On the shores of Great Lake, now part ofCroatan National Forest 



Pllotn courtesy of GA Nichotl Photo Allium. New Bern-Craven County Library 



A HISTORIAN'S 



COAST 



collectively known. Women also played 

 leadership roles in the New Light, Separate, 

 and Baptist faiths — all evangelical, dissent- 

 ing churches. The pattern was repeated by the 

 Freewill Baptists, the Methodists, and other 

 evangelical faiths during the Second Great 

 Awakening a half-century later. 



The hardships of travel were a constant 

 lament in colonial writings by missionaries, 

 man or woman. As early as 1672, the great 

 Quaker missionary George Fox described the 

 North Carolina coastal plains as being "pretty 

 full of great bogs and swamps; so that we 

 were commonly wet to the knees, and lay 

 abroad a-nights in the woods by a fire." 



Until the Tuscarora War of 171 1-13, 

 English missionaries often felt threatened by 

 the native Algonquian, Siouan, and Iroquoian 

 peoples as well. On his second visit to North 

 Carolina, in 1676, George Edmundson 

 preached in the vicinity of the Great Dismal 

 Swamp, where he found "perillous travel- 

 ling^] for the Indians were not subdued. ... 

 Scarce any durst travel that way unarmed." 

 His use of the word wilderness to describe 

 lands where native peoples had villages gives 

 insight into the way many missionaries saw 

 coastal Indians. The natives, too, were part of 

 a wilderness in need of "civilization." 



Travel had not improved much for 

 missionaries by the time Catharine Phillips 

 arrived in America. After disembarking in 

 Charleston, S.C, in late October 1753, Phillips 

 and a companion, Mary Peisley, followed the 

 Pee Dee River toward a Quaker settlement at 

 Haw River, in Alamance County, N.C. After 

 riding all day through a dark, lonely forest, the 

 women and their guides made camp by a 

 swamp. They slept under "a little shed of the 

 branches of pine-trees, on a rising sandy 

 ground, which abounded with lofty pines." 



Many English missionaries found the 

 colonial back country strange and threatening. 

 Villages were a rare sight, and travel through 

 the dense forests and ubiquitous swamps was 

 slow. Something about the great forests cast 

 long shadows in colonial travelers' minds. 

 They looked with revulsion at the desolate 

 backcountry and the pitch makers, trappers, 

 and dirt farmers who lived there. "You don't 



know gloominess until you travel through that 

 country," a woman named Mary Harper Beall 

 wrote years later, making almost a moral 

 judgment against the colony's great stretches 

 of woods and wetlands. 



The indictment was harsher yet among 

 high-minded preachers, who looked at 

 tidewater wild places as a dangerous sanctuary 

 for fugitive slaves and for Indians who had 

 outlasted the Tuscarora War. At times, they 

 preached as if clearing forests and draining 

 swamps were a holy crusade blessed by God, 

 as much a part of colonizing America as 

 thwarting the French and the Indians. 



They likewise associated the deep forests 

 and coastal swamps with a whole host of 

 European outcasts who had taken refuge in the 

 colony: criminals, debtors, women who had 

 fled their marriages, indentured servants who 

 had escaped bondage in other colonies. In 

 1 7 1 1 , a frustrated Anglican minister, John 

 Urmston, lambasted the Carolina colonists as 

 former convicts from English prisons, then 

 called them "the most notorious profligates 

 upon earth." Many itinerant ministers, 

 especially Anglicans, seemed to find the 

 colony's untamed landscape somehow 

 symbolic of those dissenters and pariahs. They 

 compared the countryside unfavorably with 



England, where game wardens maintained the 

 forests as hunting parks and poachers risked the 

 death penalty. 



Armed with that moral righteousness, 

 many colonial evangelists saw the devil's 

 stomping grounds in the longleaf pine glades 

 and blackwater swamps. From their pulpits, 

 they exhorted against the dark, unruly forces of 

 the wilderness. They taught children to treat the 

 woods as an asylum for evil spirits and witches. 



The Rev. Ruben Ross long recalled how 

 he had learned to fear the forest dwellers near 

 his home in Williamston. "We village people 

 could tell a witch as far as we could see one, as 

 we thought," he told his son and biographer. 

 "When they came to town, they always 

 appeared in the form of little old women, 

 with bright scarlet cloaks and hoods drawn 

 over the head." 



Catharine Phillips shared little of the 

 moral-tinged fear of the wilderness so prevalent 

 among her evangelical brethren. She seemed a 

 peaceful soul even that first night camping by a 

 swamp: "We made a large fire, and it being a 

 calm, fair, moon-light night, we spent it 

 cheerfully, though we slept but little." 



Not that the coastal wilderness never 

 tested her faith. Phillips often slept in cold, 

 damp lodgings, if not outdoors. One winter day, 



28 AUTUMN 2000 



