Students of North Carolina history ? especially those who?ve participated in the Citizen?s Constitutional Workshops developed by the John Locke Foundation and N.C. History Project ? know that North Carolina initially rejected the U.S. Constitution. This state accepted the document only after the federal government considered the amendments that later came to be known as the Bill of Rights.
Pauline Maier?s recent book Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 helps explain why North Carolina was willing to reject the Constitution, even though 10 other states had endorsed it.
Among the factors Maier identifies is North Carolina?s Regulator movement, and its ?fight against corrupt county officials who were appointed by the royal governor and his council and whose ?highest Study,? critics charged, was ?the Promotion of their Wealth.??
Though the Regulators? battles had predated the Revolutionary War, many North Carolinians still remembered them by the late 1780s:
North Carolina?s relatively democratic 1776 state constitution did much to address the insurgents? demands for greater control over those who ruled them, and its declaration of rights affirmed the right of the people ?to assembly together, to consult for their common good, to instruct their Representatives ? to apply to the Legislature, for redress of grievances?; it said the people ?ought not to be taxed, or made subject to the payment of any impost or duty, without the consent of themselves, or their Representatives in General Assembly, freely given.? Still, memories of the Regulation ? or, more exactly, the grievances that prompted it ? made many North Carolinians acutely conscious of how much their welfare depended on being governed by officials who were accountable to the people, under laws written by legislators who knew the circumstances of their constituents and who might even be, as the Regulators had insisted, farmers themselves. Having suffered from the twin scourges of corruption and collusion, the people of the Piedmont understood with particular force the need to prevent them in the future. And having had more than enough experience with litigation, they also grasped the importance of juries drawn from the local population and a ready access to the courts. The Regulators had managed to secure the creation of four new western counties mainly to make trips to county courts less long and onerous. The Constitution too often ran up against those sensitivities.
