When Carolina ladies made history

Over the next couple of years, you’ll hear a great deal about the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding.

In July 2026, Americans will cheer the semiquincentennial — best add that word to your spelling list — of the Declaration of Independence. Even before that, however, we’ll witness other semiquincentennial celebrations: of the April 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord that ignited the Revolutionary War, of the June 1775 battle of Bunker Hill that forced the British to take the rebellion more seriously, and of battles of Moore’s Creek Bridge here in North Carolina (February 1776) and Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina (June 1776) that, together, frustrated Britain’s original scheme for subduing the southern colonies.

These and many other consequential battles preceding the Declaration of Independence deserve commemoration. I plan to do my part with a series of columns on the Carolinas’ contributions to the war effort.

But as John Adams memorably argued in a letter written nearly two decades after his presidential term, the American Revolution didn’t start with a musket shot. “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced,” Adams observed. “The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.”

Quite so. That’s why we don’t mark Independence Day as Sept. 3, 1783, when British and American diplomats signed the Treaty of Paris that officially brought the Revolutionary War to a close. Nor do we date the country’s start as Oct. 19, 1781, when General Charles Cornwallis surrendered to General George Washington at Yorktown.

Americans had to win a war to secure their independence, yes. But they were already a self-governing people before the war’s end. Indeed, they were a self-governing people even before the Continental Congress voted in 1776 to approve the Declaration of Independence produced by its brilliant drafting committee of Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston.

Among the intellectual battles that produced the American Revolution so described by John Adams, that revolution of hearts and minds, was an event that occurred right here in North Carolina 250 years ago this week. And the revolutionaries who won it wore no blue uniforms and carried no muskets.

The ladies of Edenton wore dresses.

On Oct. 25, 1774, Penelope Barker called together 50 other female residents of the colony’s former capital on the Albemarle Sound. They met in the home of Elizabeth King to discuss the work of North Carolina’s First Provincial Congress, which had met in August in New Bern; and America’s First Continental Congress, which had just concluded its session in Philadelphia. Both congresses had opted to use economic means, not military means, to compel the British Parliament to remove its tax on tea.

The fundamental issue wasn’t financial. Americans were, relatively speaking, lightly taxed. But they insisted the power to tax lay with their own colonial legislatures, not with Parliament. Allowing faraway politicians to levy taxes to fund royal governors would make Americans vassals, not citizens.

Penelope Barker and her friends agreed. At what came to be called the “Edenton Tea Party,” they pledged not to purchase tea or other goods from Britain until it rescinded its illegal dictates. The women were “determined to give memorable proof of their patriotism,” calling it a duty “not only to our near and dear connections” but “to ourselves.”

This was one of the first political events led by American women — and it was far from play-acting. There was real danger. Penelope’s husband Thomas Barker was in London at the time, serving as essentially North Carolina’s lobbyist to the British government. Other signatories’ husbands played key roles in public affairs on both sides of the Atlantic. Over the ensuing months, the cauldrons of revolution churned, bubbled, then boiled over. When war broke out, Thomas Barker fled to France, only managing to return to Penelope in 1778.

So, let’s all raise a toast to the ladies who met in Edenton 250 years ago to strike a blow for liberty. Just don’t toast them with tea.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His latest books, Mountain Folk and Forest Folk, combine epic fantasy with early American history.