Carolina Cradle: Settlement of the Northwest Carolina Frontier, 1747-1762 (review)

Book Reviews53 hundred of that Profession in the whole county." That the Assembly was responsive to the wishes of the people is likewise borne out by the record. "If our Constituents disapprove our Conduct a few Days will give them an opportunity of changing us by a new Election," was a message from the House in 1755. The assertion, too, that Pennsylvania politics was devoid of principles or any sense of direction should be dispelled by reading the long and bitter debates over the proprietary issues in the Votes. In the last chapter, Hanna sees an internal upheaval accompanying the Revolution in Pennsylvania. This was accomplished, he thinks, by new men unassociated with the old parties, whose leaders with no heart for change composed the Tory element. Franklin went along with the Whigs but contributed little, according to Hanna, to the revolutionary movement. Again it would seem that the meaning of the sources has been misconstrued. A failure to understand the complexities of the Revolution in Pennsylvania makes this slender chapter seem forced and unconvincing. Rutgers UniversityTheodore Thayer Carolina Cradle: Settlement of the Northwest Carolina Frontier, 1747-1762. By Robert W. Ramsey. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press. 1964. xviii, 251 pages. $6.00. Carolina Cradle is an intensive study of the migrations into Northwest Carolina, particularly that part of the original Rowan County lying between the Yadkin and Catawba Rivers. In dealing with this area, Mr. Ramsey is considering a question larger than actual migration and settlement—the significance of the frontier to American history. He believes that "the truest understanding of the history of western Carolina, the South, and the nation is to be found in the careful study of the process by which they were settled." His study is surely careful: a twenty-page bibliography gives evidence of the wide field of his research ; the text is heavily footnoted; nine appendices present materials bearing on the origin of the settlers; and there are fourteen maps or drawings giving details of areas from which a number of the settlers came and of sections where they settled. Mr. Ramsey's research in court records, minutes, and public documents is impressive; he has been able to follow many families south through the sale of their lands, to find relevant family connections or to suggest them by using wills and deeds and marriage records, and finally to locate them in Northwest Carolina and to detail some of their activities. These people of Quaker origin prospered; some owned numbers of slaves; others fought in the Indian wars; they held public office out of proportion to their numbers. Their Quakerism seems far behind them. Carolina Cradle will come as something of a disappointment to Quaker readers, not through any fault of the author but because of a circumstance hard to explain. The fifty to one hundred families of "Quaker origin" who settled between the Yadkin and the Catawba Rivers seem not to have made contacts with Friends already in Carolina; in fact only their family names remain to suggest that they once had been Quakers. As early as 1748, there were Friends at New Garden, forty-five miles or so from the Yadkin Valley, "near or quite forty families" when the Monthly Meeting was set up in 1754, and with the long memories Friends have for distant 54Quaker History cousins and acquaintances, and with Public Friends traveling through the country visiting Friends in "the Service of Truth," it would seem reasonable that contact would have been established, but it was not. There was also a Friends neighborhood at Deep River (six miles southwest of New Garden), and it was the center from which the Quaker migration into Northwest Carolina was to come. In 1793, Deep River Quarterly Meeting set up a Monthly Meeting at Deep Creek, four miles north of Yadkinville. The Hinshaw Encyclopedia lists sixty-six persons among the earliest members, but not one can be identified with the settlers of "Quaker origin" who first settled in the same valley and on the creeks where there are now Quaker Meetings—Deep Creek, Forbush, Hunting Creek. Dutchmans Creek, or at Harmony Grove and East Bend. This later settlement of...