[Illustration: SEAL OF WILLIAM AND MARY COLLEGE.] FOOTNOTES: [5] The tombstone of his daughter, Lucy Burwell, wife of Hon. Lewis Burwell, describes him as “the valiant Capt. Robert Higginson, one of the first commanders that subdued the country of Virginia from the power of the heathen.” [6] One of these papers, styled “Nathaniel Bacon, Esq., his Manifesto concerning the present troubles in Virginia,” has words which ring out very much like the celebrated language of Patrick Henry--“If this be treason, make the most of it.” Bacon said: “If virtue be a sin, if piety be guilt, if all the principles of morality and goodness be perverted, we must confess that those who are now called ‘Rebels,’ may be in danger of this high imputation; but if there be, as sure there is, a just God to appeal to, if to plead the cause of the oppressed, if sincerely to aim at his Majesty’s honor and the public good without any reservation or by-interest, if to stand in the gap after so much blood of our dear brethren bought and sold, if after the loss of a great part of his Majesty’s Colony deserted and dispeopled, freely with our lives and estates to endeavor to save the remainder--be treason, God Almighty judge and let the guilty die.” [Illustration] WILMINGTON “THE FREE TOWN ON THE CAPE FEAR” BY JOSEPH BLOUNT CHESHIRE North Carolina might be called the State without a city--_civitas sine urbe_. It has never had a capital or a metropolis, except arbitrarily and in name only. It has been a rural State, a State of planters and farmers. Its eminent lawyers, and even its physicians and merchants, have often been also its eminent farmers. The first president of the State Agricultural Society was the Chief Justice of its Supreme Court. The physical conditions of a country predetermine the lines of its development. North Carolina’s interminable length of dangerous coast-line repelled the earliest attempt at English settlement. Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition of 1585, coasting along its inhospitable sands, divined their true character, and marked down upon the first map that ominous name--_Promontorium Tremendum_--Cape Fear. And in spite of all improvements in navigation they have remained a menace and a terror. Hatteras and Cape Lookout and Cape Fear warned off commerce and settlement. The eloquent words of the late Mr. George Davis, of Wilmington, applied to Cape Fear, are descriptive of the general character of the North Carolina coast: