Colonial period In 1663, King
Charles II of England granted a
royal charter to eight
lords proprietor to establish the colony of
Carolina in North America. After 1731, the members of the governor's council were chosen by the
Privy Council and were responsible to the British king. During the period of royal control after 1731, North Carolina's governors were issued sets of secret instructions from the Privy Council's
Board of Trade. The directives were binding upon the governor and dealt with nearly all aspects of colonial government. As they were produced by officials largely ignorant of the political situation in the colony and meant to ensure greater direct control over the territory, the instructions caused tensions between the governor and the General Assembly. The assembly controlled the colony's finances and used this as leverage by withholding salaries and appropriations, sometimes forcing the governors to compromise and disregard some of the Board of Trade's instructions. and accelerated the colony's break with Great Britain.
Revolutionary period In 1774, the people of the colony elected a
provincial congress, independent of the royal governor, as the
American Revolution began. Inspired by the structure of the lower house of the General Assembly and organized in part by House Speaker
John Harvey, its purpose was to chose delegates to send to the
Continental Congress. In addition to this, the congress adopted punitive measures against Great Britain for its
Intolerable Acts and empowered local committees to govern the state as royal control dissipated. A second congress in April 1775 adopted additional economic measures against Great Britain, before fleeing the colony. There would be five provincial congresses. The
fifth Congress created the first
constitution in 1776. This constitution was not submitted to a vote of the people. The assembly initially organized the state's war effort and structured the militia itself and directed oversight through committees, though when this proved unsatisfactory it created separate boards with supervisory authority. In September 1781, British forces captured the governor and several members of the General Assembly during a raid on Hillsborough. The war ended in 1783. In 1791, the General Assembly appointed a commission to designate a permanent seat of state government, and the following year the legislature fixed the seat at the planned city of
Raleigh. Construction of a North Carolina State House began in Raleigh in 1792 and became the meeting place for the General Assembly in 1794. It was enlarged in 1820 and burnt down in 1831. In 1834 the General Assembly voted narrowly in favor of a measure to establish a convention to amend the state constitution. The
subsequent convention in 1835 offered significant changes to the state's constitution which were ratified in a popular referendum. Amendments set the number of senators at 50 and the number of commoners in the House at 120. Borough towns were terminated. Senate districts were no longer required to be limited to individual counties, but instead be coterminous with which counties were to be included in them and based on a judgement of approximate wealth measured by tax receipts. Sessions for the legislature were changed from annual to biennial and the terms of legislators were lengthened accordingly to two years. The office of governor was also made popularly elective. A new constitutional amendment process was also established, whereby the legislature could by a two-thirds majority vote convene a convention or could propose amendments subject to popular referendum after passing them in succeeding sessions after first a three-fifths and then a two-thirds majority vote. Suffrage for the purposes of legislative elections was limited to white men. In 1857, property requirements for qualifying to vote in Senate races were abolished. In May 1861, at the urging of the governor, the General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a convention to consider seceding from the United States. Later that month the convention met in Raleigh and adopted an
Ordinance of Secession and adopted the
Constitution of the Confederate States. The convention met several times from then until November 1862, during which time it served as a transitional government for the state, superseding the authority of the General Assembly and making changes to state law on its own. After the president of the convention declined to convene it to discuss issues of wartime
speculation and extortion, authority returned to the state's other civil leaders and institutions. During the Civil War the General Assembly continued to meet in regular biennial sessions, but also convened in seven extraordinary sessions to address wartime issues.
Reconstruction era In 1868,
a new constitution was crafted by a convention and ratified by popular vote. The document provided for universal male suffrage and abolished all property requirements and religious tests for officeholders. and changed the Senate apportionment from districts based on taxes paid to a system which accounted for population. The constitution also reverted legislative sessions from a biennial schedule to annual. The document created the office of
lieutenant governor which was to be filled by popular statewide election. It replaced the speaker of the Senate as that body's presiding officer and assumed the former office's role in succeeding to the governorship in the event it became vacant. The constitution made numerous state executive offices and judgeships subject to popular election and provided for elected local governments, diminishing the legislature's influence over these institutions. It also laid out specific limitations on the legislature's taxation power, ability to incur public debts, and on its discretion as far as certain areas of policy. With the ratification of the new constitution and the enfranchisement of black men, blacks were first elected to the General Assembly in 1868. In the legislative term lasting from 1868 to 1870, three blacks served in the Senate and 17 served in the House of Representatives. Black men were consistently elected to the legislature in similar numbers in the following years before declining in strength in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Between 1868 and 1901, a total of 97 black legislators served. In 1873, a constitutional amendment changed sessions back to biennial. In 1875, the General Assembly convened a new constitutional convention. This led to the ratification of several amendments the following year which chiefly functioned to strengthen the power of the legislature. The changes allowed for the legislature to create additional executive offices and provide for their selection, to create and define the jurisdiction of new lower courts, and to replace elected local governments with their own chosen officials. Lastly, the amendments eased the future amendment process for the constitution, allowing any proposed change which had been approved by three-fifths of the vote of each house of the General Assembly to be scheduled for ratification in a referendum.
Republican Party members dominated the legislature from 1868 to 1870. From then until the 1895, control rested with members of the
Conservative Party/
Democratic Party. In 1894, Republicans and members of the incipient
Populist Party agreed to cooperate and as a coalition won a majority in both the House and Senate. Democrats dubbed this alliance "
Fusionism". These measures disproportionately effected poor black voters and effectively
disenfranchised most black people in the state. In 1968, the General Assembly, in tandem with national trends towards state legislative professionalization, hired its first legislative services officer, initially dubbed its administrative officer. The following year the assembly by law created the Legislative Services Commission to oversee the legislative services officer and the administrative affairs of its operations. Professional, clerical, budget disbursement, and resource procurement services provided by the commission to the legislature steadily increased over the following years. The 1969 session also marked the first time the body used a computer to keep records of its bills and track their progress. In the early 1970s, Democratic legislators, spurred in part by the election of a Republican governor in 1972, began an effort to strengthen the General Assembly's power and influence in state government which continued into the 1980s. As a result, the legislature hired its own research staff, created an independent judicial office to review administrative affairs in the state bureaucracy, and began appointing its own members to state board and commissions, though the latter practice was ruled unconstitutional by the
North Carolina Supreme Court in 1982. The legislature returned to meeting annually in 1973 and also authorized committees to meet and work in the interim between sessions. In 1977, the state constitution was amended to allow for governors and lieutenant governors to seek second terms. Shortly thereafter, the House, feeling threatened by the strengthened positions of the governor and Senate leadership, broke from a decades-long trend and began electing speakers to successive terms. The legislature's influence in state politics continued to increase through the late 20th century and early 21st century.
Reapportionment and changes in representation Lillian Exum Clement became the first female member of the General Assembly when she joined the House of Representatives in 1921.
Gertrude Dills McKee became the first woman to be elected to the State Senate in 1930. Female representation slowly increased in the following decades. For hundreds of years North Carolina's legislative representation was apportioned such that each county had at least one representative in the House and that all Senate districts were supposed to contain approximately equal populations, though the latter tenant was undermined by a constitutional requirement that no counties be split between different districts. As a result, by the 1960s, rural constituents were significantly overrepresented in the legislature. Following developments in federal jurisprudence in the early 1960s that led to the creation of the principle of
one man, one vote, in 1965, a U.S. District Court panel ruled that the state's legislative districts were unconstitutional. As a result, in the 1960s and 1970s the legislature designed districts in a manner which significantly rebalanced the representation of the state in a more equitable manner. In the mid-1980s, the legislature ceased using multi-member legislative districts. The passage of the federal
Voting Rights Act of 1965 ensured protections for racial minorities in elections and increased their electoral influence in the state.
Henry Frye became the state's first black legislator in the 20th century when he joined the House of Representatives in 1969. The number of black legislators steadily increased in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1973,
Henry Ward Oxendine became the first Native American member of the legislature. In 1994,
Daniel F. McComas became the first Latino elected to the General Assembly.
Jay Chaudhuri became the first legislator of South Asian descent in 2016. In the 1994 elections, Republicans won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1800s. In the 2010 elections, Republicans secured control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in over 100 years. As of 2025, the Republicans have controlled both chambers since then. == Membership ==