Introduction
[In the Galaxy Magazine]: I shall not often meddle with politics, because we have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs to serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
Mark Twain’s quote above might well have described modern conservatives, who far outnumber liberals in criminal indictments and convictions. Demonstrating this criminality far better than at any other time in history, Americans re-elected a convicted felon and rapist to the presidency for 2025! North Carolina in particular has long suffered from such a criminal political conservatism. It essentially began over 300 years ago, first with Barbadians who created Carolina, a branch of which evolved into Edward Moseley’s criminal “Family” syndicate. Twain was not alone in his assessment of these political criminals. The development of our American democracy in 1776 created a system by which conservatives and liberals clashed in Congress. They were attempting to finally realize the “American dream” proposed in the Constitution; however, it seems that conservatives usually fought that process. We still have yet to reach that point and historians of the past, enamored with politically conservative "Great Men" who dominated our history, have often failed us all!
Carolina politics was uniquely corrupted by money, theft, and slavery. It spawned the first criminal syndicate in America which essentially led to the Civil War. Many battles have been waged within the colony and state and eventually against the federal government! Most historians have viewed these conflicts trustingly as growing pains – an optimistically divine push towards progress. For most of our history, however, Carolina and its progeny – like the “Family” – have disingenuously pretended at social progress merely to gain profit and power. Social progress often stagnates here and North Carolina politics have not changed significantly since Carolina’s founding in 1671. Journalist Rob Christensen viewed North Carolina as “nuanced, multi-layered, and at times contradictory.”1 This outlook holds much truth even now! He may have envisioned Richard Nixon, Jesse Helms, or Donald Trump when he wrote the title for A Paradox of Tar Heel Politics. Still, his thoughts may have drifted farther back in North Carolina’s history to another man who had as much influence on Tarheel politics, setting the standard for North Carolina in the eighteenth century as Nixon, Helms, or Trump did to further it in the twentieth and twenty-first. Christ’s Hospital’s “Old Blue,” Edward Moseley easily defined Christensen’s notions of the Carolina “big boys,” or powerful Carolina conservatives! Moseley's consequential conservative traits indeed paralleled a paradoxical United States as well, in that these attributes also contributed to the attempted insurrection of 1860 with the Civil War! The hits keep coming when greed or worship of Mammon forever corrupts us all!
Moseley came to Carolina from London, an educated member of an elite family fallen on ill fortunes. English Moseleys encountered uncomfortable religious discord and liberalizing political changes in their highly conservative
1 Rob Christensen, The Paradox of Tar Heel politics: the Personalities, Elections, and Events that Shaped Modern North Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 4.
Tory empire of Stuart England. Edward left to escape these liberal changes and to seek financial redemption… to build his own lucrative empire in a faraway frontier land of massive real potential! Like Donald Trump, Moseley dreamt of America and its capitalistic freedom, divorced of course from the constraints of civilized regulation.
As hinted, Moseley set the standard for Carolina’s corrupt “Family” political syndicate. This is historically ironic because Moseley did not come directly from a “bedeviled” Caribbean world – a land “beyond the lines of amity” – most of whom originated in Barbados. No, he proudly emanated from the greatly more “civilized” world in London – a world unfortunately lacking in so-coveted a commodity as land. America, by contrast, was viewed as literally boundless in such opportunity that English worshipers of Mammon drooled at the prospects! The western limits of America were yet unknown to them! Excusing crude methods found unacceptable at home in England, America offered outcast conservative gentlemen like Moseley the greatest asset that islanders of Great Britain could only dream about: LAND and massive tracts of it! While early America existed merely as a “breadbasket” for slaving Barbadians, it offered Edward Moseley so much more – a chance to realize immense real wealth.
England’s old conservative paradigm hit a proverbial roadblock in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 and society began to chastise conservative gentleman of his station and fiscal ideology for their harsh Stuart impudence. England began repudiating Tories like Moseley. The riches that God had divinely ordained for men of his rightful station could only be sought in America!
That consequential year of 1688 saw Protestant Dutchman William of Orange replacing the Stuart king James II, dispelling – at least in England – the Tory or conservative notion of a divine monarch on the throne.
Stuarts had one last hurrah under Queen Anne (1702-1713). Yes, she was the last Stuart monarch, admittedly subjugated under a Whig Parliament. Still, it cannot be ignored that her family influenced America the most, for more than 100 years in its formative period. Edward Moseley attempted to emulate the habits of his ancestors as they followed Charles I and II and attempted to follow James III in the Jacobite Rebellions. Any expelled Stuart-loving pirate in America would have done the same, as their later Republican colleagues attempted in two insurrection attempts here! For Moseley in the eighteenth century, he would carry on his own crude capitalist oligarchy in North Carolina and helped create the political “Paradox” that Christensen was destined to find.
These “land pirates” took advantage of a crude swampy wilderness in America from which they might build their own – definitely aggressive and often violent – version of a mercantile Utopic Stuart kingdom. It must have offered everything of which Moseley dreamed because once he arrived, he never left.
Owing to his duplicitous self-serving methods, Carolina’s sons ignored Moseley’s corrupt character well after his death in 1749. Still, his posthumous reputation encountered a renaissance in the “Lost Cause” ideology or defeated anger of other conservative North Carolinians after the Civil War. Confederates sought heroes of their own martial political caste. They elevated a criminal Edward Moseley whom they saw as a Confederate brother. Since this bloody conflict, North Carolinians have regarded him as a great champion for the former Confederate state:
Of all the men who watched and guided the tottering footsteps of our infant State, there was not one who in intellectual ability, in solid and polite learning, in scholarly cultivation and refinement, in courage and endurance, in high Christian morality, in generous consideration for the welfare of others, in all true merit in fine, which makes a man among men, who could equal Edward Moseley.
---- Hon. George Davis2
While reading this quote, we must keep in mind that the “Hon. George Davis” of Wilmington was once the Attorney-General of the Confederacy. He did not refer to the United States as his “country,” but to his own “country” – in older colonial terms – as North Carolina.
Like most Confederates – desiring to redeem their ideology – Davis never believed that North Carolina belonged in the United States, especially after the war. Essentially, slaving Confederates never had belonged in a nation that aspired to freedom… at least on paper! This same anti-government theocracy and the veneration of such unlikely heroes dominated Southern Democrats throughout that war, the cold post-war Janus-faced “Progressive Era,” right up through the 1960s and Civil Rights. “Great Men” dominated in the literature and history of the early twentieth century. Compared to John Wayne by one author, “Great Men” of redeemer history were “the heroes who best embodied militant Christian masculinity [but] were those unencumbered by traditional Christian virtues” even though they used them to gain power.3 This easily describes conservatives in our divided America today – those of the MAGA or “Make American Great Again” vein. Those of such militant masculinity oddly linked religion with crude slaving conservatism. Around 1968, these early Southern Democrats joined the more comfortably business-oriented –
2 D. H. Hill, “Edward Moseley: Character Sketch,” The North Carolina Booklet, Vol. V, No. 3 (Raleigh, N.C.: North Carolina Society - Daughters of the Revolution, July 1905), 202.
3 Kristen Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Kindle version) (Liveright Publishing, 2020), 10.
even fascist – Republican Party, thanks in part to President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” of that year. Nixon recognized the defeated South as the “brothers” of his demographically-flailing party. The Republican Party then adopted a similar white-supremacist evangelist approach in the “Moral Majority” of the 1970s and truly devolved as these conservatives attempted to “Rise Again” and defeat the scourge of Black Power that threatened the divinely-ordained Herrenvolk or the “master race!”4
The Deep South’s martial – essentially feudal – ideology was recognized quite early by many British writers, one who called America the “Commonwealth of Pyrates” in his book as early as 1724. Englishmen of the eighteenth century considered most “provincials” or Americans “beyond the lines of amity” as “notorious” Golden-Age Pirates. British antiquarian Captain J. H. Lawrence-Archer in the nineteenth century wrote that the young, rebellious, provincial upstart of America was still a pirate or rogue nation and it was apparent in their Civil War. He offered that the king’s pardon of pirates in September 1717 “gave an abiding salvo to the consciences of English desperadoes, (similar to those under the belligerent Federals and Confederates, in the piratical Alabamas, Georgias, and Floridas lately sweeping the high seas).”5
4 Oh, they warned us. They did. I’m sure you’ve seen the bumper stickers, t-shirts, and patches. As a young boy growing up with family in the Lower Cape Fear, I possessed some of these prideful paraphernalia myself – even had a Confederate flag once! But, I grew up, studied my family’s history, and discovered Christensen’s “Paradox” on my own. I always felt when driving from Fayetteville, where I was born, southward to Pender County where my mother’s family lived, that there was a subtle, but definite difference to that region.
5 Captain J. H. Lawrence-Archer, Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), 6; Nathaniel Mist, writing as “Capt. Charles Johnson” in A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (London: 1724).
Afterward, American “pirates” in the South crowned themselves “God’s Chosen People.” Southern ideology focused upon the more martial Old-Testament biblical ideology – they envisioned a divine right to plunder and profit as they saw fit – in an early version of the Prosperity Doctrine. Like many ex-Confederates, George Davis fallaciously elevated a controversial kinsman he then molded into a “Great Man,” or hero to his divine “State” or “Country.” The man responsible for this early fallacious method of rhetoric, Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle, called them “unmistakably’ sent to earth by God.”6 The state’s twentieth-century Southern “redeemer” historiography asserted that the byzantine Edward Moseley was, as D.H. Hill said in 1906, “always on the side of the people.”7 Hill’s reference certainly leaned toward “ex-Confederate people” and did not actually say “against a secular United States Government,” but most of his ilk intended exactly that sentiment. MAGA today would call this federal government the “Deep State” to clearly delineate it from their multiple divinely-governed smaller and separate states – as they thought right under the Articles of Confederation in the Revolution. Republicans today use the term “States’ Rights” ubiquitously – even dramatically often – to separate themselves again from the union!
Although redeemer narratives still floated amongst the turbulent waters of popular twentieth-century history in the
6 https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/anthropology/great-man-theory; According to the early-twentieth century and now-defunct “Great Man Theory,” great leaders are born, not made. Leadership traits are inherent and cannot be learned. Great leaders come forward when they’re most needed, in order to become the foundation upon which history is built. Essentially, according to the Great Man Theory, people in positions of power deserve to lead because of characteristics granted to them at birth, which ultimately help them become heroes.
7 Hill, “Edward Moseley,” 204.
state, Edward Moseley’s deeds had not survived as well as others before. Just following that war, the man enjoyed a brief resurgence – or resurrection – as a great conservative hero! Afterwards, the state quickly ignored his distasteful brand and one now must pose the question as to why that happened. What made Moseley such a difficult subject to explore except in the most extreme or martial cases? Why was he such a repulsive subject? What happened to Edward Moseley’s reputation in North Carolina historiography?
It had much to do with lingering revolutionary fervor that followed 1776. Early American historians tended to elevate their own questionable souls – of course, I’m also thinking of the controversial Samuel Adams and his “Sons of Liberty” – to hero status. Essentially a terrorist – but, a terrorist on our American side – Adams’ pro-American crimes were easily forgotten and dismissed. Moseley’s Barbadian/Carolina-origin Family also contributed their martial talents to the Revolution. Understandably, early American scholars or antiquarians were enamored with their shiny new country and all of its founding members – even the proudly criminal ones like Adams – became heroes.
Dr. Hugh Williamson is considered North Carolina’s first official state historian. One should, however, hesitate to call him a true “historian.” In reality, Williamson was trained as a physician, became a soldier, and then a politician. Clearly an amateur antiquarian, he was not trained for and had little respect for the historical sciences – for examining and studying the past in an objective, meaningful and truthful fashion. He was not taught the critical discipline of historical inquiry – the proper methods and theories. Most of these early antiquarians of past recorders and commentators had not, either – especially those of the American South following the Civil War.
Williamson typified Carlisle’s “Great Man” “historian” or antiquarian. Wealthy and educated – again like his Carolina gentlemen contacts – Williamson came to the state from Philadelphia to practice medicine in the midst of American rebellion and Revolution, late in his career. Pennsylvania’s Williamson possessed similar biases to his friends in the Deep South before the war. “Historians” of the Antebellum Era honed their political polemicism like their Barbadian ancestors before them – upon the profit or blood and sweat of African and Indian slaves. They learned to use the stories of the past as weapons – tools to buy and sell people, get someone elected, pass a bill, or destroy an opponent. Like his ideologically akin Family in North Carolina, Williamson served as a U.S. Congressman and House delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Like Mark Twain’s impression of the “criminal” politician, he possessed a particular flair for the written word – used mainly as rhetoric. Williamson wrote – or rather, stretched – many “histories” of the state that the more astute professional later regarded as “fake news” – however, most conservative North Carolinians were proud to call him “historian.” He’s still much quoted today – again – almost exclusively within the state! Indeed, much of North Carolina’s transitory early history – redeemer history – remained durable and lasting. It stands solid against a sea of factual inquiry – as most narratives of the “Solid South” usually did.
North Carolina crowned Williamson as the state’s own physician, lawyer, and politician. He wrote History of North Carolina, Volumes I and II in 1812, establishing him as the new state’s official authority on history in antebellum times. Winners write history they say and this is often true, though the “history” they generate be prudently questionable. History is supposed to be the scholarly struggle to seek truth – although it has rarely been used in so pure a fashion. Williamson’s writing was carefully sculpted by political agendas and the needs of his compatriots – those in power at the time – in Carolina, most of who were members of Edward Moseley’s extended Family.
The rest of this state’s history he had to discern or recreate from scattered records and friendly tales of blustering hubris he learned over glasses of brandy with his fellow warriors. He listened to grandiose stories of family pride from conversations in officer’s tents at the battle for Charleston in the American Revolution. Perhaps he heard a few from these same men in the halls of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
North Carolina’s history has relied upon Hugh Williamson like the history of Golden Age pirates has relied upon an early eighteenth-century cheap dime novel written by a suspicious author, sold on docks and street corners in port cities to the few who could read, and craved a “plucky” tale to pass the time on the Atlantic crossing. I refer, of course, to “Capt. Charles Johnson’s” A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, published in 1724. This book is essentially historical fiction; it makes for great reading, but contains little if any valid opinions or analysis – the accurate ones already available in primary records of the period. Like most “Great Man” histories, it was simply regurgitated bravado – often manipulated to increase profit potential.
Eminent professor of literature Dr. Manushag Powell described this book as “counterfactual” or counter to the facts. Indeed, its author seemed quite untrustworthy as a Jacobite polemicist newspaper publisher in London actually named Nathaniel Mist, a man who had been jailed repeatedly by government authorities – and who needed money to pay his fines. In other words, Mist’s book was never a reputable historical source. As any writer of fiction, he never used citations to support his tales – to demonstrate objectivity or invite critical inquiry of his “facts,” manipulations, and fabrications. Like others of his ne’re-do-well subjects, Mist as a criminal didn’t care much about objectivity where profit might be found.
Like pirate populists with “Charles Johnson,” we North Carolinians have copied Williamson over and over and over. We spin it a little this way and that, referring to it in pretended scholarly fashion as a valid historical source. It is not. Though a bit more cautious today, we still have rarely condemned it in the past – still considering it established “truth” on which to build. Indeed, we have savored this bad habit! Remarkably, his tales have essentially survived unscathed – perhaps we loathe parting with our traditional “Great Man” – or dominant white man’s – view of our history?
What did the “Great Men” have to say about Moseley? Gen. Hugh Williamson’s associations with Edward Moseley’s Family tell the tale. Williamson befriended Gen. John Baptiste Ashe, Jr. of Wilmington, a nephew of Edward Moseley and son of a man who once bailed Moseley out of jail. He served in the American Revolution with Ashe in South Carolina and again in the first two terms as U.S. Congressmen from North Carolina. He knew Ashe’s family well and should have regarded his uncle at least as well as Gen. Ashe, but even he barely mentions this “incidental” Edward Moseley in his two-volume History of North Carolina.8 Even a slapdash antiquarian like Williamson regarded the accomplished statesman Moseley with suspicion. What he dared to say about him was brief. Moseley’s reputation must have been “too hot to handle” – even for a conservative gentleman polemicist of the Twain ilk! Still, writing before the Civil War, his conservative friends had not yet lost a major war to the hated “Deep
8 Hugh Williamson, The History of North Carolina, Vol. 1 and 2 (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1812).
State” or Union and popular refutation of their martial slaving ideology!
Perhaps a bit of light peeked through a few decades later, under a more determined examiner. Reverend and perhaps more astute and honest historian Francis Lister Hawks declared in 1858 that Moseley was "friend of Carey in his rebellion, the opponent of Governor Hyde while he lived, and of Colonel Pollock during the [Tuscarora] Indian war."9 The good Reverend Hawks goes on to praise Moseley’s devotion to church affairs and “patriotic” sense of duty, but intuitively questions his motives.
Hawks was not a revisionist, a redeemer, or even sympathetic with the Confederacy. A contemporary of Wiliamson, he wrote his history before the Civil War. Even though he was from New Bern, he lived most of his life in Connecticut and New York. He was not inclined toward the Southern slaver brotherhood like his former neighbor or the latter Southern redeemer polemics or “fake news.” And, he was certainly no friend of Gen. Hugh Williamson.
Hawks accurately accused Williamson of being an amateurish historian, often giving “no reference at all” for his arguments “as was his habit.”10 Hawks appeared to admirably rely upon primary evidence for his conclusions – colonial records he studied on his trips home. Hawks saw Moseley much differently than North Carolina’s traditional redeemer historians: Hugh Williamson, George Davis, or James Franklin Shinn, the first to risk a short essay on Edward Moseley in 1899 – presumably without angering his fellow quick-tempered North Carolina colleagues. Hawks accurately regarded Moseley as “Hasty in his temperament
9 Francis Lister Hawks, History of North Carolina: with maps and illustrations, Volume 2 (Fayetteville, N.C.: E. J. Hale & son, 1858), 556.
10 Francis Lister Hawks, History of North Carolina: With Maps and Illustrations, Vol. I (Fayetteville: E. J. Hale and Son, 1858), 143.
and resolute in his purposes, he unquestionably, in his moments of excitement, sometimes overstepped the limits prescribed by a sound discretion, and made himself more vulnerable than became a man of his talents and attainments.”11 He also asserted that the records showed “no better impression than that [Moseley] was a factious man of acknowledged ability, who could find little use for his talents save that of stirring up strife and encouraging contention for ends purely selfish.”12 Still, the forgiving reverend yet kindly – if inadvisably – appended, “We do not think this was his true character.”13 Well… yeah, we do!
Again, Hawks’ publication preceded America’s civil struggle. Two years later, a more aggressive state at war grew hardened and bitter and ripped the nation apart! History became an even more pointed weapon, an acrimonious and spiteful tool of political revenge. Four bloody years went by. Tensions remained, even exacerbated by occupation and Reconstruction.
The political cyclic nature of North Carolina history during the post-war era almost never strayed from the right side of the political spectrum – still clinging to their Stuart roots. Its ahistoric monarch – defeated, but not forgotten – remained seated upon a battered throne, patched back together and re-gilt with “Lost Cause” revisionism and even more blatant lies. During this time of Southern conservative political dominion, the academic discipline of history as exemplified by astute and reasonable men like Francis Hawks faded into obscurity. It was replaced by Williamson’s original state-glorifying redeemer brand, like that of John Baptiste Ashe’s descendent Samuel A’Court Ashe, or Alfred Moore Waddell, or of many others whose
11 Hawks, History of North Carolina, Vol. 2, 358.
12 Ibid., 359.
13 Ibid.
biased rhetoric demanded no argument or criticism. Again, it was much like today’s Fox News’ brand of conservative entertainment. In this vengeful, beaten, martial atmosphere, historical truths became malleable objects of stubborn spite – not fact, but “alternative fact,” or Dr. Powell’s “counterfactual” drivel.
Still, inquiring redeemers found that they had to be cautious with Moseley. He did not attain such “Great Man” status until after 1865 and even then, his reign during the post-war Progressive Era remained quite short. This caution was a complex thing to understand without examining the subject deeply. Moseley reached “Great Man” status artificially; his misdeeds, greed, and war-profiteering left a bad taste in the mouths of even conservative American historians before the War Between the States. His criminal methods, however, were not considered quite so distasteful for the losers of the South immediately after that Civil War. These men were eager to redeem their heritage, money, and – for “Great Men” and other heroes – to defend their “Lost Cause.”
Again, in the “Lost Cause” holy literary revivals after the Civil War, the ex-Confederate redeemer George Davis suddenly crowned the forgotten Edward Moseley as a man of “scholarly cultivation and refinement.”14 KKK leader William L. Saunders declared Moseley’s “undying love of free government, and his indomitable maintenance of the rights of the people,” white people, of course.15 Secretary of the Historical Commission, Robert Diggs Wimberly
14 George Davis, Address Delivered Before the Two Literary Societies of the University of North Carolina, June 6, 1855 (Raleigh: Holden and Wilson, “Standard Office,” 1855), 18; D. H. Hill, “Edward Moseley: Character Sketch,” The North Carolina Booklet, Vol. V, No. 3 (Raleigh, N.C.: North Carolina Society - Daughters of the Revolution, July 1905), 202.
15 American Historical Association, “Annual report” (U. S. Government Printing Office, 1896), 197.
Connor’s Makers of North Carolina History agrees with Saunders and flatters Moseley to the point of incredulity.16 Conner, in his History, elevated Moseley to North Carolina’s historical “Swamp Majesty,” writing quite accurately that “For forty years Moseley’s biography is practically the history of North Carolina.”17 He also said that few could deny this fact. “Those who did not hate him adored him,” continued Conner in the arguably Fox News fascistic tone of Tucker Carlson, “An aristocrat by nature, he was a [Southern] democrat by convictions and in practice.”18
James Franklin Shinn’s “Edward Moseley: A North Carolina Colonial Patriot and Statesman” in the Publications of the Southern History Association in 1899 was largely another glorified version of Edward Moseley’s life. Another nascent Progressive Era’s revisionist assault on truth, Shinn’s was yet another treatise depending strongly upon George Davis. Redeemers often “revised” many biographies of those they desired to flatter – and many of these mal-contrived “alternate facts” stuck in later history textbooks. Davis erroneously believed the British Moseley was raised in Princess Anne County, Virginia – in the old capital of the American Deep South – certainly not Britain! Shinn – as a good Carolinian, forever devoted to the ethos of slaving Barbados – also erroneously argued that Moseley must have lived in Barbados – for some time before coming to North Carolina. Carolinians glowed with pride over their militant Confederate origins! Overall, Shinn defended Moseley, as did Davis, by asserting “his good name is seriously
16 R.D.W. Connor, Makers of North Carolina History (Raleigh, N.C.: The Thompson Publishing Company, 1911), 38-50.
17 Robert Diggs Wimberly Conner, History of North Carolina, Vol. I (), 94.
18 Ibid.; This hinted at Fox News’ fascist tendency to elevate nationalism while quelching criticism.
damaged only by the obscurity which has lasted too long.”19 Davis, in this line, spoke directly to historian Francis Lister Hawks, who he knew had famously described Moseley’s destructive and aberrant behavior in 1858.
All this sudden praise for Edward Moseley after the war! Still, no one – not even Shinn – then, or even later, bothered to write a full biography of the man. Odd, isn’t it – for a man once compared to the entire history of North Carolina – a man who literally surveyed and defined the state, top to bottom?
Even his own Family syndicate tended to carefully ignore him or mentioned him only in passing. Confederate captain Samuel A’Court Ashe, grandson of Governor Samuel Ashe and a great-nephew of Edward Moseley, in editing the Biographical History of North Carolina, included three generations of the Moore side of the family. Yet, he neglected to include his great-uncle, Edward Moseley – treasurer, surveyor, and even interim-governor – in his list of one hundred prominent men of North Carolina. Moseley literally drew the geographical boundaries of Ashe and his Family’s home state! Assuredly, his contemporaries would have placed the capable surveyor and statesman Moseley high on that same list – but, these men had been politically and militarily beaten until 1896 and relied solely upon polemics to get beyond that defeat. They dare not elevate Moseley too highly or risk someone rereading Francis Hawks’ History and rediscovering who they actually were!20
Cape Fear author James Sprunt, writing in 1906, spoke of Moseley’s famous map of 1733, but diverted around his significantly criminal contributions to the development of
19 James Franklin Shinn, “Edward Moseley: A North Carolina Colonial Patriot and Statesman,” Publications of the Southern History Association (1899).
20 Biographical History of North Carolina: From Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Samuel A’Court Ashe, Stephen B. Weeks, and Charles L. Van Noppen (Greensboro, N.C.: Charles L. Van Noppen, 1905).
Lower Cape Fear. Why, certainly, did even Cape Fear author James Sprunt not speak of him? Was it because Sprunt also understood the criminal methods used by Moseley and his Family to gain prominence and steal massive tracts of land in the Lower Cape Fear?
“Lost-Cause” revisionism continued transmission across the expanding Deep South as Carolina and her cousins emigrated and formed new states and business opportunities – still relying upon the abuse of people of color. Indeed, Carolina – or its wealthier and more revered southern half – had been the heart and cradle of the Confederacy. It survived – even prospered – as historian Heather Cox Richardson writes in her book How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. Americans who read Hawks, Ashe, Shinn, Waddel, Conner, or their many redeemer colleagues today, should easily recognize their politics. Those today can easily observe the history of MAGA from the essentially defeated Republican Party – yet another “Lost Cause” for conservatives. One might expect anyone positively associated with Carolina’s early growth – like Edward Moseley – to figure prominently in Confederate redeemer history for all time! Just not, however, Edward Moseley!
Due to the false fascistic rhetoric of these conservatives, we encountered a twisted, confusing anomaly of our political language. The “democrat” to whom Conner refers was no Democrat of today. Ex-slaving “Southern Democrats” share nothing in common with Northern Democrats. The South disdainfully views the “Democratic Party of African Americans” today because it evolved from Northern Democrats while Southern Democrats joined the Republican Party after Nixon’s invitation in 1968. Southern Democrats before then were highly socially conservative people – ex-slavers of the Carolinas and their brood. These purported “Christians” had once enslaved the African, yet wanted “God” written into their Confederate Constitution – to protect slavery and “states’ rights!” Their anti-government Republican cousins or MAGA of today are simply these same Southern Democrat ex-slavers, Confederates of the Civil War. Like Confederates, they wanted the federal government “drowned in the bathtub,” as Republican lobbyist Grover Norquist so ineloquently phrased it. “Democrats” are presently associated with the creators of Social Security (FDR), Medicare (LBJ), and Affordable Care Act (Obama). Democrats today are much the opposite of the Southern Democrats of yesterday. Their glorified yet defeated Confederacy defiantly resisted social amalgamation – necessary to democracy – into the Union just as racist Republicans today repeatedly threaten democracy with anti-immigration and collusion with our enemies. Their anti-government rhetoric more ideologically reflected the recent purported “Moral Majority” evangelicals of Jerry Falwell or today’s anti-democratic Ku Klux Klan, Tea-Party, America First, or MAGA seditionist Republicans who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021! Politicians in North Carolina seem to have always hidden their fascist, undemocratic ways behind their Old-Testament deity with contradictory labels – certainly defining Christensen’s Paradox!
Religious conservatism has always been the most useful tool to politicians for the less-well-educated are usually more religious and easier to mold to their will. Segregationists – advocates of keeping blacks and whites apart – in North Carolina usually spoke fondly both of God and slavery – often in the same breath, as though their god would approve of their inhumane and unchristian practices. Arguably, this is the way redeemers envisioned their defeated Confederacy. They used rhetoric and their official positions to stamp down any dissent. They poured out “Lost Cause” veneration for Moseley’s wealth and power that literally dripped with biblical worship and, of course, States-Rights ideology (read: “you federal boys can’t tell us what to do!”). Redeemers compared Moseley to great leaders, with “the boldness of thought and of action that people admire,” and “common sense and self-poise… and the honesty of purpose which, regardless of his own interests, made it impossible for him to wink at the usurpations of authority.”21 Redeemers like Conner glorified Moseley’s wealth, rebellion, anti-government ideas, and slavery in a full page and a half of lionized worship – some 40-50 years after Robert E. Lee’s surrender! Indeed, Moseley and his Family wholly embodied the Southern Democrat’s political point of view with the unspoken undercurrents of the desire to “rise again.” And, with the establishment of segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the paradoxically-named “Progressive Era” began. The second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan came about in 1915 and numerous statues were erected on courthouse grounds and other government property across the entire South and beyond! Christian Nationalists enjoyed many revivals!
Undeniably, Southern Democrats had given rebirth to their Confederacy, then and now – it had, indeed, “risen again,” as historian Heather Cox Richardson declares in the title of her book: How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America! Still, no one wrote anything – even biographies about Edward Moseley. The only thing that North Carolinians remember of his accomplishments is his famous map of 1733! We all do love the map!22
21 Ibid.
22 Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (Oxford University Press, 2020).
After the Progressive Era, the political landscape changed once again – through economic destruction by conservatives and utter despair of the general populace. Excessive capitalistic and corrosive cycles broke down through three consecutive Republican administrations. Finally, with Republican President Herbert Hoover’s attacks on World-War I “Bonus Army” veterans and Robber Barons’ abuse of the Federal Reserve and their blessed gold standard brought on the resulting Great Depression of 1929.
Modern Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office after Hoover and dealt the “New Deal,” restoring public confidence in government. This was despite another rebellion – an oligarchic and Hitler-loving fascist attempt to overthrow his presidency in the “Business Plot of 1933” – even before Nazis came to power in Germany!23 It’s always been my opinion that these American Nazis may have taught Hitler a thing or two! After the failure of wealthy capitalists in this first fascist insurrection, they embarrassingly acquiesced and learned to accept the former, long-established democratic status quo which epitomized their hated Deep State – again, the federal government. Congress helped bury this history, putting off dealing with criminal conservative ire – quite like the duke of Newcastle after stalling the growth of the illegal Brunswick Settlement in the 1730s. Fascists quietly faded into background noise very much like North Carolina’s true history. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” established social programs to help the majority of Americans and the country breathed a sigh of relief.
Federal Socialism didn’t stop with Roosevelt, for the people enjoyed their Social Security – the long-resisted constitutional effort of “promoting the general welfare” of
23 See… Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973).
We the People. Surprisingly, a Southerner, Lyndon Baines Johnson – though perhaps not a true “Southern Democrat” – accelerated it forward with Civil Rights in 1964, Voting Rights and Medicare in 1965. Johnson has incurred conservatives’ verbal wrath ever since, disdainfully assaulted at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners!
Civil Rights dealt yet another blow against the “Old South’s” formerly segregationist fascist regime as well as capitalist industrialists of the North. These increasingly wealthy industrialists – like Southern plantationists – enjoyed cheap labor and their old factory towns (comparable to the old plantations from antebellum times). Conservative capitalist betrayal of Johnson’s resulted in great political realignments and more “paradoxical” behavior. The Old South literally gave up on the term “Democrat” and traded that foul classification for “Republican”- already in anti-democratic league with Northern industrialists since at least 1890. Nixon in 1968 convinced them that they had more in common with his Republican Party – as they say, the rest is history!
Confederates, or Southern Democrats, traded that now-despised name for one that better reflected their ideology and mood, the rhetorically cleaner – and much more conservative (to oppose Civil Rights) – “Republican.” “Democrat” remained with those who championed egalitarianism, democracy, socialism, or the rights of all the people. African Americans – with the new rights of a finally-progressing democracy – finally gained the same power as their former masters! This later term “Democrat” better fit the proponents of democracy, don’t you think?
We then elected our first African-American president to two terms. In this fresh cycle of progress, the revived democracy and their truly progressive social views rose to the top again. Again, working Americans nearly triumphed over the wealthy and powerful “Great Men” who once suppressed our democracy and ruled our history from their gilt political thrones.
Still, the conservatives “rose again,” facing severe demographic challenges and realizing that they must do something radical if they were to survive. They elected a life-long criminal narcissist, convicted criminal felon and rapist to the office of president who attempted to overthrow the United States like they had attempted in 1933! It was an insanely-reckless attempt to stop the Federal Government - their hated Deep State of liberals. Again, their “Lost Cause” screamed for Civil War, death to the Washington elite, attempted to arrest the certain gains of democracy that threatened their old Stuart, Tory, MAGA, and slaving way of life! The shadows of the “Glorious Revolution” once again cast a dark shadow over their elite rights and glorious corporate profits!
Radical Republicans of today – the old Southern Democrats of yesterday – would have been quite fond of the controversial Edward Moseley. MAGA might even like to write another redeemer narrative on him… but, I decided to write his biography first! Like their Confederate ancestors of old, they prefer the related hatred of people of color, immigration, and abuse of federal governmental institutions – again, the Deep State or Union, if you prefer. They utilize repeated rhetorical phraseology derived from anti-immigration, anti-LBGTQ with biblical notions of purity, and of course, anti-abortion – another practice viewed as “demonic” or un-Godly! Still, how much of the antihistorical bias of these redeemers can anyone actually stomach for long? “Possessed of vast estates, of many slaves, and of great wealth,” again continued Conner of Moseley, as if describing a venerated scion of the Mint-Julip-drinking anti-government Confederacy, “a devoted Churchman,” like Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” he “espoused the cause of dissenters in their fight against the establishment.”24 This is simply Confederate Christian Nationalism fighting the old “Lost Cause” against today’s federal government, Damn Yankees, or Deep State!
President Joseph R. Biden’s work to fight the Covid Pandemic, his Infrastructure Deal, and other programs threaten to rein in the corrupt decisions of a conservative-dominated SCOTUS – the last weapon devised against the Deep State of federal government. Biden once again saved America from a second fascist attempt, this time led by Donald Trump to overthrow the United States’ government on January 6th, 2021! FDR and Biden’s democratic resistance against conservative criminals reflects the more egalitarian “Society” of the Quakers in the Albemarle during the Cary Rebellion, or the establishment of British royal control through the duke of Newcastle in the Brunswick Settlement in the Lower Cape Fear, or Lincoln’s ending of slavery in 1863 and defeat of Stuart Tory Confederates in the Civil War.
Old Stuart-Tory-conservative regimes in America have always been quite resilient and never quite disappear after a progressive pounding. American pirates and redeemers will always try to “rise again.” They abandon their plows and tractors, flare their nostrils, and take to their guns like the Family did on the west shores of the Cape Fear River in 1733 or the Confederacy in 1861, or Robber Barons in 1933. White-supremacists are determined to prevent “Black Rule” or “Liberal Rule” at any cost. For this iteration, however, they have essentially destroyed what remains of their political reputation. Their beloved Christianity has taken a major hit, as well. MAGA and Q-Anon use blatantly ridiculous rhetoric, insanely waiting for the rising of the dead to come back and lead them against the oppressive Deep State in
24 Ibid.
another Civil War! Ironically, these conservatives trashed the reputation of their new designation of “Republican” as they had their old “Southern Democrat.” They exhibited no less than a childish tantrum and attempted another fascist insurrection; 2021 was another 1860, or 1933, or 1733, or 1708! The hits just keep coming for conservatives – repeatedly ignoring the lessons of history!
Thus, stories of this nature can be told once again – social and economic progress and equality may be advanced once again. North Carolina enters that older, nascent realm once again – before the Anglicans came – before the rich slaving Barbadians came – before the Confederates came – before the Heritage Foundation came – before their corrupt ally Edward Moseley re-emerged.
This is the history of our struggle as a democratic people, North Carolinians and all Americans – the cyclic high-low process of reflection and repression. The paradoxical politics have a great deal to do with fear of changing demographics – the descent from and resistance to “white-dominated” or master-slave herrenvolk power dynamics. Truly inspirational, “Moral Mondays” has become a new phrase in our daily vocabulary, like “Me Too” or “Black Lives Matters (BLM).” North Carolinians of the 99% are again rising up and revolting against their wealthy capitalist “betters.” Truly inspirational! Election 2024 resounded with female cries of “Roevember!” in memorial of when SCOTUS ended Roe v. Wade sparking a flurry of resentment. It can happen, even here, in the merciless Stuart conservative Paradox of the “Old North State.”
Conservatives like Edward Moseley may now be critically examined once again – and this historian will not hide his crimes for comfort’s or Confederacy’s sake. “Great Man” historical bias can again be pushed aside. We can openly examine Moseley’s crimes – learn why he was ignored before – and, why the reticence to write his biography! “Quakers” are his judges this time! There’s a reason why Donald Trump’s insane MAGA movement is so large: because social historians are beginning to break through to the truth and a lot of hateful, invested, and embarrassed people don’t want it told.
If history serves any profound purpose, it is this – to inform and reveal humanity’s weaknesses, faults, passions, and potentials. But, we have to be vigilant about telling and informing future generations! Southern Redeemers will always attempt to hold us back, misuse our history – history that should never be twisted to support fascist, anti-democratic narratives. Indeed, Nazi Germany’s Adolph Hitler’s book-burning tactics of Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida gave us a clue. History repeats itself only because we fail to learn from it – we miss its lessons. The missed education and mis-teachings inevitably become the tools of the oppressors, the politicians, especially in early paradoxical North Carolina, as journalist Rob Christensen viewed it when he wrote the often humorous and yet, revolting A Paradox of Tar Heel Politics.
Another part of the state’s Moseley/conservative problem lay in his completely befuddled historic origins – again, the results of blatantly false redeemer rhetoric. Again, no definitive work to date – until now – has ever been produced about the controversial treasurer, surveyor-general, proprietor’s deputy, member of the governor’s council, even briefly acting-governor Edward Moseley. Nineteenth-century political rhetoric forced reality into near intellectual oblivion!25
25 James Sprunt, Chronicles of the Cape Fear River (Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards & Broughton Printing Company, 1916); Noeleen McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Stephen Feeley, Tuscarora Trails: Indian Migrations, War, and Constructions of Colonial Frontiers, Volume 1,
Such an important historical figure as Edward Moseley, having held numerous offices and producing maps of such value, forming the shape of the state we know today, one should expect numerous historical works devoted to him. Still, none have emerged, nothing more than a sickly-sweet honey-dripping Progressive-Era monograph.
Few honest historians dare to enter this miry, murky, and mysterious political swamp of North Carolina’s early history. Voluminous extant primary records still reveal Hawks’ “factious man of acknowledged ability” quite unlike the man described by politician Davis, or historians Hill and Conner.26 This book follows that deeply-explorative new direction despite whatever actual or imaginary dangers may be lurking in the swampy conservative political waters, like those we saw on January 6th, 2021. Hopefully, there’ll be no throwing of flagpoles or fire extinguishers from reaction to this book, but I don’t doubt that many conservative veteran insurrectionists will feel like it.
Moseley was not the glorified figure presented by revisionists and redeemers and it must be told! Myth must be dispelled! John F. Kennedy Jr. will not come back to life, no matter how many of his ideological church brethren or Q-Anon cultists march in the streets of Dallas, Texas!
Unquestionably, almost the day young Edward Moseley arrived in North Carolina – again, like MAGA’s Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert – he began irritating his colleagues like William Byrd II in 1728, presuming undeserved authority, and catalyzing rebellion. He was young and perhaps impetuous – but also a wealth-deprived privileged narcissist who fled to America to find treasure –
Doctoral Dissertation, College of William and Mary, Department of History (May, 2007).
26 Francis Lister Hawks, History of North Carolina, Vol. 1: Embracing the period of the proprietary government, from 1663 to 1729 (Fayetteville: E. J. Hale & son, 1859), 359.
to rebuild his formerly-wealthy family’s failed finances. He was a well-educated, but inexperienced opportunistic London youth that, at first, was outmaneuvered by his betters – yet, he enjoyed the opulent gilt trappings of his Anglican church, flattering to his Confederate admirers. Truly, Moseley was a talented and opportunistic politician easily recognizable by today’s MAGA Republicans as a “good Christian.” He played both sides when it gave him advantage. Perhaps prudently, he left few writings of a personal nature. His will of 1749 and infrequent maps and sketches are all that survive of a clever and capable, yet greedy, careless, and socially-irresponsible politician. Mark Twain would have much enjoyed writing about him!
Moseley’s contemporary hometown bard, John Milton described “Satan” in Paradise Lost as a fallen angel who values earthly treasure above all other things.27 Of course, posterity seldom looks favorably upon a follower of Mammon, greed, or… “earthly treasures.” It could be that in the wilds of early North Carolina, such a conservative gentleman and Mammon devotee from London in the American wilderness might capitalize upon resources so effectively and attain such regal status so quickly. Of course, he would invite the careful condemnation we find in Hawks, or irresponsible reserve of a Williamson, or of many an “historian,” or whatever they call the smug face in the mirror.
At first, Edward Moseley’s career stalled in the Albemarle’s early colonial backwater politics; however, he did grow and learn. His intellect and fine education aided him to overcome his defeats on the early dividing line
27 C. G. Herbermann, E. A. Pace, C. B. Pallen, T. J. Shahan, and J. J. Wynne, editors, The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Discipline, Doctrine, and History of the Catholic Church, pg. 580; "Mammon" by Hugh Pope. The Encyclopedia Press, New York, 1913.
determination with Virginia. He may then have successfully sought revenge against a rival – perhaps even had this man killed. Indeed, like with Donald Trump, a few of his associates had died or, at least were discredited by their association with him. He secured coveted positions of power, started an Indian war, and developed two maps of extraordinary value to the colony and state. He may also helped to end the life of his brief business partner-turned rival – the pirate Edward “Blackbeard” Thache – and he retook control of North Carolina’s colonial markets from rival “landed” pirates who would disable his personal profits. Later, he helped blind British officials from his Family’s illegal actions to usurp the Lower Cape Fear as a separate colony – under their own private authority – as “kings of Cape Fear.” And, by default, he became the most important part of the beginnings of the lucrative port of Wilmington, then intentional rival of Brunswick Town. Through his numerous profiteering ventures, he literally defined the shape of North Carolina, top to bottom. His motives were economic – not morally pure, despite what he might tell his fellow church deacons in Edenton. He truly was a “factious” man of personal profit – a follower of “Mammon” or greed and perhaps helped set the crude and corrupt capitalist tone for America itself!28
As for myself, my many conservative opponents will simply declare – without knowledge or evidence, of course – that I just don’t know what I’m talking about! I’ll let my educated readers decide.
