Group photo of the NC American Indian Heritage Commission, Governor Roy Cooper, and several state officials. Courtesy of the NCAIHC.

Celebration of Governor Roy Cooper's proclamation marking November as American Indian Heritage Month in 2023. Courtesy of the NC Department of Administration.

State recognition provides American Indian nations with a variety of benefits. Recognition a way for communities to celebrate their shared ancestry and win acknowledgement from the state that their cultures and traditions are important. Moreover, formal recognition also allows tribes more direct access to shaping state legislation that affects them, as well as priority funding for educational opportunities, housing assistance, economic development, and many other state-funded initiatives. Finally, state recognition allows tribes to have representatives within state government in the form of the Commission of Indian Affairs and the American Indian Heritage Commission.

In the case of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the court system, first established in 1820, also hears criminal and civil cases that occurred on trust property.¹ This trust property, called the Qualla Boundary, was established in 1876 and comprises over 82 square miles of the Eastern Band’s historic homelands as part of a federal protective trust.² Headquartered in Cherokee, NC, portions of the Qualla Boundary lie in Graham, Haywood, Jackson, and Swain Counties. There the Cherokee Courts, in conjunction with the Principal Chief and Tribal Council, govern the Eastern Band today through a democratic process.

Map of the Qualla Boundary circa 1890, the modern home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Courtesy of the University of North Carolina.

The NC American Indian Heritage Commission also received a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to conduct oral histories with North Carolinian tribal elders. One of the first interviews is with Gregory Richardson, a member of the Haliwa Saponi, and is linked below. More interviews will appear on the NCAIHC site and at the NC State Archives as they are conducted.

There are many other ways to celebrate American Indian heritage and culture at the community level as well. One of the most notable is the American Indian Heritage Celebration, typically held annually each November since 1995.

Inset of an American Indian man from the 1770 John Collet map of North Carolina. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Sanders was an American Indian man that arrived in North Carolina by 1685 as an indentured servant. Originally indentured to New England merchant Joshua Lamb, Sanders might have been a prisoner of war from one of the several American Indian nations that fought the colonists during King Philip’s War such as the Wampanoag, Narragansett, or Wabanaki. Though Sanders' knew his own identity, by the time he arrived in North Carolina, his colonial contemporaries did not view his tribal nation as important enough to record. Instead, they opted to strip him of his cultural identity and referred to him simply as "Sanders the Indian." Whatever Sanders’ tribal identity was, he’d have been entirely cut off from his native community and culture.

Sanders first appeared before the North Carolina colonial court in 1705 when he appealed for the government’s help in ending his servitude after being forced to sign an exploitative contract. After arriving in North Carolina, Sanders’ service was sold to Joseph Scott. In 1692 following the deaths of Scott and his wife, Sanders' indentured passed to the couple’s adult daughter, Juliana Laker. Laker then forced Sanders to sign a contract extending his servitude twelve more years. Despite the terms Sanders remained Laker's indentured servant up through 1705, a full year after his contract was meant to expire.¹

While other American Indians might have deferred to their tribal authorities to appeal to the colonial government on their behalf, Sanders defended himself before the Perquimans County Court and won his own freedom. After the trial, Sander continued to live in Perquimans, where he resided independently through 1717.

American Indians often appeared in colonial court proceedings even if they were not directly involved in the suit. For example, an American Indian named Tom Harriss featured prominently in a defamation suit between John Jennings and Matthew Winn. Jennings accused Winn of being a hog thief, but Winn vindicated himself when he proved he had not stolen anything. Instead, he had been helping Tom Harriss recover a pig that had escaped from Harriss’ farm and gotten onto Jennings’ property.

As the trial evidence demonstrated, Harriss had purchased the hog in question from Thomas Barecock. When the hog escaped, Harriss again depended on Barecock to help him locate and recapture the animal. In this instance Harriss not only cooperated with his colonial neighbors enough to broker a livestock trade, but he also relied on his neighbors to help find the hog too.

Small interactions like these, while relatively inconsequential, demonstrate how some American Indians and Europeans cooperated and lived alongside one another in early North Carolinian colonial society.

When a colonial court charged an American Indian with a crime, it was not a foregone conclusion that the all-white colonial jury would pronounce the American Indian guilty. Instead, in many cases, the jury carefully weighed the evidence, not allowing cultural or racial prejudices from influencing their verdict. Perhaps no trial involving an American Indian better illustrates this than the 1722 case of John Cope, a Tuscarora man charged with burglary. But what crime had Cope committed?

During the early hours of one morning in August 1722, John Cope was drunk. It was late summer, where the mornings before sunrise are especially brisk and Cope hoped to find somewhere quiet where he could warm up and sleep for a few hours. Somewhere in Bertie County near Salmon Creek he found just the spot—a large secluded home with a prominent fireplace. Cope opened a window in the home’s living room and climbed in, content to take a nap near the fireplace.

Little did Cope realize, however, that this was no ordinary house. In fact, Cope had broken into what was perhaps the most important home in the colony—that of acting colonial governor Thomas Pollock.

The noise from Cope’s unorthodox entry into the home (along with perhaps a little snoring) awoke the Pollock home’s residents, who quickly evicted Cope from his warm spot on the foyer floor.

Within a few days Cope found himself on trial before an all-white jury of the North Carolina Court of Oyer & Terminer for burglary. Cope could have faced execution or banishment for the crime, but the jury, carefully examining the facts of the case, determined that Cope had not stolen anything, nor had he intended to do so. They pronounced him not guilty, and he was allowed go free.

An all-white jury was just one of the many obstacles American Indians faced when interacting with the NC colonial court system as individuals. Still, Cope's case demonstrates that coloial juries still had the ability to focus on fact without allowing prejudices to influence their verdicts.

As the colonial court system grew during the 1720s and 1730s, more people, both colonists and American Indians, began to rely on the court. In the 1733, John Robins, a Chowanoke Indian, took out a loan of eight pounds and ten shillings from Thomas Durant, likely a member of the Yeopim Nation. When Robins failed to pay back the debt, Durant filed a suit in the Chowan County court to recover the money. Robins failed to appear, and the case dragged on for several years.

The suit by its nature as a simple debt case is not particularly remarkable, but it still tells historians today a great deal about American Indian society of the time.

Robins and Durant brokered their deal through the format of an English legal document even though seemingly neither of them could read or write in English. They, along with their witnesses, came before the Chowan County clerk or another local colonial official to make a formal agreement, a practice outside the norm of traditional American Indian custom. In addition, they described their debt not in terms of tangible goods such as deer skins, beads, or shells, but in North Carolina currency—another sign of their dependence on the existing colonial court system.¹

Robins’ and Durant’s reliance on the colonial court system suggests that they lacked confidence in preexisting American Indian governance. Neither Chowanoke nor Yeopim leadership, so it seems, had the power to enforce the agreement. The original document, as well as the transcription, are shown below.

A document acknowledging John Robins' debt to Thomas Durant, dated 8 February 1734. Durant, a Yeopim Indian, relied on the Chowan County Court to enforce Chowanoke Indian Robins' debt. Courtesy of SANC.

February the 8—1733/4

This shall oblige me to pay or Cause to be paid to Thomas Duern Indian order the full sum of Eight Pounds Tenn Shillings Currant Bill money of North Carolina for Value Recd. as Wittness my Hand

his
John X Robin Indian
mark

        his
John D Martin
      mark

           his
James J Bunats
        mark

Charles B Beasely Indian
        his mark

For centuries American Indians in North Carolina lived communally in villages like Pomeiooc, a Secotan village illustrated by John White in about 1585. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

When British colonists encroached on their native land, American Indian tribes like the Yeopim of the northeastern shore of the Albemarle Sound petitioned the colonial government. Although they could have taken the trespassing colonists to court on an individual basis, the Yeopim brought to their issues to the council directly, considering the encroachment a direct threat to their sovereignty as a nation independent of the British.

As historian Michelle Lemaster argues, by directly petitioning the British colonial government, tribes like the Yeopim “considered their appeals to the colonial government as a form of diplomacy… tribes were not exhibiting submission to English law but rather the independent action of a people interested in preserving their status under the terms of their treaty agreements with other people."¹

The Yeopim's 1697 appeal was successful. The North Carolina Council ordered that no colonist be allowed to occupy land within three miles of the Yeopim’s settlement. They later formalized the Yeopim’s territorial boundary in 1704 through a survey.

However, as was the case for many other American Indian nations, the growing numbers of European colonists threated the Yeopim’s independence. As the Yeopim's population waned, more colonists began to encroach on native land, and the Yeopim found themselves without the diplomatic weight to stop it. By 1739, unable to halt the encroachment, the Yeopim sold parts of their land to colonists.When the colony stopped formally recognizing the Yeopim as a coehsive tribal troup, those tribal members who remained had not choice but to integrate themselves with the rapidly expanding colonial society.

As American Indian tribes like the Chowanoke slowly began to cede portions of their land to colonists in the 1730s, it was not a step they took lightly. Chowanoke leaders like James Bennett and Thomas Hoyter worked collectively, with several Chowanoke leading men signing each land grant.

In Chowanoke culture, like that of many other American Indian groups, there was no concept of individual land holdings. Because everyone lived on and used the land together, agreements about selling the land and using the proceeds of those sales had to be done collectively.

Rather than the individual colonists brokering land purchases with the Chowanoke directly, colonists had to receive approval from the North Carolina Council as well to make sure colonists were not seizing “Native lands without proper payment and title.”² In other words, the North Carolina Council took part in these land sales because colonists were making land deals not with fellow British citizens, but with a sovereign nation.

These land sales had the potential to not only affect individual colonists and their Chowanoke peers, but the colony’s diplomatic relationships with American Indians in the region on the whole.

In 1723, a small dispute about hunting rights had North Carolina colonial officials fearing the start of a second Tuscarora War when colonist Christopher Dudley assaulted an elderly Tuscarora man named Sighacka Blount.

That March, Blount and several other Tuscarora hunters visited colonist Richard Nixson’s house on their way to catch beavers in Beaufort Precinct. Nixson’s neighbor Christopher Dudley confronted Blount and the other Tuscarora, telling them the land was his and they had no right to hunt there, as they’d scare his livestock. When Blount made no response, Dudley became enraged and attacked him, breaking Blount’s arm.

Sighacka Blount did not fight Dudley back. However, by relying on his sovereign status as a member of the Tuscarora Nation, Blount calmly found a way to ensure that the colonist was punished for the assault. After Richard Nixson and other colonists pulled Christopher Dudley away, Sighacka, rather than going to the local colonial magistrate or justice of the peace, said he would go tell Tom Blount, the Tuscarora tribe's leader in North Carolina, about the incident. Tom Blount, in turn, would tell Colonel Robert West, a colonist who worked as a special liason between several American Indian nations and the NC Colonial Council.

The implications of Sighacka Blount's decision to get Tuscarora leadership and Col. West involved in the dispute were clear to the North Carolina Colonial Court. By assaulting Blount, Dudley risked igniting a much larger war between the colonists and the Tuscarora people if the issue was not resolved quickly and to the American Indians' satisfaction.

With the bloody events of the Tuscarora War that had ended just seven years prior weighing on their minds, the North Carolina General Court indicted Dudley for assault.³ Chief Justice Christopher Gale personally signed Dudley's arrest warrant, noting how Dudley's assault could cause "many ill conveniences... to the Tranquility & p[e]ace of this Government."

Any records about the outcome of the case have not survived. Still, it is clear American Indians like Sighacka Blount leveraged their identities as members of a sovereign nation to make the colonial government consider their claims as part of larger tribal-colonial diplomatic relations.

The historic Chowan County Courthouse, built in 1767, is the third courthouse of its kind to stand on the property. The first courthouse, built in 1719, was also the seat of the colonial assembly. Courtesy of the Historic Edenton.

Like the state and federal government today, North Carolina’s colonial government was made of three separate branches: the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch. The head of the executive branch was the colonial governor, and he had a board of advisors, typically six to twelve leading men in the colony, called the North Carolina Council.

The council advised the governor, served as the main executive body in the governor’s absence, and during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, council members also served as officers of the General Court. Early council members acted as general court judges interchangeably, often issuing judgements for major crimes and disputes as part of their regular council proceedings.

Later when the General Court became more formalized, many current or former members of the North Carolina Council sat on the court as judges or members of the jury, further muddling what was an official action of either the court or the council.

Due to this loose distinction between the council and the court, historians today group council proceedings together with court records to better understand how officeholders shaped and enforced laws within colonial society.

Aside from the General Court, members of the council also sat on a separate court, called the Court of Chancery, which granted things other than criminal punishments or monetary damages, such as writs or injunctions. The General Court, the Court of Chancery, and the Admiralty Court (concerned with maritime law and seafaring) made up North Carolina’s higher court system.

At the lower court level, counties (called precincts before 1739) also had their own local courts. Leading men from each county served as justices and heard both civil and criminal cases. In more serious cases or ones that needed appeal, the matter then transferred up to the higher courts.

Compared to what we think of the justice system today, these colonial courts were rather informal. Rather than being held in a courthouse, many early courts convened in prominent community member's private residences. Moreover, they only met for a couple days at a time, three or four times a year, meaning that trial proceedings could easily take several seasons or years to settle.¹

In the 1750s, as the colony's legal caseload grew even larger, North Carolina established a series of district superior courts which acted as the new higher court system. Regionally based in places like Edenton, Wilmington, Salisbury, and New Bern, the superior courts, like their county court counterparts, kept separate records for their criminal and civil proceedings.²

When navigating the North Carolina colonial court collection today, researchers will find that records are separated out by court type (general court, chancery court, district court, etc.), year, and case type (civil action or criminal action).

Despite this organization, only a fraction of the collection has been described in finding aids, let alone transcribed. Between finding the correct box and sorting through the hundreds of handwritten documents in each, searches for specific documents or topics can easily take hours. It also means there is plenty for historians today to still discover!

Finding American Indian documents specifically within this collection poses additional challenges. American Indians and their experiences appear at every level of the court records. Additionally, when advocating on behalf of their nations, American Indians also appeared before the Colonial Council rather than the General Court, as they were there for a diplomatic rather than legal purpose. Finally, not all interactions with American Indians were recorded and preserved, meaning that what remains in the archives today often provides more questions than answers.

The American Indian records in this edition are not meant to be an exhaustive collection of every instance an American Indian interacted with the colonial court system. Instead, MosaicNC editors hope that the documents contained in this collection provide useful examples of the variety of ways American Indians of many backgrounds interacted with colonial society.

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The story of the Edenton Tea Party Resolves has long served as a symbol of the town’s revolutionary spirit for its inhabitants. Local tradition states that Frank Wood, the early 20th century owner of nearby Hayes Plantation, commissioned the metal teapot sculpture based on a silver teapot owned by the revolutionary-era Johnston family.

In 1940 the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program erected a marker for the Edenton Tea Party in downtown Edenton. Though the marker program now boasts over 1,600 markers throughout the state with at least one in every county, the Edenton marker was one of the earliest, established just five years after the program’s founding.

The original inscription for the marker identified the site of the signing at Elizabeth King’s house, but the current marker, last revised in 2015, omits King from the narrative and acknowledges the event’s importance as an “early and influential” act of “political activism” in the state.²

The most recent commemorative effort of the Edenton Tea Party Resolves comes in the form of a children's book published by the State of North Carolina's Historical Research Office. As part of that office's ongoing commitment to educating and inspiring young North Carolinians we introduce:

Within Our Power: The Story of the Edenton Ladies' Tea Party

by Sally M. Walker with illustrations by Jonathan D. Voss

Complete with twenty-eight pages of full-color illustrations, Within Our Power tells the story of the Edenton Tea Party Resolves and the women who signed them. Touching on themes such as fairness, courage, and civil responsibility, Within Our Power highlights how the fifty-one signers expressed their outrage at Great Britain's policies and, through signing their names, stood up in protest for their beliefs.

Signing one’s name to a public protest of the British government wasn’t a small act. Just as Massachusetts was punished for the events of the Boston Tea Party, it was possible that the women who signed the Edenton Tea Party Resolves might face harsh consequences as well when the British government heard of their protests.

The women who signed the resolves did so even though they had something to lose. The signers were not rash teenagers caught up in the moment. Instead, of the forty-five signers who have been identified, eighty-four percent of them were married. The average age of the signers was thirty-five years old. Only three signers were younger than twenty. For all these women, the decision to sign was likely a deliberate one, and one on which the women carefully weighed their options, thinking not only about their own political beliefs, but also the responsibilities that they owed to their spouses, children, and larger families and communities.

Outlined below are some snapshots of some of the more notable signers of the Edenton Tea Party Resolves. These brief biographies are not complete summaries of their lives but demonstrate the wide breadth of the signers’ backgrounds and experiences.

Whether Penelope Barker truly was the organizer of the resolves or not, it’s clear that she certainly had the leadership skills and organizational capacity to do so. At the time of the signing, Penelope Barker’s husband Thomas had been away for thirteen years, working most of that time as an agent for the colony’s interests in Britain. Though the Barkers maintained a correspondence, Penelope was responsible for the day-to-day management of their property.

Moreover, her husband’s absence was by no means the only hardship Penelope had faced in her life. At age seventeen she lost her sister Elizabeth and subsequently married Elizbeth’s widow John Hodgson, becoming the stepmother to her three nieces and nephews. Just two years later John Hodgson died, leaving Penelope, still a teenager, with five children to care for. Penelope was widowed a second time in 1755 when her next husband James Craven died. By the time of the signing in 1774, Penelope had borne the loss of not only two husbands, but also all five of her biological children.

After the resolves’ signing, Penelope’s husband Thomas finally returned home in 1778 after having escaped Britain via France. The couple later built a house together which still stands at the Edenton waterfront as the welcome center for the Edenton Historical Commission.

Margaret Jolly was likely born in Lancashire, England in 1719. At age twenty-three, she attracted the attention of Nathaniel Duckenfield, an aristocrat from Cheshire who was nearly her father’s age. Duckenfield had extensive landholdings in England, but also importantly he maintained a plantation near Salmon Creek in Bertie County, North Carolina. Through this connection, Nathaniel had worked as an agent and advocate for the colony during the 1720s.

Margaret and Nathaniel married in 1745 and a year later their son Nathaniel Jr. was born. When Nathaniel Sr. died in 1749, Margaret assumed ownership of the family’s property and in 1756 she arrived in Bertie County to take over the plantation there, called Duckenfield. By the 1760s Margaret had settled permanently in North Carolina and married John Pearson, a lawyer. Margaret’s fortunes improved again when her son Nathaniel Jr. became the Baronet of Dukinfield in 1768. Although Margaret was firmly attached to North Carolina, her son’s aristocratic title tied him to the other side of the Atlantic and he returned to Britain in 1771.

As the American Revolution neared, questions of allegiances put a strain on colonists like Margaret who still held tangible ties to Britain. In 1774 she was among the first signers of the Edenton Tea Party Resolves. Just a year earlier however, her son Nathaniel Jr. had become an officer in the British Army. Perhaps out of respect for his mother’s political leanings, he became an adjutant in 1775, but only on the condition that he never be forced to serve against American forces. Regardless of his own politics however, the State of North Carolina still considered Nathaniel Jr. a loyalist and in 1778 they confiscated his property. Trying to defend her son and maintain the family’s wealth, Margaret unsuccessfully petitioned the state to get his land back.¹ Despite the setback, Margaret remained in North Carolina, and she died at the Duckenfield Plantation in 1784.

Penelope Johnston was perhaps one the most unlikely signers of the Edenton Tea Party Resolves. Several of her cousins were also signers, but she, unlike them, was the daughter of formal royal governor of North Carolina Gabriel Johnston. Penelope’s ties to the British establishment did not stop there either. Her grandfather was Charles Eden, another colonial governor, and through these connections Penelope became an heiress to an immense fortune.

When Penelope was orphaned at age eleven, she fell under the guardianship of Virgina’s governor Robert Dinwiddie. Spending time in both Edenton and Williamsburg, Penelope enjoyed a cosmopolitan lifestyle and was unusually highly educated compared to her peers. This is all to say that Penelope’s fortunes were intensely tied to the British Empire.

Despite these ties however, Penelope also had a bit of a rebellious streak. In 1758 she had eloped with John Dawson, a young surveyor from Virginia. Her family initially was shocked by the match, but they eventually came around and the couple settled at Eden House, Governor Eden’s former estate, in Bertie County. There, when the time came in 1774, Penelope Dawson signed the Edenton Tea Party Resolves and firmly affixed her name to the protest of Great Britain’s policies.

Anne Hall was one of the younger signers, aged just twenty years old. Unlike the vast majority of the signers, Anne was unmarried, and given her signature’s placement on the document, she likely followed her mother and older sister Mary in affixing her name.

The Halls were a notable family in the area. Anne and her sister Mary were two of the family’s nine children born out of the union of Clement Hall and Frances Foster. Clement, an Anglican missionary, was also the author of the first non-legal text published in North Carolina, a collection of poems. He died unexpectedly when Anne was just four years old, leaving her mother Frances to manage the large household on a diminished income. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel no longer supported the family following Clement’s death, and it’s possible this soured the Halls toward British policy. Whatever the reason, Anne, her mother, and two of her sisters signed the resolves.

The family’s support of the evolving Patriot cause didn’t stop there either. Not only was Anne’s brother Clement Jr. an officer in the Continental Army, but Anne herself married the colonel of the Chowan County Regiment of the North Carolina Militia, James Blount.

One of the last signers of the Edenton Tea Party Resolves was Anne Horniblow (née Rombough). A lifelong resident of Chowan County, Anne came from a family of skilled craftspeople. Her father John Rombough was a joiner and cabinetmaker, and two of Anne's brothers also followed him into woodworking. When she was about eighteen, her parents arranged for Anne's marriage to John Horniblow, the proprietor of one of Edenton’s local taverns. The Horniblows’ marriage may not have been a happy one, at least at its outset. When they married in November 1772, the town gossip was that Anne “was averse to the Match, & forced to it by her Father & Mother.”²

As Mrs. Horniblow, Anne likely worked in the tavern alongside her husband, keeping drinks filled, the floor swept, and fires stoked. There Anne surely overheard many political debates of the day, such as questions of taxation without representation and the balance between royal authority and democracy. On these political questions, Anne sided with the Patriots. In 1774, aged about twenty, Anne Horniblow signed the resolves and pledged to support the colonial boycott movement. Sources suggest Anne’s decision to sign the agreement had her family’s full support. Not only did her husband sign an oath in support of the American government during the later Revolutionary War, but Anne’s father was a member of the Edenton Committee of Safety, an early form of Patriot governance which enforced the boycotts.

Elizabeth Williams was born in North Carolina in 1751 and married John Johnston in about 1767. Their union marked a melding of two important political families in northeastern North Carolina. Elizabeth’s father, William Williams, had represented Bertie County in the North Carolina Colonial Assembly. By the time Elizabeth signed the Edenton Tea Party Resolves, her husband John was serving in the body as well. Perhaps spurred on by her support of the boycott agreement, both her father and husband later served as delegates to the North Carolina Provincial Congress.

By the outbreak of the American Revolution, Elizabeth’s family’s patriotic fervor had not diminished. John served as the clerk of the Bertie County Court, where he swore local citizens’ allegiance to the State of North Carolina. Meanwhile her father was a colonel in the Martin County Regiment of the North Carolina Militia.

In colorful retellings of the event, the refined ladies of Edenton gathered at a local home, sipped locally made tea, and signed resolves to stop buying British tea. In reality, the resolves never mentioned tea specifically. Moreover, they likely signed the resolves over the course of several days or weeks, meaning there was no singular large gathering of all the signers.

Rather than being an agreement to boycott the purchase of British tea, the Edenton Resolves actually signified the signers’ support of the resolutions the 1st North Carolina Provincial Congress had passed in New Bern in response to the Intolerable Acts. These resolutions included a boycott of all imports from the East India Company (including tea), a halt on exports to England, and the establishment of an independent, American-led Continental Congress.

Perhaps the best-known image of the Edenton “Tea Party” comes from British cartoonist Philip Dawe. The image, below, depicts the Edenton ladies as vulgar impolite figures. They drink tea directly out of large communal bowls, dump tea into hats, and leave children unattended. In Dawe’s version of the resolves, the ladies solely promised “not to conform to the Pernicious Custom, of drinking Tea.”

By depicting the Edenton signers as impolite country folk and characterizing their resolution as a simple promise not to drink tea (all the while hypocritically still drinking tea) Dawes and other British opponents of the American cause tried to minimize or belittle the Edenton women and their political resolves.

By the 20th century, tradition in Edenton held that the ladies signed the document together on October 25, 1774. As they affixed their names to the document, the fifty-one women observed the solemn occasion at Elizabeth King’s house near the Chowan County Courthouse while Winifred Hoskins served as the secretary for the meeting. However, if Elizabeth King and Winifred Hoskins did so much to facilitate the gathering, why didn’t they sign the resolves themselves?

It's hard to say why some historians have characterized the signing of the resolves as a singular event at Elizbeth King’s house. The most likely explanation, though unsatisfying, is that when 20th century Edentonians were looking to reconstruct the event of the Resolves signing, they looked for a home owned by a woman near to the Chowan County Courthouse, and the King house fit the bill.

In reality, deed analysis reveals that Elizabeth King’s property was quite small. As a woman of middling means it seems unlikely she would have enough room to host all fifty-one women.¹ No primary sources associated with the Edenton Tea Party Resolves that name Elizabeth King or Winifred Hoskins have ever been located. It seems likely then, that King and Hoskins’ involvement is a 20th century fabrication.

Was Penelope Barker the President of an Edenton Ladies’ Patriotic Association? Maybe.

Although no archival evidence has ever been located, oral tradition suggests that Penelope Barker was the association’s ringleader. One of the signers did send a copy of the resolves to London, where it was printed in the newspaper.

Penelope certainly could have been the one to send a copy to England, but the evidence is inconclusive.

The truth is historians likely will never know who exactly sparked the idea of writing the resolves. No primary sources from the time of the writing of the resolves have ever been located, so it is impossible to know whether Penelope Barker was the group’s leader and organizer.

Instead, historians can only interpret what we do know. Rather than focus on one “great woman,” we can celebrate the resolves as a bold act of women’s collective political activism, one of the earliest events of its kind in North America.

The American Revolution and the ensuing founding of the United States of America was by no means inevitable. When North Carolinian women affixed their names to a nonimportation agreement in October 1774, they had no way of predicting that the Revolutionary War's first shots would ring out less than six months later.

The Edenton Tea Party Resolves and the event's precursors, such as the Boston Tea Party and the First North Carolina Provincial Congress, were a symptom of the ongoing political debates of the day. These questions included: What rights did colonists have? How, were their rights different from those of other British citizens? How could colonists have their voices heard when it came to shaping governmental polices?

The Edenton Tea Party Resolves became a way for women to have a voice and to advocate politically for themselves in the same way that their male contemporaries were.¹ They couldn’t know it yet, but the nonimportation movement they supported would eventually lead to the American Revolution.

By 1773, after financing the costly Seven Years War and facing a famine in parts of colonial Asia, the British government was in financial crisis. Earlier in 1767 the British government had enacted the Townshend Acts, a series of laws meant to directly tax North American colonists for goods such as glass, paper, and tea. Colonists, however, found these policies highly unpopular. It was taxation without representation, they argued, as they did not have representatives in parliament who could advocate for them. After a series of protests, Parliament eventually repealed the unpopular taxes, save for one on tea. Trying to soothe the financial crisis, in June 1773 Parliament enacted the Tea Act, giving the government-backed East India Company a monopoly on tea and other colonial trade. However, the act opened the old wounds many colonists had felt during the Townsend Duties crisis. Again they protested the unfair policy of Taxation without Representation.

During the night of December 16, 1773, a group of protesters in Massachusetts had enough. Throughout the summer they had called for boycotts on the East India Company. They rallied colonists together, calling for a repeal of the Tea Act and for the ships laden with East Indian tea to go back to England. When the colony's royal governor refused to listen to their demands, a group of the Sons of Liberty took matters into their own hands. They illegally boarded three ships and dumped 340 chests of tea into the Boston Harbor in an event that later became known as the Boston Tea Party.

In order to punish Massachusetts for the incident in the Boston Harbor and strengthen their authority in that colony, Parliament enacted a series of laws called the Coercive Acts or the Intolerable Acts. The first of these acts, called the Boston Port Act, was enacted on June 1, 1774. It closed the Boston Harbor until colonists paid for the destroyed tea, halting the whole colony’s economy due to a few individuals' actions.²

More concerning, the Intolerable Acts also revoked Massachusetts’ charter, placing the colony under direct royal control. Further, the act severely restricted the colonists’ right to assemble or hold large meetings.

These so-called Intolerable Acts only applied to Massachusetts, but as the news circulated, it sent shockwaves throughout the North American colonies. Many colonists feared that Parliament’s swift and harsh punishments for Massachusetts would set a dangerous precedent. For these concerned citizens, the harbor's closure and the revocation of both the charter and the right to assemble were signs of massive governmental overreach. Further, the acts only heightened preexisting tensions. As British authorities soon found out, the Intolerable Acts would become a uniting force as Patriots from all thirteen colonies came together to oppose the new laws.

Although the Intolerable Acts and the Boston Port Act more specifically only affected Massachusetts, the punitive legislation motivated colonists with Patriot sympathies into action throughout North America. On August 25, 1774 seventy-one delegates representing thirty of North Carolina’s counties assembled at the Craven County Courthouse in New Bern. There they debated how to respond to the recent acts.

Called the Provincial Congress, this meeting was the first of its kind held in the thirteen colonies and, unlike the North Carolina Colonial Assembly, it wasn’t approved by royal authority. Later that year, several other colonies would hold their own provincial congresses to discuss principles of self-government. Calling the Boston Port Act a “most cruel infringement of the rights and privileges of the people of Boston,” North Carolinians resolved:

Until Parliament repealed the acts, the delegates resolved to boycott all imports from the East India Company, including tea. Further, unless “American Grievances” were addressed before October 1775, North Carolina would also halt all exports to Great Britain, including lucrative raw materials such as tar and tobacco. Calling for unity amongst the North American colonies, the delegates swore to only deal with those colonies who adopted similar boycotts in support of Massachusetts.

The Provincial Congress ended its meeting by electing three men to serve as North Carolina's representatives at the Continental Congress held in Philadelphia the following month. Like the Provincial Congress but larger, the Continental Congress hosted delegates from twelve colonies and wrote a petition to the King calling for a repeal of the Intolerable Acts. This body also later wrote and published the Declaration of Independence.

Earliest extant version of the Edenton Tea Party Resolves, printed in the postscript of the Virginia Gazette (pub. Purdie & Dixon) 3 November 1774. Courtesy of Special Collections, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

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