NORTH CAROLINA, FLAG OF

U.S. state flag consisting of a horizontal red stripe over a white stripe and, at the hoist, a vertical blue stripe incorporating a white star, the initials of the state (NC), and two ribbons. There is an unsubstantiated reference to a North Carolina flag of the Revolutionary War era (177583). It supposedly was white with a hornet's nest and the inscription May 20, 1775, the date on which citizens in the town of Mecklenburg are said to have proclaimed their independence from Great Britain. Prior to the Civil War (186165) militia troops from North Carolina carried blue flags with the state seal. When the first official North Carolina flag was adopted on June 22, 1861, however, its colours and stripes were based on the Stars and Bars, and it displayed the date of North Carolina's secession from the Union (May 20, 1861). Various Confederate regimental flags were subsequently based on that design. The present North Carolina flag, established on March 9, 1885, is similar to its Civil War-era predecessor; it was designed by General Johnstone Jones, who served in the Confederate army. On one of the ribbons in the current flag is emblazoned May 20th, 1775. The other ribbon has the inscription April 12th, 1776, referring to the Halifax Resolves, wherein the Provincial Congress authorized North Carolina delegates to approve the Declaration of Independence of the United States. Whitney Smith History The proprietary and royal colony Following the attempts by Raleigh and others to colonize the coastal regions in the 1580s under patents from Queen Elizabeth I, the region remained Indian territory for decades. A grant by King Charles I in 1629 for the lands south of Virginia brought the term Carolina into being, but no permanent settlement was made until farmers and traders from Virginia moved into the Albemarle Sound area in the 1650s. This resulted in a grant from Charles II in 1663 that created Carolina, but for years the settlers resisted the ineffective government imposed by the proprietors in England. Between 1712 and 1729 the separate province of North Carolina was ruled by a deputy dispatched from Charleston, which had become the centre of proprietary government. Boundaries between North and South Carolina were agreed upon in 1735 but not completely surveyed until 1821. North Carolina's growth was hampered by restrictions on shipping imposed by Virginia on its tobacco crop, by economic and religious quarrels with absentee proprietors that led to several uprisings, by war with the Tuscarora Indians (171113), and by coastal piracy involving Edward Teach (Blackbeard) and others. Unlike other colonies, which had grown up around coastal towns that represented the first settlements, North Carolina had no town until Bath was incorporated in 1705. By 1729, when the colony came under royal rule, several other towns had been chartered. The decades of royal rule saw a turnabout in the colony's fortunes. The population rose rapidly, settlement spread across the Piedmont, and the wealth and quality of life expanded. A large slave population maintained an agricultural economy based on tobacco and rice and on naval stores from the region's extensive pine forests. Prior to the U.S. War of Independence, the beginnings of an intense eastwest hostility had grown into several insurrections, but joint antipathy to British rule united North Carolinians and forced the flight of the royal governor in 1775. Statehood The war in North Carolina comprised not only a miniature civil war involving the many Tories in the new state but also the suppression of Cherokee uprisings in the west. Much of the state's energy went to resolving the conflicting interests of the eastern counties and those of the west until constitutional reforms in 1835 broke the dominance of the east. A period of great economic and social progress, first under the Whigs and after 1850 under the Democrats, was slowed by the furor over slavery and was ended by the American Civil War.