id of them." Macon was not speaking against slavery but against fears that blacks might start an "insurrection." In 1803, when South Carolina resumed slave importation to fill the labor demand for its plantations, North Carolina's legislature urged passage of a Constitutional amendment banning the practice. The reasons seem to have had more to do with fears of race mixing and the feeling that slave labor would drive down the wages of white labor than the injustice of slavery. In any case Congress declined to act.
It is not clear why more racial tolerance was apparent in the western counties than other parts of North Carolina, and in any event slavery increased throughout the state until 1860. However, various commentators have alluded to the ethos of self-sufficiency and individualism in the remote Appalachians. In 1839, Tocqueville wrote that "a few bold adventurers began to penetrate" the Mississippi valley and the "new" states of the West and Southwest, where, at the time, the nearest neighbors were "scarcely known to one another [and] . . . igno
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