what is meant by the piney woods region of N.C. and the idea occurs to me that it is no wonder we are called Tar Heels.” The term was used later in the war more positively by Confederate general Robert E. Lee, who supposedly said after a battle, “Thank God for the Tar Heel boys.” By 1864, it was no longer a term of opprobrium. Late in the war, the governor of North Carolina addressed his troops as “fellow Tar Heels.” Outside the South, the term still maintained a negative connotation. In 1875, an African-American congressman from South Carolina discussing race relations noted that many whites were “noble-hearted, generous-hearted people,” but others were “the class of men thrown up by the war, that rude class of men I mean, the ‘tar-heels’ and the ‘sandhillers ,’ and the ‘dirt eaters’ of the South—it is with that class we have all our trouble.” The New York Tribune noted that not all North Carolinians were worthless, that some “really like to work, which is all but incomprehensible to the true Tar Heel.” By 1893, the term was sufficiently positive for the state university to name the student newspaper The Tar Heel. A few years later, the New York Evening Post identified Jonathan Daniels’ father Josephus Daniels and Thomas J. Pence as two Tar Heels holding important posts in Woodrow Wilson’s campaign. Today it’s not only the state’s nickname, but it’s also the nickname of the University of North Carolina sports teams. Not bad—for a state to take an insult and incorporate it as its nickname. And it’s an improvement on the old nickname for the state—the Old North State. Tar Heel is also a better nickname than “sand hillers” or “dirt-eaters,” names the Reconstruction congressman might have suggested. Besides its nickname, North Carolina’s early history is noteworthy because it was one of the last colonies to adopt the U.S. Constitution. The first time the North Carolina Constitutional Convention delegates voted, they voted overwhelmingly to neither ratify nor reject the Constitution. The main sticking point, it seems, was that the proposed 45 [3.136.154...