During the height of British Imperialism, the British colonies had three major ports along the Atlantic coastline: Charlestown, New York and Boston in which all British trade prior to the Revolution commenced.
The Carolinas, like New York, were hotbeds of discontent. Rivalries emerged between Officers of the Crown and land grant owners, land grant owners and merchants, merchants and yeomen, yeomen and indentured servants, indentured servants and enslaved peoples, and the early settlers of English and Scotch Irish, and various communities of expulsion from Europe, including Palatines, Scottish Highlanders, Welsh, and French Huguenots were petitioned in the coffee houses of London of the promise of land to those who would journey across the Atlantic and develop the coastlines of the Carolinas.
Expansive land grants of the eight Lord Proprietors of the Carolinas, including Lords Ashley Cooper, Berkeley, Albemarle, Craven, Carteret and Clarendon, followed first the river beds feeding into the port of Charleston and further north, the Albemarle region. By 1720, two seats of Royal government were created – New Bern at the northern end of the Province and Charleston at the south, positioning the district of Hanover (Brunswick Town and Wilmington) at an advantage – away from the watchful eye of all the King’s men.
“Before the Revolution, England had imposed a law banning the export to America of any tools that might assist in the manufacture of cotton, linen, wool, and silk. The British manufacturers of hats, nails, steel, and gunpowder had impeded American efforts to make comparable articles” (Chernow 371).
The rum distilleries of Rhode Island, the sugar of the West Indies, and the Naval stores of the Carolinas supplied Britain with so much wealth that the British Navy is a fierce defender of the Crown and its interests all over the New World.
By the 1760s King George III acquires the property of the Duke of Buckingham as a private family residence for his wife, Queen Charlotte, and their children. It was known as “The Queen’s House.” Remodeling and modernizing the house between 1762 and 1776 was at a cost of £73,000. The Queen’s rooms on the principal floor were among the most sophisticated of their time.
Note the similarity of styles of these two royal houses. Not to be outdone by the opulence of the mother country’s estate, the humble government seat of the Carolinas will follow by example.
Tryon Palace in New Bern was built between 1767 and 1770 as the first permanent capitol of the Colony of North Carolina and a home for the Royal Governor and his family. At a cost of at least £15,000, a sum that was largely paid for by increased taxes on the Carolina colony.
When all desirable land along the Ashly and Cooper Rivers of Charles Town are taken, a group of men commonly referred to as the Goose Creek men settle along the Cape Fear River. This distinct set of individuals between the two royal seats of New Bern and Charles Town – establishing Brunswick Town at its mouth and Rocky Point several miles upriver along its Northeast branch.
Bred a merchant in Dublin, Cornelius Harnett Sr. settles in Edenton, sometime prior to 1722 in which records indicate he marries Mary Holt, daughter of Obadiah Holt, a prominent colonial family. Their union not only includes a son born on April 20, 1723, but will comprise extensive tracts of land, and their estate will be estimated in value at £7,000 sterling. Inserting himself in the political intrigues of Governor Burrington, Harnett moves to the Cape Fear.
In June 1726, Harnett Sr. is the first to purchase two lots from Maurice Moore on condition that within eight months he should build on them good, habitable houses. He opens an inn, establishes a ferry over the Cape Fear River, enters upon large tracts of land, erects sawmills and becomes one of the leaders in the industrial development of the Cape Fear Section, and all the while continuing a level of infuriating quarreling with the royal governors.
“Ultimately Governor Burrington charges him with base ingratitude, and in Harnett’s own house denounces him as a ‘fool, blockhead, puppy, and Ashe’s tool.’ The closing years of his career, he serves as a justice of the peace, as the first sheriff of New Hanover county, and as vestryman of St. Philip’s Church at Brunswick. Dying in 1742, he left a not inconsiderable estate to his son of the same name” (Connor 19).
“There were in Wilmington, and residing in the country around, a larger number of men than could be found in any other potion of the province of like commanding character and eminent ability.” Among them were Hugh Wadell, John Ashe, Samuel Ashe, Alexander Lillington, Robert Howe, Maurice Moore, William Hooper, Timothy Bloodworth, Adam Boyd, Alexander MacLaine, James Moore, Moses John deRosset, and Cornelius Harnett (Conner Essay 22).
From 1726 to 1750, Cornelius Harnett, Jr. lives in Brunswick Town. In the latter year, he moves eighteen miles north to Wilmington, engaged in mercantile pursuits; he is appointed by Governor Johnston as justice of the peace for New Hanover County in April 1750, at the age of 27; shortly thereafter, he is elected town commissioner in August 1750. From 1754-1766, he served as representative of the borough of Wilmington in the North Carolina Assembly, in which he served for eleven years” (Morgan 231)
During his years in the Assembly, Harnett “served on committees to prepare bills for the building of roads and the establishment of ferries; for the location of towns; for the creation of counties; for the regulation of quit-rents and the settlement of public accounts; for the encouragement of agriculture and the protection of infant industries; for the organization of the militia and the protection of the coast and the frontier; for the regulation of commerce and the protection of traders; and for the encouragement of public schools” (Colonial Records V and VI – Connor Essay 29)
“He was responsible for seeing that Wilmington’s laws were fairly administered and enforced – that every household regularly swept its chimneys and had a fire bucket, that pigs were not allowed to wander in the streets, nor young men to ride wildly through the town.”
Harnett had been best known as a skillful financier. As far back as December 5, 1759, both houses of the Assembly had made him chairman of a committee to “examine, state, and settle the public accounts of this province. This tangles business he had unraveled with such dispatch and accuracy that to the day of his death his primacy in matters of finance was never questioned (Our Debt 385)
His primary residence, Maynard, built in 1750 on a bluff overlooking the Northeast branch of the Cape Fear at the north end of Wilmington was “a brick structure described as being of a type frequently used in colonial times, distinguished by the gambrel roof. Its interior was of red cedar, and of elaborate and ornate finish. The windows and door frames were very broad, also of cedar. … including the basement it contained twelve rooms.
Harnett’s wife, Mary, has been confused by scholars as to origin, though is best described in the journal of Janet Schaw in 1774:
…{I} must confess that in all my life I never saw a more glorious situation. It {the plantation} fronts the conflux of the north east and north west, which forms one of the finest pieces of water in the world. On this there is a very handsome house, and properly situated to enjoy every advantage. But the house is all, for I saw nothing neat done about it; tho’ nature has blocked out a fine lawn for them; down to the river it is overrun with weeds and briers. They tell me however that the Mrs. of this place is a pattern of industry, and that the house and everything in it was the produce of her labours. She has (it seems) a garden, from which she supplies the town with what vegetables they use, also with melons and other fruits. She even descends to make minced pies, cheese-cakes, tarts, and little biskets, which she sends down to town once or twice a day, besides her eggs, poultry and butter, and she is the only one who continues to have Milk. They tell me she is an agreeable woman, and I am sure she has good sense, from one circumstance, — all her little commodities are contrived so, as not to exceed one penny a piece, and her customers know she will not run a tick (credit), which were they to be the length of sixpence, must be the case, as that is a sum not in every body’s power, and she must be paid by some other articles, whereas the two coppers (that is, halfpence) are ready money. I am sure I would be happy in such an acquaintance. That is impossible; her husband is at best a brute by all accounts and is besides the president of the committee and the great instigator of the cruel and unjust treatment the friends of government are experiencing at present (178-179)
This “brute” of a man the deare Lady of Quality, Janet Shaw refers, had served as chairman of the Sons of Liberty of North Carolina and leader in the resistance to the Stamp Act in 1765 and 1766.