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The Lost Colony

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What Happened to the ‘Lost Colony’ of Roanoke?

By: History.com Staff

Updated: June 20, 2023 | Original: October 3, 2012

The origins of one of America’s oldest unsolved mysteries can be traced to August 1587, when a group of about 115 English settlers arrived on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. Following an earlier, failed attempt at settlement on Roanoke two years earlier, these colonists intended to form the first permanent English outpost in the New World. 

John White's Departure and the Spanish Armada

Later that year, it was decided that John White, governor of the new colony, would sail back to England in order to gather a fresh load of supplies. But just as he arrived, a major naval war broke out between England and Spain, and Queen Elizabeth I called on every available ship to confront the mighty Spanish Armada . 

In August 1590, White finally returned to Roanoke, where he had left his wife and daughter, his infant granddaughter (Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas) and the other settlers three long years before. He found no trace of the colony or its inhabitants, and few clues to what might have happened, apart from a single word—“Croatoan”—carved into a wooden post.

Was the 'Lost Colony' of Roanoke Ever Found?

Investigations into the fate of the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke have continued over the centuries, but no one has come up with a satisfactory answer. “Croatoan” was the name of an island south of Roanoke that was home to a Native American tribe of the same name. Perhaps, then, the colonists were killed or abducted by Native Americans. 

Other hypotheses hold that they tried to sail back to England on their own and got lost at sea, that they met a bloody end at the hands of Spaniards who had marched up from Florida or that they moved further inland and were absorbed into a friendly tribe. 

In 2007, efforts began to collect and analyze DNA from local families to figure out if they’re related to the Roanoke settlers, local Native American tribes or both. Despite the lingering mystery, it seems there’s one thing to be thankful for: The lessons learned at Roanoke may have helped the next group of English settlers, who would found their own colony 17 years later just a short distance to the north, at Jamestown .

HISTORY Vault: Roanoke: A Mystery Carved in Stone

For centuries, the disappearance of 117 colonists from Roanoke Island has been this country's oldest mystery. Now, stonework experts Jim and Bill Vieira will use cutting-edge technology to take a deeper look at the evidence left behind.

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Get a free outer banks travel guide, take a virtual tour, roanoke island & dare county mainland.

Across Roanoke Sound from Nags Head sits Roanoke Island, a small island with two towns – Wanchese at the south end and Manteo in the center – and some of North Carolina’s oldest colonial history. At the north end, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site tells the story of the first attempt at a permanent English settlement in the New World. This ill-fated colony disappeared between 1587 and 1590, leaving a carving on a pole as the only clue to their whereabouts; to this day the mystery around their disappearance intrigues visitors and history lovers. You can walk the ground where they lived and look out on the waters where they dropped anchor, and next door you can sit for the long-running outdoor drama The Lost Colony where you’ll learn more about their time here. Elizabethan Gardens , a 10-acre botanical garden adjacent to Fort Raleigh, is laced with gardens and plantings and a statue dedicated to Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World.

Recreation & Outer Banks Icons

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On Roanoke Island, there are a slew of Outer Banks icons. First, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site , the place where the ill-fated Lost Colony attempted to establish the first permanent English settlement in the New World. See if you can uncover any clues to their whereabouts (if you don’t know the story, they disappeared and it’s been a mystery since the late 1500s) as you check out the exhibits in the visitors center and as you walk the grounds. Within walking distance of the very site where Fort Raleigh was built, the longest-running outdoor drama in the nation tells their story. The Lost Colony runs throughout summer and lays out the story of the colony, of the assistance they received from nearby Native Tribes, and of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World. It’s an amazing play and actors like Andy Griffith have taken the stage as Sir Walter Raleigh (yes, he’s the namesake of our state capitol even though he never actually visited!) and other characters. You’ll find a statue devoted to Virginia Dare in Elizabethan Gardens , a 10-acre botanical garden next door. The statue of Dare stands under a stately spread of live oaks and has been the focal point of many a photo (and we want to see yours. Use the hashtag #OBXnow and don’t forget to tag @TheOuterBanksNC when you do), but there’s more to see and shoot here than just her statue. Take in the views of the Roanoke and Croatan Sounds, explore the symmetrical plantings in the traditional English garden, and see if you can find a favorite flower among the thousands of blooms.

In Manteo, the biggest of the two communities on Roanoke Island – the other being the fishing village of Wanchese – there’s Roanoke Island Festival Park, a history center and gathering place where several festivals take place throughout the year and where you’ll find costumed interpreters showing you the ways of life for those original colonists. Climb aboard the Elizabeth II , a full-scale replica of the ships those lost colonists took from England to our fair waters – floats across the town marina in Shallowbag Bay. Cross the bridge to and you can visit it, climb the top and lower deck accompanied by a costumed interpreter who’ll fill you in on daily life on the ship and detailing the difficulties faced by the sailors and landlubbers on their journey to the New World. Near the center of the island you’ll find The Mothervine – the oldest cultivated grapevine in the U.S. Now grapevines aren’t much to look at- they’re gnarled, barky things – but The Mothervine is impressive. Growing here since around 1584 (the records are a little fuzzy that far back, so we could be a couple of years off on that), this muscadine vine stands in the front yard of a home and an extensive set of trellises support its thick, heavy trunk and what looks like a quarter-acre of vines and leaves. There’s no wine made from The Mothervine’s grapes, instead it’s all alcohol-free juice, but that juice is packed in antioxidants and with just a sip you can say you have a tie back to the very roots of our nation.

Near The Mothervine, Island Farm’s collection of historic buildings that once belonged to the prominent and prolific Etheridge family offer a glimpse at life on the Banks in the 1850s. The Etheridge family was granted a tenant’s lease for a huge swathe of Roanoke Island back in 1757, and in 1783, they’d become the landowners here. Around 1850, the farmhouse and many of the outbuildings here were built and in daily use for the Etheridge family and the enslaved people who worked their farm and fields; this is what Island Farm’s curators and interpreters (in period costume) show us today. Highlights here include the demonstrations – from blacksmithing to feeding the livestock to spinning wool – and the historic structures, especially the most eye-catching feature: a windmill. More accurately it’s a post windmill, one of two on Roanoke Island in the mid-1800s but a fairly common sight along the Outer Banks for decades (with no streams to turn a water-powered grist mill, Bankers used their most abundant resource – the wind – to do the work for them). One more thing to see here: a pair of Banker Ponies, wild horses descended from shipwrecked Spanish Mustangs that have lived in the dunes and scrub forests of the Outer Banks for hundreds of years.

The Etheridge family name will pop up again when you visit the North Carolina Aquarium at Roanoke Island. Out front, the gravesite and a memorial to Richard Etheridge, a Black descendant of the family and one of the most heroic figures of the U.S. Lifesaving Service (which later became the Coast Guard), gives a little context to his accomplishments. Inside the Aquarium you’ll be led through the story of our waters. At the North Carolina Aquarium Roanoke Island , the centerpiece is the 285,000-gallon Graveyard of the Atlantic tank where a replica wreck (like the ones offshore here, on this stretch of coast where more than a hundred ships have sunk) sits amid sharks, eel, and dozens of other fish. There are interactive touch tanks, exhibits on sea turtles and coastal ecology, and as you move through the aquarium, you’ll follow the flow of water from inland to the ocean, and tanks representing each environment will show you everything from otters to alligators to seahorses to sharks.

Continuing the story of water, the Roanoke Island Maritime Museum has exhibits of boats designed here specifically for use in the sounds and seas around the Island and the Outer Banks. The Roanoke Marshes Lighthouse stands at the end of a short pier, and this reproduction is nearly identical to the lighthouses that helped commercial fishermen navigate the shallow and often shoal-filled waters around the island. Nearby, Island Farm serves as a living-history museum showing how Roanoke Islanders and Outer Bankers lived in the mid-1800s. A collection of original and restored buildings and a dedicated group of costumed historians and subject matter experts make the place come alive.

You can head over to Roanoke Island for a ride or walk. On the Island, a mixed-used path parallels the highway and spends most of its time in the shade (you’ll be glad of this if you’re riding in summer). Once you’ve explored the commercial and residential streets of Manteo (be careful as you might be riding on streets, not paths, in areas), take the bike path north toward the Aquarium, Island Farm, the Fort Raleigh-Elizabethan Gardens area, and the views at the foot of the Washington Baum Bridge. Bring your bikes or connect with one of the bike rental shops on the Outer Banks and pick up a set of wheels for the day, the week, or anything in between.

Many visitors like to take things a little slower, and for that we’ve got a fleet of boats ready to take you on sunset cruises, dolphin tours, and on sightseeing jaunts on the Sound and in the Atlantic. Several boats sail out of the Manteo harbor, including Captain Johnny’s Outer Banks Dolphin Tours, the Downeast Rover (a beautiful 55’ topsail schooner), Sail Outer Banks, Outer Banks Adventures, and others. From Wanchese, at the south end of Roanoke Island, Paradise Dolphin Cruises specializes in spotting these magnificent mammals in the wild. There are just as many sunset cruises, dolphin tours, and pleasure cruises to join on the Outer Banks proper.

On Roanoke Island, you can hunt on private property (with permission from the property owner) and in the 1,847-acre Roanoke Island Marshes Game Land, south of Highway 64. Game includes white-tailed deer, black bear, turkey, feral pigs, small game, and waterfowl. To hunt here you’ll need your North Carolina hunting license and the proper tags or stamps (for deer, hogs, or waterfowl).

The Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge has a wide array of game available. Here you can hunt a range of waterfowl, quail, mourning dove, woodcock, rabbit, squirrel, raccoon, opossum, and white-tailed deer. Most of the Refuge’s 154,000 acres are open to hunting, with clear signs and maps denoting where hunting is and isn’t permitted. To hunt here you’ll need a valid North Carolina hunting license and a permit from the Refuge. The permit, and the Refuge’s hunting regulations, are available online here .

There are guides and outfitters who lead hunts for waterfowl, deer, and more. Dare to Hyde Outdoor Adventure leads trips in Dare County and neighboring Hyde County. Eastern OBX Guide Service, Parkers Waterfowl Guide Service, Duck Hunter OBX, and Outer Banks Waterfowl Guide Service are a few of the local guides who can help you have a successful day.

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Fort Raleigh National Historic Site protects and preserves known portions of England's first New World settlements from 1584 to 1590. This site also preserves the cultural heritage of the Native Americans, European Americans and African Americans who have lived on Roanoke Island.

Dive deeper into the stories of the English expeditions to the New World and the Carolina Algonquians that called the land home.

After the Battle of Roanoke Island in 1862, a Freedmen's Colony was established for those who were formerly enslaved.

From early radio experiments to the creation of the longest-running outdoor drama, Fort Raleigh continued to make history in the 1900s.

Discover the different places to visit and learn about at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.

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• HISTORY & CULTURE

Newfound survivor camp may explain fate of the famed Lost Colony of Roanoke

Find provides “compelling evidence” to help solve one of America’s oldest historical mysteries.

More than a hundred men, women, and children sailed from England to North Carolina in 1587 to build a new settlement. Three years later they had vanished, leaving few clues of their fate.

Pieces of broken crockery recently unearthed in a North Carolina field belonged to survivors of the ill-fated Lost Colony, the first English settlement in the Americas. That dramatic claim has stoked a long-simmering debate over what happened to the 115 men, women, and children abandoned on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island in 1587.

Working on a bluff overlooking Albemarle Sound, 50 miles west of Roanoke Island, a team from the First Colony Foundation uncovered a trove of English, German, French, and Spanish pottery pieces.

“The number and variety of artifacts recovered provide compelling evidence that the site was inhabited by several settlers from Sir Walter Raleigh’s vanished 1587 colony,” said archaeologist Nick Luccketti, the team’s leader.

The announcement came just months after another archaeologist claimed to have found objects related to the lost settlers on Hatteras Island, located about 50 miles south of Roanoke Island. If both discoveries hold up, they support the theory that the colonists split up into two or more widely separated survivor camps, almost certainly aided by Native Americans with whom they likely assimilated.

Clues to colonists’ fate

The Lost Colony was made up largely of middle-class Londoners who found themselves stranded on the North Carolina shore when the Spanish Armada attacked England, plunging their nation into war. At the time, the colony’s governor, John White, was in London gathering supplies and additional colonists. When he finally returned to the settlement three years later, he found it deserted.

The sole clue to the settlers’ fate was a post carved with the word “Croatoan,” then the name of Hatteras Island and its native inhabitants, who had been on friendly terms with the English. One of them, Manteo, traveled twice to England and was made a lord by Queen Elizabeth I.

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White also wrote that the settlers intended to move “fifty miles into the main,” an apparent reference to an inland site. The governor never located the settlers, who included his daughter Eleanor Dare and his granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World.

A map drawn by the colony's governor includes a patch covering the symbol of a fort located 50 miles inland from Roanoke Island. Researchers say they've discovered evidence of Lost Colony survivors in this area.

The case went cold until 2012, when researchers noticed a patch on a watercolor map of eastern North Carolina painted by White. Beneath the patch they found the image of a fort at the head of Albemarle Sound. Its location is 50 miles to the west of Roanoke Island, matching the governor’s account. On top of the patch was another faint outline of a fort, this one drawn in what analysts said was invisible ink.

Scholars speculated that White wanted to hide the existence of the fort from the Spanish, who viewed the Roanoke venture as a threat to their domination of North America and the critical shipping lanes off North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The Spanish sent an expedition to wipe out the rogue colony, but they, too, failed to find the settlers.

In 2015 Luccketti’s team excavated the area marked on the map, close to a Native American village called Mettaquem. Since early European colonists typically built their settlements near Native American sites, this seemed a good place to start.

A piece of English ceramic from Site X may be part of a pot used by a survivor of the ill-fated colony.

Clay Swindell, an archaeologist associated with the First Colony Foundation who examined Mettaquem, said the palisaded village was home to some 80 to 100 people. Just outside its wall, at a place they called Site X, Luccketti’s team found no fort, but they did uncover two dozen pieces of English pottery that they maintained likely belonged to Lost Colony survivors.

In January, the archaeologists excavated in a field two miles north of Site X, which they dubbed Site Y. Here they found European ceramics in far greater number and variety than at Site X. Luccketti contends that at least some of the settlers moved from Roanoke after White’s 1587 departure, bringing along their European ceramics. He says that a small group, possibly a single family, may have taken up farming alongside their Native American neighbors as they waited in vain for rescue.

Mystery solved?

William Kelso, an archaeologist who led the effort to uncover the 1607 Jamestown fort, is confident the finds “solve one of the greatest mysteries in early American history—the odyssey of the Lost Colony.” Other archaeologists, however, warn against jumping to conclusions.

“I am skeptical,” says Charles Ewen, an archaeologist at East Carolina University. “They are looking to prove rather than seeking to disprove their theory, which is the scientific way.”

Luccketti’s assertion hinges on dating the small pieces of pottery—no easy task since styles remained the same for long periods of time. The ceramics at Site X and Site Y conceivably could have been left by later English traders who came from Jamestown, which was settled two decades after the failed attempt at Roanoke. Researchers agree, however, that the discovery of two separate caches strengthens Luccketti’s case.

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“I have no problem with their interpretation of the ceramics in question as possibly late 16 th century and potentially associated with the Lost Colony,” concludes Jacqui Pearce, a ceramic expert at the Museum of London. While all of the pottery continued to be made well in the 17 th century, she says it seems unlikely this particular collection of pots was made after 1650, when the first known English traders began to infiltrate the area.

Still, the finds were mixed with soil plowed in subsequent centuries by later settlers and enslaved Africans, and the team has yet to find clear remains of an Elizabethan homestead. “One must find artifacts of known 16 th -century date in a stratigraphically sealed context,” says Henry Wright, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan.

One intriguing clue that points to Roanoke colonists rather than Jamestown traders is the lack of early 17 th -century clay pipes at Site X and Site Y. Early Roanoke expeditions appropriated pipe smoking from the Native Americans, and Raleigh made it fashionable in England. Slender clay pipes with small bowls, quite distinct from their indigenous counterparts in material and style, were inevitable parts of any English trader’s kit by the early 1600s.

But these pipes did not turn up at Site Y. Pearce called the absence of these significant. “If any of the inhabitants of the Lost Colony smoked, then they would have used native pipes rather than London-made ones,” she said.

Second survivor camp?

While Luccketti’s team was digging at Site X, a group led by Mark Horton, then an archaeologist at the University of Bristol, was excavating the remains of a Native American village on today’s Hatteras Island, the historical Croatoan. Working with volunteers from the Croatan Archaeological Society, he uncovered European artifacts, including the hilt of a 16 th century rapier and part of a gun.

Scott Dawson, head of the society, said the artifacts provide evidence that the colonists assimilated with the Croatoan people. “We now know not just where they went but also what happened after they got there,” he wrote of the colonists in a recent book.

Horton, who has not yet published his finds, cautioned that these objects were all found in a context dating from the mid- to late-17 th century. That means they might be heirlooms passed down by the descendants of the colonists, or later trade goods obtained from Jamestown.

Luccketti doubts that large numbers of Roanoke colonists descended on Croatoan, in part because environmental evidence indicates that rainfall was scarce in the decade following the settlers’ arrival. “You don’t just dump a hundred people on an island in a drought,” he said.

But Horton said the discoveries from Site X, Site Y, and Hatteras give credence to the increasingly popular theory that the Lost Colonists went their separate ways and merged into the local Native American communities. “This is typical in situations like shipwrecks,” he says. “Order breaks down and you end up with several survivor camps.”

And there is a clear precedent. In 1586, when food ran perilously short for members of the first Roanoke colony, its leader dispersed his hundred settlers across the region, including to Croatoan, so they could forage—a tactic that proved successful until they could hitch a ride back to England.

Dawson hopes to resume digs on other parts of Hatteras in the search for a survivor’s camp, while Luccketti’s team also intends to continue their hunt. “There is not enough data, but they should keep looking,” says Ewen.

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• The Lost Colony

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• Roosevelt on Roanoke

President Roosevelt visited Roanoke Island on August 18, 1937— the 350th anniversary of Virginia Dare’s birth and a little more than a month after the July 4th premiere of Green’s drama. Prior to the performance of  The Lost Colony , the President delivered an address.

Until recent years history was taught as a series of facts and dates. Today we are beginning to look more closely into the events which preceded those great social and economic and political changes which have deeply affected the known history of the world. For example, most of us older people learned of Columbus’ voyages and how America came to be named—and we jumped from there in our North American history to the founding of Jamestown and of Plymouth—1492 to 1607—with mere passing reference to Roanoke and perhaps to the voyage of Verazzano.

It has always been a pet theory of mine that many other voyages of exploration and of trade took place in that century along our American shores. We know that during the same period the Spaniards established great colonies throughout the West Indies, at Panama and other points in Central America, and extended their cities, their religious institutions and even their universities to both the east and west coasts of South America. It is unbelievable that white men did not come scores of times to what is today the Atlantic Seaboard of the United States. Some day, perhaps, a closer search of the records of the seafaring towns of Britain and France and Flanders and Holland and Scandinavia will rediscover discoverers. Perhaps even it is not too much to hope that documents in the old country and excavations in the new may throw some further light, however dim, on the fate of the “Lost Colony” and Roanoke and Virginia Dare.

If we are to understand the full significance of the early explorations and the early settlements, if we are to understand the kind of world upon which Virginia Dare opened her eyes on that far-away August day in 1587, we must ask why Western Europe came to the New World.

Many of those who sailed in immense discomfort, in tiny ships, across the Atlantic, were adventurers, some of them seeking riches, some seeking fame, some impelled by the mere spirit of unrest. But most of the people who came in the early days to America—the men, the women and the children- came hither seeking something very different, seeking an opportunity which they could not find in their homes of the old world.

We hear of the gentlemen of title, who, on occasion, came to the Colonies, and we hear of the gentlemen of wealth who helped to fit out the expeditions. But it is a simple fact which cannot too often be stressed that an overwhelming majority of those who came to the Colonies from England and Scotland and Ireland and Wales and France and Holland and Sweden belonged to what our British cousins would, even today, call “the lower middle classes.” The opportunity they sought was something they did not have at home—opportunity freely to exercise their own chosen form of religion, opportunity to get into an environment where there were no classes, opportunity to escape from a system which still contained most of the elements of Feudalism.

This is said not in derogation of those pioneers. It is rather in praise of them. They had the courage, physically and mentally, by deed and word, to seek better things, to try to capture ideals and hopes forbidden to them by the laws and rulers of their own home lands.

They would forget, too, that throughout the days that intervened between Roanoke and Jamestown and Plymouth, and the time of the American Revolution itself, practical democracy was carried on in the lives of the inhabitants of nearly every community in the Thirteen Colonies. It is true that as commerce developed in the seaboard cities, and as a few great landed estates were set up here and there, a school of thought parallel with the same school of thought in England made great headway.

It was this policy which came into the open in the Constitutional Convention of 1787; for in that Convention there were some who wanted a King, there were some who wanted to create titles, and there were many, like Alexander Hamilton, who sincerely believed that suffrage and the right to hold office should be confined to persons of property and persons of education. We know, however, that although this school persisted, with the assistance of the newspapers of the day, during the first three National Administrations, it was eliminated for many years at least under the leadership of President Thomas Jefferson and his successors. His was the first great battle for the preservation of democracy. His was the first great victory for American democracy.

In the half century that followed there was constant war between those who, like Andrew Jackson, believed in a democracy conducted by and for a complete cross-section of the population, and those who, like the Directors of the Bank of the United States and their friends in the United States Senate, believed in the conduct of government by a self-perpetuating group at the top of the ladder. That this was the clear line of demarcation-the fundamental difference of opinion in regard to American institutions- is proved by an amazingly interesting letter which Lord Macaulay wrote in 1857 to an American friend.

This friend of his had written a book about Thomas Jefferson. Macaulay said “You are surprised to learn that I have not a high opinion of Mr. Jefferson and I am surprised at your surprise. I am certain that I never wrote a line and that I have never . . . uttered a word indicating an opinion that the supreme authority in a state ought to be entrusted to the majority of citizens told by the head; in other words, to the poorest and most ignorant part of society.”

Macaulay, in other words, was opposed to what we call “popular government.” He went on to say, “I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.”

Almost, me thinks, I am reading not from Macaulay but from a resolution of the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Liberty League, the National Association of Manufacturers or the editorials written at the behest of some well-known newspaper proprietors in 1936 and 1937.

Like these gentlemen of 1937, Macaulay in 1857 painted this gloomy picture of the future of the United States: “I cannot help foreboding the worst. It is quite plain that your government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. . . . The day will come when . . . a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a legislature . . . On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights . . . On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists . . . and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries. . . . I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of adversity . . . do things which will prevent prosperity from returning; that you will act like people who should in a year of scarcity devour all the seed corn and thus make the next year a year, not of scarcity but of absolute famine. . . . There is nothing to stop you. Your constitution is all sail and no anchor. . . . Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your Republic will be . . . laid waste by Barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth.”

That, my friends, with all due respect to Lord Macaulay, is an excellent representation of the cries of alarm which rise today from the throats of American Lord Macaulays. They tell you that America drifts toward the Scylla of dictatorship on the one hand, or the Charybdis of anarchy on the other. Their anchor for the salvation of the Ship of State is Macaulay’s anchor: “Supreme power . . . in the hands of a class, numerous indeed, but select; of an educated class, of a class which is, and knows itself to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order.”

Mine is a different anchor. They do not believe in democracy—I do. My anchor is democracy—and more democracy. And, my friends, I am of the firm belief that the Nation, by an overwhelming majority, supports my opposition to the vesting of supreme power in the hands of any class, numerous but select.

I am just as strongly in favor of the security of property and the maintenance of order as Lord Macaulay, or as the American Lord Macaulays who thunder today. And in this the American people are with me, too. But we cannot go along with the Tory insistence that salvation lies in the vesting of power in the hands of a select class, and that if America does not come to that system,’ America will perish.

Since the determination of many who compose this minority is to substitute their will for that of the majority, would it not be more honest for them, instead of using the Constitution as a cloak to hide their real designs, to come out frankly and say: “We agree with Macaulay that the American form of government will lead to disaster and therefore we seek a change in the American form of government as laid down by the Founding Fathers?”

They seek to substitute their own will for that of the majority, for they would serve their own interest above the general welfare. They reject the principle of the greater good for the greater number, which is the cornerstone of democratic government.

Under democratic government the poorest are no longer necessarily the most ignorant part of society. I agree with the saying of one of our famous statesmen who devoted himself to the principle of majority rule: “I respect the aristocracy of learning; I deplore the plutocracy of wealth; but thank God for the democracy of the heart.”

I seek no change in the form of American government. Majority rule must be preserved as the safeguard of both liberty and civilization.

Under it property can be secure; under it abuses can end; under it order can be maintained—and all of this for the simple, cogent reason that to the average of our citizenship can be brought a life of greater opportunity, of greater security, of greater happiness.

Those worthy hopes led the father and mother of Virginia Dare and the fathers and mothers from many nations through many centuries to seek new life in the New World. Pioneering it was called in the olden days; pioneering it still is- pioneering for the preservation of our fundamental institutions against the ceaseless attack of those who have no faith in democracy. Fortitude and courage on our part succeed the fortitude and courage of those who planted a colony on this Island in the days of good Queen Bess.

-President Franklin D. Roosevelt August 18, 1937 Roanoke Island, NC

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