If you think North Carolina is a typical Southern state, you
don't know us. Bad soil and shallow rivers denied us the slave-
based plantations that powered South Carolina and Virginia to
their 19th-century peaks. So North Carolina remained poor, with
a population of unpredictable yeoman farmers. Slaves or not,
North Carolinians fought for the Confederacy, and they took so
many casualties that monuments across the state recall "Our
Confederate Dead." Still, as the war wound down, Gen. William
Tecumseh Sherman called off his army of locusts that had swarmed
through Georgia and South Carolina. Sherman's orders noted that
"the state of North Carolina was one of the last states that
passed the ordinance of secession," adding that "it should not
be assumed that the inhabitants are enemies of our government."
Sherman wasn't sure what to think of North Carolina, either. A
political environment that was friendly to business (and hostile
to unions), along with a workforce spread across hundreds of
small towns, made post