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Abstract
In the decade before the American Civil War, North Carolina voters embarked on a path to remake state politics and government in a manner beneficial to the non-plantation owning class of white men. Politically educated and mobilized through newspapers and populist political candidates, these yeomen farmers, subsistence farmers, and urban professionals first removed the Whig party from control of the state government, placing the Democrats in power to expand voting rights in all elections to all white male citizens of the state. When Democrats proved resistant to enacting further change, chiefly tax reform, these same groups of voters overwhelmingly removed them from power by 1862. Newspapers provided detailed accounts and heavily slanted commentary to readers regarding legislative and executive actions in the state as they appealed to sectionalist divides in North Carolina that often pitted the poorer but populous west against the richer and plantation-dominated east. From David S. Reid’s free suffrage campaign of 1850, to expand voting rights, to the Opposition Party’s tax reform campaign of 1860, politicians feverishly attempted to proclaim themselves as the champions of popular rights. Historians have often overlooked the role of newspapers as an agitator for voters in the history of antebellum North Carolina politics and the inseparable connection between the explosive free suffrage debate before the Civil War with the push to enact tax reforms that placed a larger tax burden on the users of enslaved laborers. Understanding this pivotal decade in politics and democratization in North Carolina before the Civil War aids us in understanding the limits of North Carolina’s loyalty to the broader South and ultimate rebellion.