Songs of the Carolina Charter Colonists, 1663-1763

CONCLUSION

The historical-minded are actually only a small part of the population of most states and countries. But in a free democratic society such as we believe North Carolina to be, with a good and honest public school system, two distinguished universities and old and time-honored colleges, ancient churches supported by millions of pious and God-fearing people, such rare, and in some instances almost unique, institutions as Annual Culture Week in Raleigh, the State Art Gallery, and the North Carolina Symphony—in such a North Carolina every person who can read or listen and watch may well feel a thrill of pride in an occasion so portentous as the celebration of a tercentenary of any sort that the wise and good would fain remember.

Few tercentenaries are so significant as that of the Charter of 1663 to the Lords Proprietors, those great Englishmen who are commemorated, every one perhaps, in the names of North Carolina Counties. While Virginia has Jamestown and 1607, and Massachusetts has Plymouth and 1620, North Carolina has the Lost Colony and 1587 and the Charter and 1663. Other states—for example, Florida with St. Augustine and 1565, Mississippi with Biloxi and 1699, South Carolina with [81] Charleston and 1670, New Mexico with Coronado and 1539— have their honorable antiquities. But, with the exception of South Carolina, joined with North Carolina by the Charter, these share a tradition other than the British. Citizens of all the states may well congratulate North Carolinians, who have never been notorious or offensive ancestor-worshipers. Indeed, most North Carolinians relish the somewhat pejorative epithet applied to the Tarheel State—“A Vale of Humility between Two Mountains of Pride.”

What better way for North Carolinians to feel intimately and personally this pride in honored antiquity than by recalling, if possible hearing sung, the songs that the Carolina Colonists “sung, or would, or could, or should have sung?”

A physician and Christian of our century of the Charter, Sir Thomas Browne, in his great and beautiful Religio Medici (1643), wrote, “What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.”

Here, with mistakes in conjecture perhaps, and doubtless with omissions, are the songs of the Carolina Charter Colonists, some of them almost as familiar as the Bible. Here is the way to realize them, in their beauty or moving homeliness, in their glory and sometimes their ribaldry.

[82] May this book “tell.” May we read the songs and hear them sung, and thus share emotions felt by sturdy English and Scottish and Welsh and Irish people who braved the perils of the wilderness across the ocean three hundred years ago in search of the freedom and security, the peace and plenty which their posterity share today.