State Constitution Retains Its Original Thrust

By John Hood

RALEIGH — Americans love their constitution. Recent surveys find near-unanimous affection for the document, with more than 90% lauding it as a key protection of their liberty and security. Past generations loved it, too. But that didn’t keep Americans from amending the constitution multiple times, and from fighting a bloody war to expand the scope of that protection.

Here in North Carolina, our state constitution engenders both affection and revisionism, as well, although with less breadth and depth of feeling. Elected officials, candidates, political activists, and lawyers comprise the vast majority of those with strong opinions about the North Carolina constitution. Among voters, what is evident is a willingness to add protections to it — most recently against tax increases — as well as a resistance to surrendering any of their power to elect state officials, including judges and executives. One can agree or disagree with these sentiments. I would not recommend ignoring them, however.

That our legislature is by far the most powerful branch of state government, for example, is no accident of history or vestige of partisanship. It was the manifest intention of those who gathered 250 years ago this week at the courthouse in Halifax to write a constitution for the new state of North Carolina.

Among them was Hezekiah Alexander, born in Maryland in 1728 and trained as a blacksmith. Relocating with the rest of the sprawling Alexander clan during the 1760s to what is now Mecklenburg County, Hezekiah became a Presbyterian elder, a local magistrate, and co-founder of Queens College, the first such educational institution created south of Virginia.

It was King George III’s 1773 veto of the charter for Queens College that helped push Hezekiah and his fellow Mecklenburg leaders away from conciliation with Britain and toward confrontation with George’s royal governor, Josiah Martin. In mid-May 1775, Hezekiah responded to a call from his friend Thomas Polk and cousin Adam Alexander, the commander and second-in-command of the county militia, to meet in what was then called Charlottetown to devise a path forward. When news arrived of the outbreak of war at Lexington and Concord, the infuriated leaders issued a call to arms on May 20, an event now commemorated on North Carolina’s flag and seal.

When the Fifth Provincial Congress convened in Halifax on November 12, 1776, Hezekiah Alexander was one of Mecklenburg’s five delegates, having already served as a commissary for the militia and on the 13-member council that acted as North Carolina’s interim government. A well-respected orator and leader, he was appointed to the drafting committee and helped write what became North Carolina’s first constitution.

It was a momentous appointment. In the factional divide between moderates and radicals, he was very much in the latter camp (while Polk was a leader of the former). Hezekiah favored a strong legislature and weak governor, the latter elected by lawmakers to one-year terms. At the same time, he wanted a list of specified rights upon which even legislative supermajorities could not encroach.

What made our state and federal constitutions so distinctive at the time — and essential bulwarks of liberty ever since — were these explicitly anti-majoritarian provisions. Hezekiah Alexander and his colleagues were certainly democrats, in the way we use the term today, and set up a representative republic. What concerned them were not just unaccountable kings or power-mad governors, however. Even democratically elected lawmakers could still be tyrants, they believed. One of their declarations at the start of the document was that “a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles is absolutely necessary, to preserve the blessings of liberty.” Alas, like most other people of their generation, they did not yet extend those blessings to enslaved Africans and their descendants.

Hezekiah Alexander (my first cousin, six times removed) remains a recognizable name in Mecklenburg in part because his residence, the Rock House, is the last standing house of one of the authors of our state constitution. You can still visit it on the grounds of the Charlotte Museum of History.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).