Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community 1861-1865 (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War Series)

Winner of the Jules and Frances Landry Award for 2009

Conflicting Worlds New Dimensions of the American Civil War T. Michael Parrish, Series Editor

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Barton A. Myers

executing daniel bright Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community

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 1861–1865

Louisiana State University Press Baton Rouge

Published by Louisiana State University Press Copyright © 2009 by Louisiana State University Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing Designer:  Barbara Neely Bourgoyne Typefaces:  Arno Pro, text; Giza, display Printer and binder:  Thomson-Shore, Inc. Chapter 3 makes use of material from the author’s essay “‘A More Rigorous Style of Warfare’: Wild’s Raid, Guerrilla Violence, and Negotiated Neutrality in Northeastern North Carolina,” from North Carolinians in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, edited by Paul D. Escott. Copyright © 2008 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.unc press.unc.edu. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Myers, Barton A., 1980–   Executing Daniel Bright : race, loyalty, and guerrilla violence in a coastal Carolina community, 1861–1865 / Barton A. Myers.    p. cm. — (Conflicting worlds)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8071-3475-7 (cloth : alk. paper)  1. Pasquotank County (N.C.)—History, Military— 19th century.  2. Bright, Daniel, d. 1863.  3. North Carolina—History—Civil War, 1861–1865— Underground movements.  4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Underground movements.  5. Guerrillas—North Carolina—Pasquotank County—History—19th century.  6. Executions and executioners—North Carolina—Pasquotank County—History—19th century.  7. Wild, Edward Augustus, 1825–1891.  8. North Carolina—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns.  9. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns.  I. Title.   F262.P25M946 2010   973.7′8509756142—dc22 2009008299 The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.  ∞

To Molly

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction 1 1 The Roots of Civil War Loyalty Black Labor and Whig Politics in Pasquotank County  10 2 “The Work of Evil Minded Citizens” Divided Loyalties and the Origins of Guerrilla War in the North Carolina No-Man’s-Land  31 3 “An Elysium and an Asylum to the Buffaloes and Union Men” Edward Wild’s Raid and the Execution of Daniel Bright  76 4 “Without Aid or Protection from Any Source” Negotiating Neutrality for Pasquotank County  99 Epilogue The Problem of Verifying Loyalty in the No-Man’s-Land  123 Appendix Statistics for Pasquotank Citizens and Guerrillas in 1860  135 Notes  145 Bibliography  175 Index  189 Illustrations follow page 75. Map of Northeastern North Carolina at the time of the Civil War is on page xiv.

Acknowledgments

I first encountered Daniel Bright while visiting the Davis Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the summer of 2002. I was spending four days in the microfilm reading room desperately squeezing in every last minute I could get as I reached the tail end of the stipend so generously awarded me by the College of Wooster. Late one afternoon, as my eyes were about to sink back into my skull, I quickly glanced over an article in the Charleston Mercury entitled “Yankee Atrocities in North Carolina— Their Own Confessions.” The story recounted the gruesome execution of a suspected Confederate irregular and northeastern North Carolina farmer named Daniel Bright. Given my interest in guerrilla violence, the word atrocity grabbed my attention. But I would have to wait until I arrived on the campus of the University of Georgia a year later before I would have the time and financial support to start rebuilding Daniel Bright’s world. Early in my graduate career, I was fortunate to take John C. Inscoe’s nineteenth-century American community studies course and James C. Cobb’s legendary “Highlights in Southern History” seminar. Both historians encouraged me to think about this project as a book. As a very young scholar, I took them only half seriously when they first suggested that the story I was working on could be a microhistory of some importance to the vast literature on the Civil War. Yet I kept plugging away at the story, spending many late nights reading the Official Records and cramming weekend research trips into a busy graduate class schedule. I wanted to understand how and why a guerrilla conflict had emerged in a Civil War community on the coast of North Carolina and how this one individual had come to end up in all that trouble back in December 1863.

x  /  acknowledgments

Many people and institutions helped me complete this project. First I would like to thank John C. Inscoe, James C. Cobb, and Paul S. Sutter, who were unfailing in their advice, time, and support during the writing process. I cannot say enough about Dr. Inscoe’s mentorship; he is the gold standard by which all mentors should be compared. He read and commented on every draft of the book, and without his support, I would not have finished it. Dr. Cobb consistently asked me to consider the implications of my story for the historiography of the American South. Dr. Sutter pushed me to think harder about the intersection of guerrilla conflict and the Dismal Swamp environment. Stephen Berry, Stephen Mihm, and Claudio Saunt of the University of Georgia have also been supportive of my work in a variety of ways. In addition, I would like to extend a hearty thanks to the chair of the history department, Robert Pratt, who awarded me several travel grants. UGA has a long history of producing fine Civil War scholars, and I hope one day to count myself among that group. A number of graduate colleagues provided a sounding board for this project as it took shape, in particular Steve Nash, Bruce Stewart, Judkin Browning, Chris Manganiello, Jim Gigantino, Chris Huff, Ichiro Miyata, Ken Shefsiek, Ivy Holliman, and Christopher Lawton. The University of Georgia is a collegial place for a graduate student to practice history, and the graduate students doing southern history are consistently supportive of one another’s work. As with Georgia, I am deeply indebted to my undergraduate training at the College of Wooster. Wooster’s renowned Independent Study program provided the self-reliance, confidence, and inspiration needed to write a first book. The faculty created an intellectual environment where eager young historians could thrive and debate historical topics; I am thoroughly convinced that there is no finer undergraduate history program in the country. I would especially like to thank Jeff Roche, John M. Gates, and Madonna Hettinger, who, despite their busy schedules, spent countless hours advising me. Friends from Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park have also been incredibly supportive. My numerous conversations with colleagues at the park, where I served for several summers wearing the green and gray, helped make me a well-rounded Civil War scholar. I would like to thank Gregory A. Mertz, Frank A. O’Reilly, Donald Pfanz, Janice Frye,

acknowledgments  /  xi

Elsa Lohman, Noel G. Harrison, Keith Alexander, Mac Wyckoff, Eric Mink, and John Hennessy for their advice and suggestions. Greg Mertz recruited me as an intern in 1999 and then gave me my first opportunity to be a Civil War historian. Without Greg’s help, doing research at the National Archives would have been much more difficult. Peter Carmichael of West Virginia University has deep roots at the military park, and I was fortunate to meet him as I worked on revisions to this project. He was generous with advice and support. I had the assistance of many skilled archivists and librarians at the institutions I visited during the research phase of this book. The personnel at the University of Georgia’s Interlibrary Loan Department and especially Virginia Feher provided an immeasurable amount of help. This talented staff repeatedly found sources that I needed but had little time or money to pursue beyond the walls of the UGA main library. Daniel Bright and I found our publishing home at the Louisiana State University Press and in the capable hands of “Conflicting Worlds” series editor T. Michael Parrish. I am grateful to him for his close reading of this manuscript as it went through the publication process. Civil War historians respect his series for its high-quality scholarship, and I consider it an honor to have my first book as an entry in it. I would also like to thank the anonymous reader who provided penetrating analysis and excellent criticisms, as well as Rand Dotson of LSU Press for his help along the way. I am also grateful to my gifted copy editor, Grace Carino, who made my prose clearer and strengthened the entire manuscript. Other readers of parts of the manuscript provided important commentary and advice. Paul D. Escott, Mark Bradley, Paul Anderson, Brian S. Wills, and Noel G. Harrison all saved me from embarrassing errors of oversight and provided invaluable critiques during the process of revision. Likewise, my conversations with Victoria Bynum, John M. Coski, David Williams, Daniel Sutherland, John Neff, George Rable, Peter Carmichael, Jeanne and David Heidler, LeeAnn Whites, and Alex Christopher Meekins were tremendously helpful. Any errors or omissions that remain in this study are entirely mine. Special thanks go to Editor-in-Chief David Perry of the University of North Carolina Press for permission to use sections of an article that I published in Paul D. Escott’s edited volume North Carolinians in the Era of Civil

xii  /  acknowledgments

War and Reconstruction. Thanks also go to the U.S. Army Military History Institute, the North Caroliniana Collection at the University of North Carolina, and Alex Leary of Shiloh, North Carolina, for permission to publish images of Edward Augustus Wild, Edward Wild’s raid, and Abner Grandy, respectively. A number of organizations provided generous funding for my research. I would like to extend thanks to the U.S. Marine Corps Historical Center for awarding me the 2004 Lt. Colonel Lily H. Gridley Fellowship. The Marine Corps Historical Center’s generous fellowship made this project possible through its support of a topic it viewed as important to current issues faced by the U.S. military. The fellowship provided invaluable support for my research trips to archives in both the North and the South. The North Caroliniana Society’s Archie K. Davis Fellowship, the Colonial Dames of America’s Dissertation Research Award, the UGA Dean’s Award in the Arts and Humanities, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts at UGA, and a generous fellowship from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation enabled me to finish the research. The Richard B. Moreland Foundation provided important computer and technical support without which I would not have been able to complete the book. Finally, I must thank those who supported this project in ways only they know, my family. Matthew, Wendy, and Lorna all encouraged me to continue my graduate studies in the Deep South even though it meant sending me to the other side of the country for long periods of time. While it will no doubt come back to haunt me as I continue to work, I would also like to thank the family cat, Edgar Allan Poe, who spent much of his time trying to eat my research and steal my pens. But most especially, I would like to thank my darling wife, Molly, who endured the chaos of our courtship as I worked on this book. She provided another historian’s ear on top of all the love and support she gave me during this process. I dedicate this book to her.

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Introduction

On 18 December 1863, a large group of white Union officers and black enlisted troops under the command of Brigadier General Edward Augustus Wild escorted “a man of about thirty, a rough, stout fellow . . . dressed in butternut homespun,” to an empty cider barrel inside an unfinished postal building.1 At that site on a knoll overlooking the public road just north of Elizabeth City in rural northeastern North Carolina, the Union soldiers fastened a cord with a hangman’s knot to a joist directly above the barrel, which was to serve as both scaffold and drop. Federal volunteers affixed a noose around the man’s neck and prepared to execute a sentence passed the day before by “drum-head court-martial.” General Wild himself presided as executioner that day, and at the appointed moment, after the local man had been given a chance to pray, Wild kicked the barrel out from underneath his feet. According to one Union soldier’s account of the hanging, the guilty man did not die immediately from the fall, since his neck was not broken. He instead suffered death by “strangulation, his heart not ceasing to beat for twenty minutes.”2 The Union soldiers were not the only observers of the grisly scene that afternoon. At least two local residents of Pasquotank County, Union hostages Elizabeth Weeks and Phoebe Munden, the wives of Confederate soldiers in Captain John T. Elliott’s company of irregulars (men recently assigned to Colonel James W. Hinton’s organizing regiment of North Carolina State Troops), were among the party of observers, surely wondering whether they would suffer the same fate.3 Union authorities would later claim that the condemned man was a deserter from the Confederate army,

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but they left a message at the Hinton’s Crossroads execution site that clearly and forcefully communicated the reasons for their actions to the local community and the Confederate troops who later found the body. Pinned to the man’s back was a note that read: “This guerrilla hanged by order of Brigadier-General Wild. Daniel Bright, of Pasquotank County.”4 When a Confederate cavalry detachment dispatched by Colonel Joel R. Griffin of the Sixty-second Georgia Cavalry/Partisan Rangers (then part of the Department of North Carolina commanded by General George E. Pickett) arrived at the scene of the execution some forty hours later, the soldiers found Bright’s body still hanging.5 One of them, Richard Barfield, recorded that the Georgians gave Bright a full military funeral.6 Confederate authorities would later claim that Bright was a member of the Sixtysecond at home on leave attempting to raise a new company of cavalry authorized by North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance. Having failed to accomplish this, he retired to his farm. General Wild and his officers alleged a much more sinister story behind Bright’s home-front activities.7 Bright was a “guerrilla,” they believed, and he had deserted from the regular army in order to plunder local farms, destroy bridges, harass the loyal unionist citizens of Pasquotank County, and waylay Union troops from his home near the Great Dismal Swamp. The execution of suspected guerrilla Daniel Bright has been treated by Civil War scholars as only a footnote event in the voluminous history of the conflict. The few scholars who have addressed the events in Pasquotank have dealt with them only as sidelines to larger projects on other topics.8 Indeed, Edward Augustus Wild’s 1863 incursion into Pasquotank, Camden, and Currituck counties, which culminated in the Bright hanging, has received little attention from historians.9 This study diverges from these previous works by focusing on Daniel Bright’s community, Pasquotank County.10 Daniel Bright was a member of a community before he fought for the Confederate cause, and it is through an exploration of local relationships that we can understand the interactions of Pasquotank’s black and white residents that led to the events of December 1863. The circumstances surrounding Bright’s execution expose the cast of players within this locality: General Edward Wild’s black soldiers, former slaves recruited from northeastern North Carolina who returned to Pasquotank County to free hundreds of fellow blacks from bondage; Phoebe

introduction  /  3

Munden and Elizabeth Weeks, captured local women who represent the peaceable but politically divided white community and its helplessness in the face of continued power reversals between outside Union raiders and Confederate guerrillas on the Carolina coast; Edward Wild, the catalyst, who exemplifies Federal military policy and emancipation at the point of black soldiers’ bayonets; and Daniel Bright, who embodies the pattern of retaliatory guerrilla violence, destruction, and murder in Pasquotank that played a fundamental role in the community’s war experience. By understanding the community from which Daniel Bright came, we can understand more about the nature of guerrilla violence, southern dissenters, and politically divided communities during the Civil War.11 In using Daniel Bright’s execution as the central focal point for exploring the Civil War home front in northeastern North Carolina, this book employs the methodology of microhistory to examine cultural shifts that cannot be easily discovered and understood at the macro level of synthetic narrative history. By examining an atypical person, event, or place, microhistorians can examine patterns and relationships not evident in a less focused study. Another practitioner of microhistory, Jill Lepore, has recently commented that “however singular a person’s life may be, the value of examining it lies not in its uniqueness, but in its exemplariness, in how that individual’s life serves as an allegory for broader issues affecting the culture as a whole.” “Microhistorians,” Lepore continued, “trac[e] their elusive characters through slender records, to address themselves to solving small mysteries about a person’s life as a means to exploring the culture.” The hanging of Daniel Bright enables the microhistorian to use an event, a place, and a person to build a narrative around the social and cultural changes that wrought a local guerrilla conflict in northeastern North Carolina.12 Reconstructing the history of a guerrilla war that occurred more than 140 years ago has led me to focus on four tightly interwoven themes to explain the origins of the home-front conflict in northeastern Carolina from the antebellum years through the end of the Civil War. Race, political loyalties, power, and guerrilla violence all shaped the life of Daniel Bright and the county he died defending. The interplay of these four dynamics created a world where irregular military activity could thrive and where murder and execution could hold hostage a southern community on the periphery of the major Confederate war effort.

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Since the publication of Phillip Shaw Paludan’s Victims (1981) on the massacre at Shelton Laurel in Madison County, North Carolina, Civil War historians have steadily worked to rediscover the local “social impact” of southern guerrilla violence in its many forms and regional variations. 13 Scholars have pursued the task of filling this gap in our understanding of the war by producing histories of the Civil War South’s irregular conflicts. This book adds local perspective from northeastern North Carolina to the existing debates over what the role of guerrillas on the home front was and who southern irregulars actually were.14 After the fall of Elizabeth City to Union naval forces in February 1862, conditions were initially peaceful, but guerrilla war in Pasquotank and surrounding counties in northeastern North Carolina soon shattered that peace. Since Union troops never permanently garrisoned any town in the region east of the Chowan River, a period of uncertainty began for the citizens of those counties. Between the spring and fall of 1862, Confederate mounted irregulars began monitoring the situation in Pasquotank County in order to resist regular Union recruiting expeditions and coerce unionists and black laborers into submission or silence. A pattern of retaliatory violence developed by early 1863 between the Union army recruiting forces sent to the North Carolina coast and local irregular companies that had formed in the region. In mid-1863, North Carolina authorities, strapped for manpower, began an effort to organize these guerrillas into an infantry regiment, but the local men resisted conscription efforts and Confederate officers and continued their independent operations. In response, Union counterguerrilla operations began in earnest, but a series of Federal raids launched to combat guerrillas throughout the fall met with limited success. Finally, General Edward Wild from Massachusetts was ordered to lead an expedition into the region. He used his black soldiers in an effort to liberate the remaining slaves in Pasquotank, combat irregulars in the region, and protect Pasquotank’s minority unionist population. Wild’s operation flipped the antebellum racial order of Pasquotank County on its head and resulted in one of the first major counterguerrilla operations employing black soldiers in the eastern theater.15 It has been nearly three-quarters of a century since historian U. B. Phillips first declared that the central theme of southern history has been the desire among whites that the region “shall be and remain a white man’s

introduction  /  5

country.” Yet despite the centrality of race and racism to the institution of slavery, the cause of the South’s bloodiest conflict, until recently Civil War scholars have seemed reluctant to focus directly on the role of race in shaping wartime events, especially in relation to guerrilla warfare. In a recent article, Mark Grimsley highlighted the importance of race and racism in the context of the conflict not just in igniting hostilities but as significant factors in shaping battlefield and home-front fighting. According to Grimsley, the use of black soldiers and Native Americans by both sides made the war not only a clash of two colossal white armies over the status of slaves but also “an interracial conflict.”16 For their part, military historians have analyzed the story of black soldiers in the Union army, but despite the declaration nearly two decades ago by Richard Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still Jr. in Why the South Lost the Civil War (1986) that the potential for race war prevented southerners from adopting guerrilla war as a military strategy after Appomattox, only a handful of historians have focused on the dynamics of race and guerrilla violence on the southern home front.17 This work focuses particular attention on the use of black troops to hunt white guerrilla fighters, the use of Confederate guerrilla forces in slave coercion and control, and the public reaction to these events.18 During Wild’s raid, black men played an integral role as executioners and executed. They were ordered to take hostages, impress and destroy property, and ultimately aid in freeing approximately twenty-five hundred slaves and free blacks living in peonage. The reaction to their presence and the continual shift in military supremacy between Confederate guerrillas and unionist raiding parties played no small part in the local white population’s attempt to develop a new strategy for coping with racial disorder and guerrilla war— that of negotiating neutrality between the two belligerent governments. Guerrilla violence and slave control were closely intertwined in Pasquotank. Daniel Bright went from antebellum slave patroller to Confederate soldier to irregular between 1859 and 1863. Bright’s personal story reflects one important impetus for initially forming guerrilla bands in the county— slave control. While guerrilla warfare was clearly a product of resistance to Confederate conscription and a response to the threat posed by the presence of the Union army on the coast, and although the Great Dismal Swamp provided the ideal environment for maintaining secret bases of operation,

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guerrilla warfare was also an important strategy for preserving the South’s racial order. Conditions in the region had created a situation in which the institution of slavery was threatened with collapse early in the conflict, and during much of the war guerrillas supplied the only available Confederate manpower for maintaining that institution. Yet the presence of irregulars in the northeastern counties attracted counterguerrilla operations, which steadily weakened the system until it ultimately collapsed at the hands of counterguerrilla forces. In late 1863, Wild’s effort to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and destroy the irregulars brought an end to slavery in Pasquotank. The experience of Pasquotank County bolsters the claims of other historians that guerrillas both protected the southern racial order built on slavery and simultaneously threatened it by attracting counterguerrilla operations.19 Political loyalties shaped the experience of Pasquotank’s citizens in fundamental ways.20 Whig party dominance in the region acted as a mitigating political influence on sectional tension throughout most of the final years before the war. Nevertheless, a political heritage of conservatism that consisted of support for social hierarchy among white citizens and strong ties to a national market economy disintegrated into divided loyalties when the Whigs split over the issue of secession in 1861, with some but not all of the wealthy, slaveholding Whigs supporting the Confederate cause. A predominantly Whig antebellum electorate evolved into a majority Confederate community with a strong unionist minority. By mid-1863, Pasquotank was war weary from power reversals and guerrilla war on the home front. Loyalties in Pasquotank became steadily more and more difficult to discern for both Union and Confederate troops. By the time of Wild’s raid, many members of the community claimed neutrality. Wild, however, was still able to identify a list of unionists in Pasquotank, which he used as a guide in his counterguerrilla activities. The community’s response to the execution of Daniel Bright and the Wild raid in 1864 was to attempt to negotiate a neutral position between Confederate authorities in North Carolina and Union military officials in Virginia. The attempt to negotiate neutrality was an effort led by elites of both loyalties to reestablish social order and hierarchy from a position of weakness. By August 1864, this attempt at neutrality had largely failed, and loyalties grew more difficult to verify in the county, with both governments claiming that Pasquotank and the surrounding area were loyal to their cause.

introduction  /  7

The concept of power in history is not easily explained but profoundly felt. My discussion of power in Daniel Bright’s community is constructed around Stephen V. Ash’s notion of a “no-man’s-land.” Pasquotank and the nearby counties fall into this broad regional grouping by having a unionist minority and Confederate majority population but with neither able to maintain permanent control. Although nominally Confederate, these counties were on the edges of areas where large Confederate armies actually operated and were always open to Union occupation. By exploring the constant shift back and forth between two forces that could politically influence the county’s population and how they demonstrated their intentions to the community through violence and coercion, specifically public executions and murder, one can begin to understand the state of fear that gripped Pasquotank citizens during the Civil War.21 This work defines power broadly to include both military force and political actions taken to exert influence over the community and especially communal loyalties. The decision by white residents of Pasquotank to hold a meeting following Wild’s raid is an example of power in a way that is similar to Wild’s use of Daniel Bright’s execution to communicate a message about loyalty. The execution of Samuel Jordan, one of Wild’s black soldiers captured during the raid, was meant to symbolically reestablish the local racial order while sending a message about the status of black soldiers in the minds of local Confederate irregulars. Both the meeting and the executions were intended to convey messages about political control and appropriate conduct. In order to understand Pasquotank County’s war experience, one must understand the effects of these constant shifts in military and political pressure on the daily lives of its residents. Bright’s execution fits into a pattern of retaliatory guerrilla violence that was larger than the Wild raid and signaled just another shift in power relationships. In northeastern North Carolina, both armies used violence as a means of affecting loyalty and conduct during the war. Executions were one method by which soldiers conveyed their cultural argument about the legitimacy of their own status as regulars or irregulars. “The public execution,” for Michel Foucault, “did not reestablish justice; it reactivated power.”22 Through executions, both Union soldiers and Confederate guerrillas attempted to legitimize their forms of violence while also reasserting their influence over the community. It was an educative lesson in power for the occupied community. In Pasquotank, the symbols and messages of this lesson were the

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very bodies of the murdered and executed soldiers. In this way, execution and murder became both the instrument and locus of a conversation about power relationships in Pasquotank.23 Each chapter in this work builds on the others to explain how the four themes of race, loyalty, power, and guerrilla violence shaped the Pasquotank war experience. Chapter 1 opens with an analysis of antebellum slavery, race relations, political debate over slavery, and the role of the environment in shaping the antebellum economy. Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of a rift between unionist and Confederate factions in the community in 1861 and on the events in 1862 that led to the formation of local guerrilla bands. General Edward Wild’s 1863 military operation in Pasquotank, Camden, and Currituck counties is the subject of Chapter 3. The fourth chapter discusses the response by local people, state and regional authorities, and the Confederate Congress to the events of the Wild raid and specifically to Daniel Bright’s hanging; it also analyzes the role of racism in shaping those responses. The Epilogue centers on the final year and a half of war, particularly the outcome of efforts to negotiate neutrality and the state of local loyalties by mid-1864. Clearly, events surrounding Daniel Bright’s execution and the irregular war in northeastern North Carolina illustrate two important dimensions of the state’s home-front conflict—how widespread guerrilla violence was in Civil War North Carolina and the demoralization of the white population on the northeastern North Carolina home front by 1864. For many years, the popular mythology of Civil War North Carolina, aided in part by the blockbuster film and best-selling novel Cold Mountain, has isolated the irregular conflict to the highlands of western Carolina or the inner Civil War in the Piedmont region.24 What the brutal local conflict in Pasquotank confirms is that the violence and viciousness of guerrilla war were not limited to the west or central regions of the state but also stretched into the rural northeastern region.25 Furthermore, the subsequent responses of peaceable citizens in Pasquotank to the local war elucidate the collapse of the white majority’s will to resist. Southern newspapers in the 1860s carried news of the guerrilla war in northeastern North Carolina far and wide, and the Daniel Bright hanging became the signature event in these sensationalized stories. Although the events of Pasquotank’s guerrilla war affected people in this region in

introduction  /  9

much the same way that major battles like Gettysburg and Fredericksburg changed the people who witnessed them, the events of this local war have not received appropriate investigation. By blending political, social, and military history, this book provides perspective on how irregulars, their supporters, and their enemies fought a war in the no-man’s-land of the Confederacy. And by evaluating the events that ultimately led to the Union army’s execution of Daniel Bright, this work contributes one more thoughtprovoking chapter to the ever-expanding history of how Americans have coped with guerrilla war.

1 The Roots of Civil War Loyalty Black Labor and Whig Politics in Pasquotank County

Pasquotank is one of the six counties in northeastern North Carolina east of the Chowan River, a region that also includes Gates, Perquimans, Camden, Chowan, and Currituck counties. This 1,660-square-mile region had been included in the original Albemarle County designated in the Lord’s Proprietor Charters of 1663 and 1665, which governed the first permanent European settlement in what would become North Carolina.1 Located on the northern side of the Albemarle Sound, Pasquotank is immediately south of the Virginia state line and the Great Dismal Swamp. In the 1860s, a portion of the vast Dismal Swamp extended into the northern half of the county and crept almost to the outskirts of the county seat, Elizabeth City.2 Swampy terrain was the hallmark feature of the entire region, providing a perfect haven for runaway slaves and other fugitives. And although Pasquotank was a community of small farms and large plantations, its dense cypress forests, meandering black water canals, and swamps—areas inhabited by poisonous canebrake rattlesnakes—created ideal hiding places for a renegade guerrilla. During most of the antebellum era, Elizabeth City was an important shipping port. The northeastern Albemarle region, crisscrossed by the Perquimans, Pasquotank, and Little rivers, had water access from the Albemarle Sound to the Atlantic Ocean. The sound also connected the Roanoke River and the interior of North Carolina to commerce with Norfolk, Virginia. Because of its geography and industrious black and white population, Elizabeth City, along with Edenton in nearby Chowan County, became the cen-

the roots of civil war loyalty  /  11

ter of much of the seaborne commerce in northeastern North Carolina. A maritime economy developed around the export of locally produced products: corn, grain, forestry supplies like lumber and cypress shingles, and naval stores such as turpentine.3 Diligent mariners delivered these goods to the energetic deepwater commerce port of Norfolk via the Pasquotank River and the inland Dismal Swamp Canal, which allowed limited through navigation beginning in 1805, and the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal, which opened in neighboring Currituck County in 1859.4 From Norfolk the commodities were then shipped on to Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. As the population of Pasquotank County grew in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth City merchants imported large quantities of finished goods from the North for their stores. The seamen of the county carried on this profitable shipping trade while also sustaining a vibrant fishing industry in the waters off their shore.5 Although the shipping trade produced many seafarers, the export economy of Pasquotank also required a large number of farmers. The county in 1860 was the state’s seventh-largest producer of corn and the fifth-largest producer of flax.6 Pasquotank’s farmers also cultivated large amounts of wheat, rye, and silk cocoons. According to the final census before the Civil War, however, it produced no cotton or tobacco. Nevertheless, the vast fields of corn in Pasquotank County clearly made this plantation society a staple-food exporter for other regions of the country. Typical of the local farmers who raised corn was Daniel Bright, who grew one thousand bushels of corn in 1860.7 In fact, during the Civil War one northern traveler through the county believed that, even after two and half years of home-front violence, it was still “one of the richest agricultural regions in the State.”8 On the eve of the war, one of Pasquotank’s plantation owners, Major Bell (his proper name), who owned fourteen slaves and $4,600 in real property, demonstrated a typical concern among the planters of the northeastern region. Bell wrote letters in 1860 inquiring about the price of corn in Charleston, South Carolina, and the production levels for the crop in Georgia. He also inquired in the North about market prices for the staple in Baltimore and New York. Clearly by the late antebellum period, Pasquotank’s white citizens, with their easy access to ports and shipping, were well acquainted with the national market and what fluctuating crop prices in other regions meant for local business and farming.9

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Since Pasquotank’s antebellum economy was rooted in two labor-intensive practices, large-scale plantations and the procurement of lumber and naval stores, a ready supply of cheap labor was requisite for the community’s economy to function efficiently. Because the production of cypress shingles, lumber, and turpentine required laborers willing (or who could be compelled) to endure the dual menace of deadly disease and dangerous wild animals in the county’s northern swamps, few whites were willing to work there. As a result, black labor became the most attractive alternative to sustain Pasquotank’s economy. But the swampy, lowland environment and the multi­ faceted geography of the county made slavery a difficult system to manage. The white community of Pasquotank County supplied labor for its farms and forest industry in a seemingly contradictory way, by sustaining a labor force of both free blacks and slaves. The final census before the Civil War recorded that 348 men in Pasquotank owned a total of 2,983 slaves.10 The free black population during the same year numbered 1,507. This meant that in the black community there was a roughly 2-to-1 ratio of slaves to free blacks. The total white male population of the county in 1860 was only 2,207. White women added another 2,243 people to the population. This made slaveholders roughly 15 percent of the white male community, a relatively thin slice of the white male population. And although the majority of the slaves in Pasquotank were held by yeomen with only one to five bondsmen, five of the wealthiest planters in the county retained more than fifty slaves each. Yet the racial demography of the community points to a very fragile social order; the 4,490 blacks, more than one-third of whom were free, slightly outnumbered 4,450 whites.11 Free blacks made up a ready supply of labor for hire in the turpentine and shingle-making industry as well as in the maritime shipping trade. Although the Dismal Swamp Land Company owned several slaves during the antebellum years to help operate the Dismal Swamp Canal, even many of the black laborers in the marshes appear to have been free. Nevertheless, a few slaves were hired out by masters to do hazardous or less desirable occupations. Some free blacks and slaves managed to make substantial amounts of money as shingle getters, swamp guides, ferry boat operators, and canal diggers. Unskilled free blacks who did not work in the swamps provided a cheap labor pool for ancillary farmwork in the county, especially during harvest, when slave labor was stretched thin. Many of the unskilled free

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blacks and slaves found their way into either swamp labor or work in the maritime fishing economy around Elizabeth City.12 It is difficult to put an exact figure on the number of free blacks who worked in the swamps of Pasquotank County during the antebellum period. The overwhelming majority of free black males living in Pasquotank County listed their occupations in 1860 as farmhands, farmers, or carpenters. The number of swamp workers from the county must have been considerable, though, given that in 1847 the General Assembly of North Carolina passed legislation mandating that all free blacks working in the Great Dismal Swamp register a description with local authorities. After that year, Pasquotank and the surrounding counties began registering each free black worker in the Great Dismal Swamp as a way of controlling the activity of free blacks and preventing runaway slaves from being aided by them. But while free blacks and a small number of slaves labored in the difficult terrain of northern Pasquotank County, large-scale plantation slavery reigned as the primary system of labor on the wheat and corn plantations of Pasquotank’s lower districts.13 The experience of Moses Grandy, a slave who was born in neighboring Camden County but who was owned by James Grandy, a boy from Pasquotank, illustrates the variation in the black labor experience possible in northeastern North Carolina throughout the antebellum period. Moses Grandy, who was in his mid-fifties in 1843 when he published a narrative describing his work as a slave during the 1820s and 1830s, had spent most of his life up to that point living in Pasquotank and the neighboring counties. Because of his owner’s youth, Grandy was hired out every year to whatever master would pay the most for him at the local courthouse.14 Despite being a skilled sea captain, a profession he learned while working on shingle flats and running canal boats for a master during his teenage years, Moses Grandy was sometimes forced into field work in the corn plantations of lower Pasquotank. He described the yearly contract system as a precarious one for blacks. “In being hired out,” Grandy declared, “sometimes the slave gets a good home, and sometimes a bad one: when he gets a good one, he dreads to see January come; when he has a bad one, the year seems five times as long as it is.”15 The dangers of slave work in the northeastern region are evident from Grandy’s description of the beatings and other forms of mistreatment Pas-

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quotank slaves were forced to endure by local whites and the occupational hazards the workers faced. Grandy described a wide range of treatment at the hands of white owners. He remembered that during the time he was owned by Enoch Sawyer he was used as an overseer in the Dismal Swamp. While working as an overseer, Grandy witnessed frequently severe and occasionally sadistic abuse of slaves for minor offenses such as not accomplishing the day’s work goal. Furthermore, Grandy described that Sawyer often starved him but still required him to pay back in cash more than his yearly purchase price. Grandy even recounted how he was periodically assaulted. Another master who rented him at the courthouse, John Micheau, thrashed Grandy with a shovel for falling asleep while waiting on him at a gambling table. As Grandy’s firsthand account attests, in order for the laborintensive economy of antebellum Pasquotank to function well, the white community had developed a harsh system of slave control. But even if some masters in Pasquotank treated their slaves well and did not beat them, the work slaves were doing could be deadly. In 1859, a brief note in the local newspaper reported the death of a young male slave owned by J. C. Eringhaus. During an accident while working in the Great Dismal Swamp’s lumbering industry, the slave was “struck with the tongue of a heavy loaded carry log. The blow took effect on the side of the head, breaking the skull, and producing death instantly.”16 Since accidents such as these were common, it is easy to understand why poorer white members of the community supported the use of slave and free black labor in the local economy. If blacks did not perform the labor, poorer white residents of the county would have to do it. But if one can appreciate why the majority of white resi­dents living in Pasquotank supported the institution of slavery, it is also not difficult to understand the unrelenting drive of Moses Grandy to be free. Although he was unable to read or write, Grandy successfully saved enough money to purchase his own freedom as well as the freedom of his wife and several of his children. Grandy was a skilled slave who could work in nearly every maritime profession. He knew the region’s geography well, and he had a keen business sense. Yet unscrupulous masters had forced him to pay for his own freedom twice before a friendly local man named Captain Minner purchased him and allowed Grandy to pay him back the purchase price over an extended period of time. After paying for himself the third and final time, Grandy was set free and headed north to Boston, where he

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continued to work as a seaman and travel the world. He ultimately crewed a schooner that sailed to the Caribbean and even visited England to raise money to purchase family members still enslaved.17 Although Grandy successfully freed himself from slavery after years of arduous antebellum labor, most of Pasquotank’s enslaved population anxiously awaited liberation from bondage, liberation that would come only during the Civil War. While Moses Grandy never advocated violent revolution, his real-life experience working in the swamp relates to the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s less well known second novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), which focuses on the life of an escaped slave who lived in the region. Stowe, whose first antislavery book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, became the best-selling novel of the 1850s, used the Dismal Swamp as the focus for her second book because of the importance of wetland areas to runaway slaves in the South. The high-ground areas within swamps concealed communities of runaways in several regions of the South, and the Dismal Swamp was one of the most prominent. In the novel, Dred preaches angrily against the outrages of slavery, rescues runaway slaves from the dog of a slave hunter, and leads a militant band of escaped slaves in the swamp. The novel elevates a black revolutionary figure as a savior for slaves in a way that would be paralleled later in the war when black soldiers would return to free slaves from bondage in northeastern North Carolina.18 Even though geographic diversity and dangerous work conditions required a large, controllable workforce to toil in Pasquotank’s labor-intensive industries, they were not the sole reasons for the presence of a large free black community in Pasquotank. The growth of this community was also helped by the religious makeup and political activities of some white residents. A sizable number of Quakers who lived in Pasquotank during the antebellum years encouraged individual manumissions; some of the Society of Friends even bought slaves for the express purpose of emancipating them.19 The Quakers’ influence in the county can be measured by the size of their meetinghouse: in 1850, it held eight hundred people. Only ten years later, however, Pasquotank County had no meetinghouses, and Perquimans County—which had four meetinghouses in 1850—had only one. This decline in the Quaker population was almost certainly due to rising sectional tensions over the slavery issue.20 By 1860, most of the Quakers in both Pasquotank and Perquimans counties had immigrated to Indiana and Illinois because of the increased threat of violence to abolitionists in the South.21

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Nevertheless, the Friends played a major role in the American Colonization Society in Elizabeth City during the earlier antebellum period. During the late 1820s, Elizabeth City was one of the most important financial sponsors of this political movement in the state. The local colonization group promoted removing free blacks to a colony in Liberia on the African continent. Between 1825 and 1860, Pasquotank sent 247 of its black residents to the colony, more than any other county in North Carolina.22 Several affluent white citizens in Pasquotank financially supported the organization until the early 1830s, when the money dried up all over the state as a response to the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion in nearby Southampton County, Virginia. The antebellum history of Pasquotank is filled with events that demonstrate an anxiety over the issue of potential black violence. During 1800 and 1802, fear of an armed slave revolt was rampant in the community after news of slave rebellions in Virginia’s tidewater and North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound region spread to Pasquotank and the other northeastern counties.23 In 1802, Pasquotank experienced its own insurrectionary scare when a local slave named Mingo reported that six slaves commanded by “Dr. Joe” were going to murder citizens in Pasquotank. Mingo, however, must not have been convincing when the accused plotters were brought to court in Norfolk; the six slaves were acquitted and Mingo sentenced to have both his ears cut off for perjury.24 The proximity of Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion was also frightening to this anxious white populace. The belief that Turner’s men were headed toward the Dismal Swamp only exacerbated local apprehension. In September 1831, local leaders from Pasquotank wrote the governor of North Carolina demanding that either weapons or an army be sent to the region for protection. According to one citizen, the white people of the county were so upset they “patrol and mount guns constantly to keep up appearance without means. The females and children are much distressed.”25 In nearby Chowan County, the militia was called out to prevent Turner’s group from escaping across the state line into North Carolina via the Dismal Swamp.26 The North Carolina legislature responded to Pasquotank’s calls for protection by commissioning two local militia companies, the Elizabeth City Rangers and the Elizabeth City Guards, but it did not do so until 1832.27 The tense feelings left over from the Turner scare also prompted the community in August 1835 to appoint a committee of vigilance “to give the earliest notice

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to the inhabitants of any designs against their peace and security by those fanatics who are endeavoring to incite our slave population to insurrection and rebellion.”28 Yet even though the community feared for its safety in the years following the Nat Turner rebellion, it did not commit rampant, violent reprisals against its own free black community. Despite the uneasiness of many white residents with the presence of both a large slave and free black community in their midst, white voters from Pasquotank chose overwhelmingly not to disfranchise the free black men of the state when given a chance to vote on the issue. In 1835, the citizens of the county opposed an amendment to the North Carolina constitution that would have barred free blacks from voting. Their doing so demonstrated an emerging influence in the county’s political development: conservative Whig politics. Pasquotank’s white male community had begun overwhelmingly to support the Whig party and its policies, which affirmed rule of law and supported a strict social hierarchy.29 These voters consistently electioneered for Whig presidential hopefuls during the antebellum years. The white citizens of Pasquotank County, which in 1835 had a total of seventy-five free blacks who were eligible to vote, likely voted against disfranchisement because they were comfortable with their ability to influence the free blacks to support the Whigs. White voters also may have felt that free blacks had little choice but to vote for the Whigs as well, especially since the only other alternative was the even more radically racist ideology of the southern wing of the Democratic Party. Unfortunately for the free blacks in the county, however, Pasquotank was the only one of the six northeastern counties to vote against disfranchisement of its free black population. North Carolinians approved the disfranchisement amendment to their constitution, and in the summer of 1835 free blacks lost the right to vote in the Old North State.30 In 1840, interest in free black colonization on the African continent revived in Elizabeth City. The donation records of the American Colonization Society show gifts from the county totaling more than $150 in that year. One of the many local blacks whom the society sponsored was an Elizabeth City woman named Sarah Pailin. Pailin sailed to Liberia on a ship that left from Baltimore Harbor in 1850. Even some local slaveholders were interested in the colonization effort. Pasquotank’s largest slaveholder, James C. Johnston, an absentee landlord who owned 181 slaves right before the Civil

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War and lived in Edenton, gave money to the local organizers of the colonization movement in 1854.31 His gift probably went toward the passage of fourteen Elizabeth City free blacks who were onboard the ship Sophia Walker, which sailed for Africa that year with 252 free African Americans on board. Despite the large population of free blacks living in the northeastern region of North Carolina, only a handful were willing to participate in an endeavor that would take them on a dangerous journey across the Atlantic far from their family networks and birthplace in North Carolina.32 An antebellum history of Quakerism, a flirtation with the American Colonization Society movement, and the need for cheap, uninterrupted labor in dangerous occupations conspired to give Pasquotank an unusually high population of free blacks.33 Their number had increased from 1,038 in 1830 to 1,507 by 1860, the second-largest free black population of any county in the state of North Carolina. Among these free blacks 261 owned some form of property in 1860. Fifty-one free blacks owned land, which demonstrated that a small minority (roughly 3 percent of the 1860 free black population) were self-supporting yeomen.34 In the final year before the outbreak of hostilities between the North and South, then, one in three blacks living in the county was free, and one in six free black men owned property. But this racial order of whites dominating a numerically superior free black and slave community was a heavy burden for many white residents. In 1852, one resident complained that the free blacks of Pasquotank “are found addicted to the worse vices with not one single incentive to industry, or a victorious life set before them.” He noted that “thousands of dollars are . . . filched from the pockets of the farmers and merchants . . . annually. The free negroes live, they eat, they drink, they are clothed, yet how few of them work.”35 Despite the strenuous efforts of many in the free black community on behalf of the local economy, some members of the white community were always agitated by the presence of a black population that was not owned and directly subject to the command of the white citizenry. One example of these heightened racial tensions during the 1850s involved James W. Hinton, a prominent local lawyer, old-line Whig politician, slaveholder, and later a colonel of North Carolina State Troops during the Civil War. Hinton even served as a county commissioner in 1853, 1856, 1858, and 1859. In 1857, he was threatened with violence by a free black couple, who had allegedly stolen goods from him. After being convicted of stealing

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Hinton’s property, the two free blacks threatened to “put him away” and burn his property. The two were ultimately jailed for their threats.36 Incidents like this one involving prominent white members of the community did little to alleviate the fears of anxious white citizens. Since many in the South believed in the 1850s that the North’s newly formed Republican Party would free the slaves if it came to power in Washington, D.C., events like this one stuck in their minds as examples of what emancipation might look like at the local level. For Hinton, in particular, the threat of black-on-white violence in the event of emancipation probably played a role in his decision to support North Carolina and the institution of slavery when war came. In the late 1850s, as tension over the abolitionist movement in the North rose, fear of another slave uprising gripped Pasquotank. During the antebellum period, local county officials organized regular slave patrols. These patrols, composed of local white men, were responsible for the regular maintenance of the racial order in many southern communities through the capture and coercion of resistant blacks. These patrols were especially important given the near parity between blacks and whites in Elizabeth City, the eighth-largest city in the state, where 217 free blacks and 620 slaves lived alongside 952 whites.37 One of the Pasquotank community leaders responsible for organizing slave patrols was Hinton, and one of the many men called to serve as a prewar patroller was a yeoman farmer named “Daniel Brite [Bright].”38 Like many white men in the South, Bright, who was twenty-eight years old in 1860, patrolled as a way of offering protection to the white community from both real and imagined slave rebellions. His service in an antebellum slave patrol, especially the experience he and other patrollers gained from riding around the county at night accosting black residents, prepared him and many like him for future martial activities on the home front during the Civil War. Bright’s patrol service demonstrated both the fragility of the racial order in some southern communities and the underlying fear of whites who regularly wielded exorbitant power over other human beings, especially in a county like Pasquotank where the black residents outnumbered the white.39 Local racial tension, however, was not the only problem Pasquotank’s white community faced during the 1850s. State and national political debates were also an arena for contention, and the discord that was growing at those levels increased the likelihood of social division in the county. In 1850

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and 1851, the sectional issue of slavery on the western frontier of the United States and the question of what to do with the newly acquired lands from the Mexican-American War split many communities in the South between Whigs, who supported the Compromise of 1850, and more radical southern rights members of the Democratic Party. The Compromise of 1850 permitted California to enter the Union as a free state, created the Utah and New Mexico territories, left the issue of slavery in those new territories to be decided by popular sovereignty, abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and established the controversial Fugitive Slave Law, which forced northern states to capture and return escaped slaves. Since the majority of Pasquotank’s white men were Whigs, they hailed the compromise negotiated by Senators Henry Clay and Daniel Webster as a triumph of the American political system. Nevertheless, the minority Democratic Party in the county was not satisfied with all of the compromise’s provisions, especially the principle of popular sovereignty. Southern rights advocates believed that, by leaving the question of slavery in New Mexico and Utah up to a vote by the residents of these two territories, the North was infringing upon the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which had established states south of the thirty-sixth parallel as slave and north of that line as free. In December 1850, an editorial conflict broke out between Stephen D. Pool of the Old North State, a Whig newspaper, and Lucien D. Starke of the Democratic Pioneer. The quarrel between the two editors demonstrates the divided political loyalties of the white community in Pasquotank during the 1850s. Throughout the winter of 1850 and 1851, Starke and Pool fired off a series of articles in their respective papers over the Compromise of 1850. Pool asserted that each new state should have the right to determine whether slavery or freedom would reign supreme in its borders. Starke, however, believed that the Missouri Compromise line should be upheld all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Starke also called for the formation of a Pasquotank Southern Rights Association.40 Starke’s call for a southern rights organization in the county led to a meeting in December 1850 at Elizabeth City where the local political leaders from both the Democratic and Whig parties gathered to discuss the divisive issue of slavery in the territories and the Compromise of 1850. At the gathering, southern rights advocates put forward a resolution stating that any threat to or repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law would be cause for disunion. Moderation prevailed at this meeting, however, when Pas-

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quotank’s most prominent politician, the Whig John Pool, later a member of the North Carolina legislature in 1856 and 1858, spoke eloquently about the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and convinced many in the community that support for the local resolution was unwise.41 Ultimately, no resolutions supporting disunion were approved at the meeting. Following the gathering, the idea of a Pasquotank Southern Rights Association died a quiet death like other such local southern rights organizations throughout the South.42 Doubtless, the influence of prominent local Whig leaders like John Pool proved the deciding factor in dissuading any wavering members of Pasquotank’s majority Whig electorate from supporting secession over the Compromise of 1850. What did not end at the southern rights meeting was the feud between Lucien D. Starke and Stephen D. Pool. During the summer of 1852, Starke read an editorial in Pool’s Old North State that referred to him and the Democratic Party as “Loco Foco,” or equal rights. This comment referred to the hard-line movement within the Democratic Party during the mid-1830s that supported hard currency over small paper notes, opposed banks, and consisted of many unionized workers in the urban North.43 Pasquotank’s Whigs supported a national market for their local goods and therefore desired banks and paper currency that would lubricate trade, and they opposed the unionization of labor. Starke, who also hated the notion of unionized labor, took this description of the Democratic Party as an affront to his honor and attacked Pool with a cane on the streets of Elizabeth City. Pool struck Starke in the face and was then accosted by two other citizens who held Pool while Starke hit him several times. The incident ended only when another man came between them. Soon afterward, Starke challenged Pool to a duel. Pool declined the challenge, however, and the debate continued in the local papers until late 1854 when the Old North State discontinued printing as a result of financial problems and the Whig Party collapsed nationally.44 Incidents of retaliatory violence and threatened duels were common occurrences in the antebellum South, especially among newspapers editors, who often became targets as a result of their public criticism of political figures and issues. It is important to highlight that even before the Civil War Pasquotank’s men were demonstrating a propensity toward the sort of individualized combat that one historian has called “personal warfare” and that during the war would manifest itself as guerrilla violence on the northeastern North Carolina home front.45

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When the Whig Party collapsed as a national political party in 1854, as a result of differences between northern and southern factions within the party over their stance on slavery’s expansion, it did not mean that the ideology of its membership in North Carolina disappeared or changed overnight. In North Carolina and especially in the northeastern counties, Whigs remained vital players in the state government. Over the next six years as the moribund national two-party system gave way to Democratic dominance in national and state elections, North Carolina’s Whigs became the backbone for a continued two-party system at the state level. First under the name American Party (or Know-Nothing Party), then under the name American-Whig Party, and finally under the title Opposition Party, conservative North Carolinians—including the Whig majority of Pasquotank— who supported internal improvements and the growth of the national market economy continued to support politicians who had been members of the old Whig Party.46 On the eve of the sectional crisis, the Whig ideology of Pasquotank’s majority electorate had several essential components. Whigs supported a strong banking system that would provide capital for economic growth, an independent judiciary to enforce contracts and the rule of law, and federal financial support for state-level internal improvements (these would provide the physical infrastructure for the growth of economic markets), and they held the conviction that a natural hierarchy existed among white men of different social classes. Among the vast majority of southern Whigs, the belief in a system of social inequality among whites paralleled fervent support for slavery. Whigs believed that government should reflect this natural inequality. Many among North Carolina’s Whig elite believed that legislators should be autonomous actors who were not immediately responsive to their constituency; these elite white representatives should have the ability to think independently and vote their own conscience on issues.47 In 1850s North Carolina, party leaders sustained support for Whig ideology by highlighting popular tenets of the party philosophy in local communities where a particular dimension of the ideology had support. Pasquotank’s citizens both respected the independent judiciary and supported economic policies that would improve commerce on the North Carolina coast. During the Civil War, the respect for rule of law and fear of financial disaster if the community lost a national market for its crops and naval goods would be

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major tenets keeping some white slaveholders in Pasquotank loyal to the United States.48 Even though their party’s name changed rapidly during the middle and late 1850s, many voters who had traditionally supported the Whig Party in Pasquotank and around North Carolina continued to support their old leaders and ideology. In 1855, the frustrated editor of Elizabeth City’s Democratic Pioneer described the anti-Catholic and anti-immigration stance of the Know-Nothing (American) Party as a “foolish and unmeaning cry of danger” and simply “a scheme to rebuild the defunct Whig party.”49 The Know-Nothing stance was popular among many white men in Pasquotank probably because of the large minority of naturalized citizens of German, Austrian, and British birth who were living in the county.50 Furthermore, one noted historian of antebellum North Carolina politics has persuasively argued that by 1856 the Know-Nothing Party in North Carolina was in reality only “a surrogate for the Whig Party.”51 During their congressional and gubernatorial campaigns in the mid-1850s, Know-Nothing Party leaders statewide downplayed their affiliation with the former Whig Party, and doing so cost them control of the legislature and governor’s office during these elections. By 1857, old-line Whigs who desired a resurrection of their beloved party began to use the title American-Whigs to describe their party affiliation. Democrats continued to attack the party for the continued name change as well as an alleged lack of principles. In June 1857, the KnowNothing Party collapsed altogether as a national organization. But by 1859, Whigs in North Carolina had again found an effective political message for waging campaigns against the dominant Democratic Party.52 The 1859 election for North Carolina’s First Congressional District, which included Pasquotank as well as a large section of northeastern North Carolina, reflected the Whiggish political leanings of the county’s white community on the eve of the Civil War. The two primary candidates in the election for Congress were Henry Shaw, a Democrat from Currituck, and W. N. H. Smith, an Opposition/Whig from Hertford County. Smith was a strong supporter of slavery but also a staunch opponent of disunion during the late 1850s. During the campaign, Smith attacked Shaw on two major issues. The first was the Pacific Railroad bill proposed by President James Buchanan. Smith alleged that this legislation if approved would cost American taxpayers thirty million dollars.

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This piece of legislation was unpopular even among proponents of internal improvements, since taxpayers in the East would be paying for an improvement in the West that they were unlikely to benefit from directly. During the campaign, Smith also continuously hammered on the corruption of the Democratic Party and the Buchanan administration.53 Democrats like Shaw and J. B. Godwin, the new editor of the Democratic Pioneer, criticized the Opposition/Whigs for having no platform or new political ideas, continually changing their party name, and simply not respecting the intelligence of the voting population. The prominent Democrats of Pasquotank gathered in May 1859 for a meeting at Edenton to work on their platform and the upcoming campaign. The list of seventy-five delegates at the meeting included all the men who would later be leading supporters of secession in Pasquotank: William F. Martin, J. B. Godwin, L. D. Starke, Major Bell, Richard Benbury Creecy, P. A. R. C. Cohoon, J. T. P. C. Cohoon, and Edmund H. Perkins. Godwin and his Democratic cohorts mocked a similar organizational meeting of the Opposition/Whigs at Elizabeth City during the same month as “a gathering of the Know-Nothings, alias, Americans, alias, American Whigs, alias Opposition, alias, Anything to-get-in-power.”54 Throughout the 1859 campaign Godwin’s editorials stoked the flames of political animosity that were threatening to divide the white community of Pasquotank further. “Why this repeated alternation of name?” Godwin asked. “Does not this continued shifting and turning show . . . contempt of the popular intelligence and a belief in their liability to be gulled, duped, and imposed upon?”55 The Pioneer concisely summed up the principal attack on the Opposition/Whigs made by Henry Shaw throughout the campaign: “They . . . refuse to avow distinctly and explicitly the position which they occupy upon any of the great measures incorporated in the administrative policy of the government by the Democracy, and content themselves with putting forth an accusation of extravagance and corruption.” “Claiming no virtue for themselves,” Democrats argued, “the Opposition rely solely on Democratic misdeeds for their success.”56 Shaw, Godwin, and the other Democrats even pointed to the platform of the Opposition/ Whigs as evidence of their lack of political backbone. The platform declared that “the corruption, frauds extravagances, tyrannical proscription and mal-administration of the affairs of the General Government, by the

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party now in power, have been so enormous and glaring, and so entirely unjustifiable and abominable as to call upon all good men and patriots of the first Congressional District of North Carolina and everywhere, to unite together, and use all proper efforts to expel them from power, and to put in their places honest and better men.”57 Fearing a major defeat on the eve of the congressional election, Godwin stepped up his militant rhetoric aimed at the Opposition/Whigs and advised other Pasquotank Democrats to “ [r]emember whom ye are to cope with; a conglomeration of isms; Whigism, Know-Nothingism, Anti-Naturalizationism, Americanism, Oppositionism.” Godwin also implored fellow Democrats to “[r]emember that ours is a party of principle, not of expediency—not organized merely for the purpose of getting possession of the government offices.” Ignoring Opposition/Whig attacks of extravagance as the campaign entered its final days, Godwin tried a different approach to gain the electorate’s favor. Striking at the heart of the most important issue in southern antebellum politics, Godwin appealed directly to the slaveholders in Pasquotank. “Hear Horace Greely,” Godwin ominously warned. “Proslavery and Democracy are synonymous terms. Slavery [in] the South cannot fall, till the Democratic party falls.” Showing his growing worry over the safety of slavery in the United States, Godwin also affirmed that “the Democratic party [of] the North, was the only party opposed to the schemes and plans of the free soilers and the only hope of the South in the hour of danger . . . it [i]s the duty of the South to strengthen its friends in the North by sending men to Congress supporting the same principles.”58 In a dramatic but ultimately futile attempt to change the minds of any wavering voters in the county, one of Godwin’s final editorials appealed to the masculinity and individual militancy of Democrats in Pasquotank. Thursday, the 4th of August, will be a day big with the fate of Rome and Caesar—there being no other election to take place besides that for a member of Congress, party lines will be drawn, and the battle will be fought by the opposing parties strictly on political issues. . . . Friends! though in the minority, we know that you are far from being lukewarm in the cause you have at heart, nor indifferent as to the result of the battle to which you are to march in a few days, and from which you will return with victory perched upon your banner. . . . Brother Democrats! It is known to you that

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the Opposition are expecting to gain largely in Pasquotank. Already has it been proclaimed to the world that she will give Mr. Smith three hundred majority. It is for you to say whether this is to be so, or that it is gasconade, soon to turn to dust and ashes on their lips. Your gallant captain leads you on—his clarion voice is heard, calling you to battle and to victory. Let every soldier be found at his post. Let the “Spartan band” of Pasquotank Democrats come once more into the breach. . . . See to it that you hold your own, and, if possible, make inroads upon the Opposition. . . . Now’s the day and now’s the hour for work; the time for Action has come. Are you ready? Is your armor bright?59

Even by southern standards this was a particularly militant editorial. While this passage reads like editorial posturing, it also highlights deep existing political divisions and animosity in the white community, divisions that would make the potential for home-front violence during the war that much greater. Despite strenuous efforts by Democrats to sway the Pasquotank electorate, the congressional campaign of 1859 confirmed the overwhelming strength of the old Whig Party membership in Pasquotank and demonstrated a strong political conservatism among many voters in northeastern North Carolina. Smith won the election by 514 votes in the entire district. In Pasquotank, the defeated Shaw received 340 and Smith 569 votes. This margin of victory was just 71 votes shy of the 300-vote majority predicted in the Democratic editor’s pre-election piece. Of the surrounding northeastern counties, Currituck, Shaw’s home county, voted overwhelmingly for him, while Camden supported Smith. Smith also won by a very narrow margin of 8 votes in Chowan. Although a majority Whig area, the entire region had a significant minority of Democrats residing in it, a factor that made widely divergent political opinions common in northeastern North Carolina at the end of the antebellum period.60 Sectional disagreement over slavery grew to a fever pitch in the United States in 1860, and Pasquotank and the rest of northeastern North Carolina contributed significantly to the contentious debate over this issue in the state of North Carolina. Pasquotank’s best-known former Whig politician, John Pool, electioneered as the Constitutional Union/Opposition Party candidate for governor.61 During the campaign leading up to the August 1860 gubernatorial election, Pool’s central issue was his approbation of the

the roots of civil war loyalty  /  27

ad valorem taxation policy. This policy proposed that all citizens in North Carolina should be liable for taxation on the full appraised amount of their slave property. Since 1835 the North Carolina constitution had mandated that all slaves between the ages of twelve and fifty and all white men between twenty-one and forty-five be taxed uniformly.62 If slaves were taxed at their full market value as Pool and others proposed, then slaveholders would see a sharp increase in their tax bill. Despite being a slaveholder himself, Pool supported the policy in true Whig fashion because of his devotion to fiscal responsibility as well as a desire to lure Democrats with class animosities over slavery into the Opposition/Whig fold. Pool believed that the ad valorem policy might create a class rift within the Democratic Party on which its opponents might capitalize.63 Throughout his speaking campaign around the state, Pool loudly proclaimed “that North Carolina should not stand alone among her sister states of the south recognizing in her Constitution the Black Republican doctrine that slaves are only persons” and not property. Attempting to appease slaveholders within his own party, Pool also argued “that making slaves pay their equal portion of the burdens of taxation would remove any hard feelings of non-slaveholders against slaveholders and give to every man whether slave holder or not an interest in the institution of slavery.”64 Democrats countered by arguing that Whigs wanted to increase the tax burden on the poor of the state. Democrat John Ellis and his allies misrepresented Pool’s position by arguing that the Whigs wanted to tax “every thing from a tract of land to a tin cup.” In reality, the Whig position would have only equalized taxation between land and slaves. Clearly, the sectional issue of slavery and the class division inherent in the system were at the heart of the gubernatorial election in North Carolina.65 In the end, the ad valorem issue proved to be somewhat of a class wedge between planters and yeomen in some regions of North Carolina. Outside the mountainous region of western North Carolina, Pool carried all the counties with less than 10 percent slave population. One historian has calculated that the average slave ownership among white residents in the counties Pool won was 8.28 whereas Ellis’s counties had an average of 10.5, and there was a difference of more than 20 percentage points in average real property ownership between the poorer counties Pool won and the richer ones Ellis took.66 For men who owned no slaves the ad valorem policy would have made the tax burden statewide more equitable, but for

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yeomen who owned just a few slaves or only one slave, like Daniel Bright, the added tax burden may have pushed them into the Democratic camp.67 What is clear is that the class issue of ad valorem was not enough to propel Pool into the governor’s mansion. Ellis defeated him by a slim margin, only 6,000 votes statewide.68 Pool received 47.2 percent of North Carolina’s popular vote, with his greatest support coming from the traditionally Whig counties, like Pasquotank.69 At least one historian has also posited that the class-based issue of ad valorem and its resonance with poorer North Carolinians (70 percent of whom did not own slaves in 1860) confirmed the presence of antebellum class antagonism that would reemerge with the debate over conscription and paying for substitutes in the Confederate army during the Civil War. During the coming conflict, some of the Pasquotank men who voted for John Pool would remain unionists or would become ambivalent about the future political fortunes of the state.70 In 1860, the principal Opposition/Whig organ in the northeastern region, the Albemarle Southron and Union Advocate, succinctly presented the party’s platform for the August gubernatorial and the November presidential elections. “The union of States—opposition to sectionalism—equality at the tax box as well as at the ballot box—these are the watchwords which should be emblazoned upon the banners of the Opposition of North Carolina.”71 Throughout the months leading up to the presidential election of 1860, the paper scorned both Republicans in the North and the southern Democrats led by John C. Breckinridge. “Unless their mad and onward march is arrested by the combined efforts of the conservative elements of the country, the Union of these States, we fear, cannot survive their success. We allude to the Black Republicans anti-slavery party of the North.”72 Former Whigs in North Carolina now represented a pro-slavery yet pro-Union middle position between the radicalism of southern rights candidates and the abolitionist sentiment of the Republican Party in the North. The lack of extant primary sources, especially newspapers, after November 1860 prevents a more thorough discussion of the debate over disunion in Pasquotank County. Nevertheless, the presidential election returns and the North Carolina constitutional convention vote over the issue of secession in February 1861 do provide insight into the feelings of Pasquotank’s citizenry. In the November 1860 presidential election, Pasquotank’s voters supported the Constitutional Union candidate, the former Whig John

the roots of civil war loyalty  /  29

Bell. Bell and his running mate, Edward Everett of Massachusetts, ran on a platform of simply upholding the U.S. Constitution, whatever this meant to the voters. But even though the Albemarle Southron and Union Advocate stalwartly promoted the conservative Bell ticket, the county electorate was divided.73 Bell had the support of 477 (62 percent) citizens, 239 (31 percent) voted for the southern Democrat John C. Breckenridge, and 55 (7 percent) preferred the northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas.74 These returns were much more pro–Constitutional Union Party than North Carolina’s vote totals statewide; in North Carolina Breckenridge won the race with 50.5 percent, Bell received 46.7 percent, and 2.8 percent supported Douglas. Moreover, of the thirty-nine counties Pool had carried in August, Bell won thirty-six of them.75 What this vote demonstrated was that as late as November 1860, as southern rights Democrats thundered with the rhetoric of secession, the majority of people in Pasquotank sought a middle ground, a negotiated solution that would keep the Union together and their fragile racial hierarchy of slavery and free black labor intact. Many Pasquotank voters hoped, like thousands of people in North Carolina and other states of the upper South, that cooler heads would prevail through the moment of sectional disagreement. Some of these same voters had seen their leaders succeed in negotiating compromise at the local level in 1850 when sectional tensions nearly boiled over, and surely many hoped that their local leaders would see them through this crisis as well. Again as slavery threatened disunion in the winter of 1860 and 1861, John Pool used his political influence to attempt to convince voters that secession would be a disaster. As South Carolina and then six other states of the lower South seceded between December 1860 and February 1861, he gave speeches throughout northeastern North Carolina that condemned secession. In one speech, Pool urged his fellow North Carolinians “not to yield their attachment to the Union, but to adhere to it until all possible peaceable means” for resolving the conflict had been pursued.76 Pool, however, was fighting a growing tide of states’ rights radicalism that was beginning to take shape as a government in Montgomery, Alabama. In early February, the seven states that had seceded formed the Confederate States of America. But later that month, on 28 February 1861, in step with John Pool’s politics and the strong Whig political heritage of the county, Pasquotank’s voters overwhelmingly opposed a constitutional convention that

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might take North Carolina out of the Union. In Pasquotank County, the vote during the February 1861 state secession referendum was 426 opposed and 159 in favor, nearly a 3-to-1 ratio against secession. In the event that a secession convention did convene, Pasquotank’s electorate supported a unionist delegate, the old-line Whig and Elizabeth City mayor Rufus K. Speed.77 The votes of the other five counties east of the Chowan River showed a growing division in the region over the path the state of North Carolina should take. Two counties voted against the convention, and three voted for it. Camden opposed the convention 290 to 41, as did Chowan by the narrow vote of 222 to 204. Currituck, a staunchly Democratic county, overwhelmingly approved the convention by a vote of 447 to 86. Gates approved it by 367 to 141 and Perquimans by 299 to 182. Nonetheless, the majority of North Carolinians supported Pasquotank and the middle position in early 1861, if only by a razor-thin margin of fewer than 1,000 votes statewide.78 During both the presidential election and North Carolina secession referendum, Pasquotank voters continued to assert their Whiggish tendencies, but momentum was building for secession in North Carolina and in the northeastern region. Only two months after the February referendum, events off the coast of South Carolina refocused public attention in the upper South toward northern aggression, and many political opinions throughout North Carolina began to shift as well.

2 “The Work of Evil Minded Citizens” Divided Loyalties and the Origins of Guerrilla War in the North Carolina No-Man’s-Land

In April 1861, as the guns in Charleston, South Carolina’s harbor roared, residents of North Carolina and the rest of the upper South waited to see what response the recently inaugurated president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, would make to events in the Deep South. Like many other people in areas of the upper South, the majority of citizens in the northeastern counties of North Carolina maintained their loyalty to the Union until just after the attack on Fort Sumter, when President Lincoln called for seventyfive thousand troops to put down the rebellion in the states of the lower South. That presidential order sent many pro–national market and formerly old-line Whig southerners rushing into the ranks of newly forming state regiments for Confederate service. In the immediate aftermath of President Lincoln’s call for troops, the majority of North Carolinians began to shift their thinking away from moderation on political issues toward secession and preparations for the armed defense of their state. Although the popular vote statewide in February had opposed a secession convention, on 20 May 1861 delegates from across North Carolina met at a convention in Raleigh and voted to secede. Pasquotank’s representative at the May convention was Elizabeth City mayor Rufus K. Speed. In December 1850, Speed had stood alongside John Pool and spoken against the local Pasquotank resolutions that criticized the North for its resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law. Events in the early months of 1861 moved swiftly, however, and carried many pragmatic supporters of the Union into

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the vortex of war. Speed, who had originally been elected to represent the county as a unionist delegate, had changed his political stance after Lincoln’s call for volunteers to put down the rebellion in the lower South. Like Speed, many other former Whigs in the county’s electorate were changing their mind in favor of disunion as well.1 In May 1861, a majority of residents living on the rural farms and plantations of Pasquotank County, some of whom had staunchly opposed secession throughout the late-1850s, followed their beloved Old North State out of the Union.2 In Pasquotank, the citizens who supported North Carolina’s decision to leave the Union were of two shades of Confederate loyalty. Confederates included white citizens who were ardent secessionists and now active southern nationalists and a larger group of residents who supported North Carolina primarily and the Confederacy only as a result of their state government’s decision to do so. The first group of Confederates had been members of the county’s small antebellum Democratic Party and the second a collection of mostly politically inactive or antebellum Whig Party members. Moreover, this new majority Confederate citizenry represented a class alliance of poor whites, middling yeomen who owned a small number of slaves, wealthy planters, and a core group of affluent lawyers. A few of the Confederates were merchants, teachers, artisans, doctors, and mariners. But the overwhelming majority of southern sympathizers in the county were small farmers, many of whom owned few or no slaves. These men, however, were tied to an economic and social order that benefited from the use of slave labor. Most of the slaves owned by Pasquotank Confederates were concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest planters and lawyers in the county, six of whom owned fifteen or more slaves each. Many of these influential planters lived in the lower districts of Pasquotank, where numerous large corn plantations were located (see Appendix, tables 1–4). But even after the upper South marched out of the Union and other antebellum moderates and Whigs cast off their old political ties to support region, family, and the institution of slavery, not all of Pasquotank’s citizens renounced their loyalty to the old flag. In fact, a sizable minority remained loyal to the Union; roughly 5 percent of the white males in the 1860 population can be positively identified as unionist based on their public actions and statements of loyalty. The actual number of unionists was likely much higher, but any public pronouncement of unionism was quickly followed

the origins of guerrilla war in the north carolina no-man’s land  /  33

by the threat of violence during the war. A significant number of the unionist citizens lived in Elizabeth City or along the roads leading into the town and were tied to its antebellum commerce and trade. The most prominent unionists belonged to Pasquotank’s middle class: well-established merchants, craftsmen of middling rank, and farmers owning significant (but not huge) tracts of land. In short, these men were both fiscally pro-business and politically inclined to support social stability, the rule of law, and national market trade (see Appendix, tables 1–4).3 The unionist community as a whole was more economically diverse in background than the Confederate population. Unionists represented the entire range of economic classes and occupations in the locality; poor, middling, and wealthy men all supported unionism. The term community applies to the unionists of Pasquotank because it is clear that these individuals operated as a social network; these men could identify each other as unionists, shared information with each other, and on occasion protected one another. The Confederate community, which also operated as a social network, represented a wider economic disparity. This group of people was made up of planters who owned a large amount of real and personal property and poor farmers who owned little or nothing. On average, unionist community members owned roughly $500 less in real property than the average Confederate and $700 less in personal property. This figure is skewed by the staggering wealth of just a handful of Pasquotank Confederates. Unionists owned an average of $4,032 in real estate, while Confederates held $4,547. Personal property ownership followed a similar pattern, with Confederates holding an average of $5,251 and unionists only $4,487. Furthermore, unionists’ personal property ownership included an average of eight slaves, fewer than the average of ten slaves owned by the Confederate citizens but certainly not indicative of strong abolitionist feeling. Unionists were also slightly older than Confederates; the average ages in 1860 were thirty-nine and thirty-four, respectively (see Appendix, tables 1–4). What is clear is that unionism was primarily a phenomenon not of the poorest citizens dissenting as a class but of a cross-class grouping of people driven by concerns about economic stability in the region.4 Sandwiched in the middle of the indigent and the wealthy white population of Pasquotank was Confederate Daniel Bright, who represented the yeoman farmer on the make in eastern North Carolina. While he did own

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a slave and held substantial property in comparison with many of his fellow farmers, he was clearly not among the wealthiest elite members of the white Confederate community. His personal property, valued at only $1,200, and real estate, valued at $3,300, were far less than the holdings of the richest members of the Confederate or unionist community, but he owned substantially more than the large section of the white population, who held less than $1,000 in real or personal property. Bright’s status as a slaveholder also set him apart from the struggling poor whites that made up the majority of the community.5 Many poor whites in the South worked their entire lives in the hope of acquiring a slave, and Daniel Bright had achieved this by his twenty-eighth year. Still, this one slave paled in comparison with the dozens of slaves owned by the wealthy planters in his locale. On the eve of the war, Daniel Bright’s hopes were likely those of many other men in the South with ambition. Given his uncertain but hard-fought-for foothold in the economic order, Bright likely thought military service would offer upward mobility and a more esteemed place in the hierarchical order of his southern community. And with the war came opportunity.6 At the inception of hostilities, the Albemarle Sound coastline, dotted with large plantations and beautiful homes, provided an enticing target for Federal maritime expeditions. Many secessionists and county officials in Pasquotank realized their vulnerability, and in May 1861 the county commissioners noted at their monthly meeting that the Confederate forces on Hatteras Island were erecting fortifications for the defense of the region.7 From the operations of county government during the initial months of the war, it is clear unionists remained prominent in influence even during the mobilization of the county’s Confederate forces. Pasquotank commissioners during 1861 included two important unionists, William G. Pool and R. F. Overman. Both men were former members of the Whig Party and continued to be actively involved in preserving order in the town of Elizabeth City while enforcing municipal law. Throughout 1861, Pool and Overman must have worked privately to retain their position and influence without publicly stating their loyalty, but most unionists in the county would not be able to keep this charade up for long.8 During the summer of 1861, hundreds of white men from Pasquotank flocked to North Carolina Confederate regiments. The 362 men who enlisted in the Confederate army from the county by November 1861 were

the origins of guerrilla war in the north carolina no-man’s land  /  35

roughly 16 percent of the total white male residents (roughly 8 percent of the total white population).9 This enlistment figure was above average compared with the figures of other counties in the state with significant unionist populations. Western North Carolina, which had a large unionist minority in virtually every county, sent far fewer troops than Pasquotank relative to the size of the counties’ white populations. The immediate military threat to coastal Pasquotank and the use of coercion by Confederate community members likely played a role in the higher percentage.10 Many of the men from Pasquotank enlisted in the Seventeenth North Carolina Volunteer Infantry (First Organization) during the spring and summer of 1861 to protect the region from Federal invasion.11 These men were commanded by a Confederate colonel named William F. Martin, a local Pasquotank lawyer and former Democratic Party leader. Other officers in the regiment included the vituperative former editor of the Democratic Pioneer, L. D. Starke, and the former Whig mayor Rufus K. Speed, who served as surgeon to the regiment.12 During the summer of 1861, Confederates constructed two forts on Hatteras Island, Fort Clark and Fort Hatteras, which guarded the vital inlet off the southern coast of the island. Hatteras Inlet in 1861 was the only inlet on the North Carolina Outer Banks that was deep enough to allow oceangoing vessels to pass through it, making it an important place where Confederate blockade running ships could move between Beaufort and New Bern harbors and the Atlantic Ocean. Hatteras Inlet was therefore important to control if naval forces sought access to the North Carolina coast for invasion or to the Albermarle Sound. Fort Hatteras, the more substantial fort on the island, was constructed to guard the channel of Cape Hatteras, and Fort Clark was built farther to the east and faced the Atlantic. Confederates, however, stationed only 350 men on Hatteras Island to garrison the forts by mid-August, among them William F. Martin’s companies of the Seventeenth North Carolina (First Organization) and the First North Carolina Artillery. Massachusetts general Benjamin F. Butler, then commanding the garrison at Fort Monroe, Virginia, realized the strategic importance of the island and sought support for a joint army and navy operation to take Hatteras Island. On 27 August, Butler’s forces landed on the island and quickly forced the withdrawal of Confederate forces from Fort Clark, who ran out of powder. W. F. Martin and his men then stationed at Fort Hatteras sent for reinforcements, but

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before any could arrive, his men were forced to surrender, on 29 August 1861, because of a combination of poor fuses and powder for their own guns and a heavy naval bombardment. Despite its strategic importance to protecting the coast, Hatteras was left seriously underdefended by Confederates. Several hundred Confederate troops were taken prisoner, including many citizens from Pasquotank County and Elizabeth City. Confederates would be forced to pull their defensive line on the coast back to Roanoke Island, just west of the Outer Banks, following the disaster on Hatteras.13 Among the captured at Hatteras Island was Daniel Bright, who had enlisted as a private in Company A, Seventeenth North Carolina Infantry (First Organization). Bright’s experience was typical of many Confederates from Pasquotank who enlisted in the army during the spring and summer of 1861. Following his surrender, Bright was transported first to Fort Monroe, Virginia, along with the other Hatteras Island prisoners of war and then to Federal prisoner camps first at Fort Columbus, New York Harbor, and then Fort Warren, Boston Harbor. When the men from Bright’s unit were paroled by Union authorities in December 1861 and sent back to North Carolina, Bright agreed not to take up arms until he was officially exchanged through the cartel of prisoners, whereby each Confederate sent home was exchanged one for one with a Union prisoner held by the South. It is possible that Daniel Bright was on the same ship with James S. Whitehead, a member of the Tenth North Carolina State Troops also captured on Hatteras Island and carried north as a prisoner to Boston Harbor. During his transfer back to Norfolk, Virginia, for exchange in early February, Whitehead kept a diary in which he recounted the wretched condition of the Confederate men aboard ship during their eight-day voyage. “I told them they were the worst looking set of men I ever saw,” Whitehead wrote, “400 men crowded in the hole [hull] of an old bark for a week & its so rough all the time, that they can’t get on deck but sick in piles from day to day, & nothing they can eat, but sick enough to die all the time.” Even if Bright was not on Whitehead’s ship, he almost certainly made the same miserable journey back to Norfolk for exchange during this period.14 The majority of the men in Bright’s unit were not declared formally exchanged until 20 February 1862. Upon exchange, Bright, like some of the other exchanged Confederates from Pasquotank, was immediately transferred into Company B (First Organization) of the Thirty-second

the origins of guerrilla war in the north carolina no-man’s land  /  37

North Carolina Infantry.15 Shortly thereafter Bright apparently became disenchanted either with the drudgery and boredom of infantry life or with the potential removal from the home front that accompanied Confederate military service, since he and many other men in his company formally mustered out of the regiment—just in time for spring planting.16 The fall of the Hatteras forts in August 1861 and the capture of many local men briefly depressed Confederates in northeastern North Carolina, but as long as the Confederate forces defending Roanoke Island remained resolute, the Union naval and army forces could not penetrate far into the Albemarle Sound region.17 To bolster the defenses of Roanoke Island and the northeastern section of the state, Confederate president Jefferson Davis ordered North Carolina’s governor, Henry T. Clarke, in September to call out the militia in Pasquotank and the other counties of the North Carolina coast. Interestingly, Davis gave Clark the discretion to make the call “by volunteers or by draft . . . but the number must be equal to 10 per cent of the total population, after deducting volunteers already in service.”18 In addition to these troops, James Green Martin, a Confederate general and brother of Colonel William F. Martin of the Seventeenth North Carolina, worked to secure the Albemarle Sound by building a Confederate fleet at Elizabeth City. Throughout the fall and winter of 1861, Martin diligently labored in collaboration with the Confederate Naval Department and Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works to build a collection of floating batteries for Roanoke Island’s defense. Confederate officials hoped that the additional militia and naval forces from Pasquotank and the surrounding counties would prevent U.S. forces from capturing the island.19 Without a supply base on Roanoke Island, inland operations would be difficult for the Union army. Confederate armies could easily cut off Union troops and destroy any expedition piecemeal by disrupting a long-distance supply line over the open waters of the sound. In addition to limiting blockade running from the North Carolina coast, seizure of the island was part of Abraham Lincoln’s long-term plan of seizing the coast of North Carolina and establishing a restored government in the state, which might also draw Confederate troops from Virginia to defend the interior of North Carolina, thus weakening Robert E. Lee’s army. Confederate officials understood this and in December 1861 transferred command of northeastern North Carolina defenses to the former Virginia governor and now Confederate

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brigadier general Henry A. Wise. Wise’s skill at making political speeches, however, did not translate into military success in the Albemarle. He spent the entire battle for the island ill with pneumonia at the Nags Head Hotel. When he became sick, his command fell to another Pasquotank native, Colonel Henry M. Shaw of the Eighth North Carolina Regiment.20 Like Hatteras Island, Roanoke Island was seriously underdefended and faced a well-coordinated amphibious operation by Union general Ambrose Burnside. After a brief engagement on the island involving nearly eight thousand U.S. soldiers, Colonel Shaw surrendered the island unconditionally, and the coast of North Carolina was now open to invasion. On 8 February 1862, panic gripped the community of Elizabeth City when General Burnside captured Roanoke Island, the final Confederate stronghold protecting the Albemarle region and the inland waterways beyond. The fall of Roanoke Island left the entire Albemarle region open to Federal invasion. In the aftermath of General Burnside’s amphibious expedition, northern troops established a community on the island for refugee slaves. Among the 2,675 men Burnside took prisoner in the engagement were many men from northeastern North Carolina, including Pasquotank. Burnside, who was seeking the quickest way to get rid of prisoners because he was still planning operations farther south, hastily organized a cartel of exchange with Confederate general Benjamin Huger and released the prisoners to the home front at Elizabeth City on 21 February 1862. This decision would be a fateful one, since the release of prisoners flooded northeastern North Carolina with Confederate manpower. The fall of Roanoke Island led directly to the invasion of the coast as the port of New Bern fell to U.S. forces in March.21 Among the parolees was James W. Hinton. This prewar Whig politician and slaveholder joined the Eighth North Carolina Infantry as a captain shortly after the war broke out and was captured during the surrender of Roanoke Island. This regiment included two companies of men recruited largely from Pasquotank and Currituck counties and had been stationed on Roanoke in September 1861.22 Hinton’s conduct throughout the war reflects loyalty to both North Carolina and his home community. Although an officer in a Confederate regiment, Hinton represents the many members of the formerly Whig Confederate community who remained loyal to North Carolina foremost and were always concerned with the stability and well-

the origins of guerrilla war in the north carolina no-man’s land  /  39

being of their local community. Hinton saw Pasquotank and the northeastern region of North Carolina as his Confederacy to defend. Even if Hinton’s loyalty was primarily driven by loyalty to Pasquotank and North Carolina, he was in the Confederate service by his own volition. Not all of the Pasquotank men who served in the Confederate defense of Roanoke Island were there willingly; some men were apparently coerced by secessionists from Pasquotank to join the Confederate force defending the island. Among these soldiers was Miles Morgan, who in late 1861 was forced into a local militia company forming in Pasquotank. After two months in the local service, Morgan was, in his words, “taken prisoner and carried to Roanoke Island where I was kept a little over a month, I was then paroled and sent home and had nothing whatever to do with the service afterwards.”23 Seventeen-year-old William Leigh was another of the men forced into the service. In early 1862, local Confederates coerced him to join the Confederate army against his and his mother Eleanor’s wishes. He deserted after only two months in the Confederate army and returned home. Twelve months later Leigh enlisted in the Union army at Elizabeth City.24 The fall of Roanoke Island and dubious Confederate recruits were only the beginning of disappointment for Pasquotank’s white Confederate majority. Only two days after the fall of Roanoke Island, Union naval forces supporting Burnside’s expedition defeated James Green Martin’s makeshift Confederate fleet (under the command of Flag Officer William F. Lynch) off the coast of Elizabeth City, causing immense panic in the town.25 On 10 February, only two Confederate infantry regiments were in the immediate vicinity. The Fifty-ninth Virginia Infantry was in Pasquotank County around the county seat, and the Third Georgia Infantry guarded the important Dismal Swamp Canal locks just north of Elizabeth City at South Mills in Camden County.26 Fearing the invasion of a superior force of Yankee troops and not wanting to leave valuable property to the Federal army, Confederate soldiers and civilians in Elizabeth City began burning the village and set fire to the courthouse, which was shortly razed to the ground.27 Explaining the fear and strategy of the Confederates, one southern sympathizer wrote that “[m]any thought it best to set fire to our houses and retreat by the light as the Russians had successfully done at Moscow when invaded by Napoleon.” Among the homes destroyed was James W. Hinton’s.

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Confederates Wiley Grandy and William Glover set fire to their homes and “made tracks for Currituck.” Unionist George D. Pool fled all the way to Chapel Hill, and the home of his brother, unionist W. G. Pool, was burned. Panic-stricken Confederates fled the county in every direction, but many, like Grandy and Glover, moved to nearby Currituck County, which had an overwhelmingly Confederate population and was probably perceived by many Confederates as being geographically remote. While many citizens returned after only a few months, some who fled during the fall of Elizabeth City would not return to Pasquotank until late 1864.28 Among those who remained in Elizabeth City was the Reverend E. M. Forbes, the rector of Christ Church, the local Episcopalian place of worship. Forbes put on his “ecclesiastical vestments, in order that [Yankees] might respect his sacred office,” and headed toward the wharf to surrender the city and ask for protection from the Union forces. Forbes, who was also a Confederate sympathizer, was not about to take any chances with his own possessions. He contacted close friend and fellow Confederate Richard B. Creecy to have his valuables and books taken to Creecy’s home south of Elizabeth City. Creecy sent his slaves “Little Peter” and Isaac to secure the belongings in a cart, but on the way back from Elizabeth City, the slaves and horse pulling the cart became so frightened that they lost most of Forbes’s library along the road.29 As the small contingent of Confederate soldiers commanded by Colonel C. F. Henningsen of the Fifty-ninth Virginia Infantry fled Elizabeth City in the face of Union naval power, they took out their frustrations on the local unionist population. During the retreat, a group of Confederate soldiers arrived at the home of John Lister outside Elizabeth City, wanting to take him into the Confederate interior as a hostage. Lister, a well-known unionist who had named one of his sons after Abraham Lincoln, refused to go. According to Henningsen’s account, Lister had been avoiding arrest by a local vigilance committee for more than a month. When they arrived at Lister’s house, Confederates attempted to force him to go by threatening to burn his home to the ground. Lister then locked himself in the house and fired at the party of secessionists, wounding one young private.30 The troops then set the house on fire, and as Lister ran to the window to escape the billowing smoke, he was shot, falling back into the house. Lister’s body was then left inside the dwelling to burn along with his property.31

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Following the naval battle, the commander of the Union flotilla that defeated the Confederate fleet off Cobb’s Point in lower Pasquotank County sent his crews ashore to help put out the flames. Stephen Rowan commended his men for their “coolness, gallantry and skill displayed . . . in the capture and destruction of the enemy’s Battery and Squadron at Cobb’s Point,” but Rowan was “particularly gratified at the evidence of the high discipline of the crews in refraining from trespassing in the slightest degree upon the private property of defenceless people in a defenceless town.” Rowan believed that his command’s effort to “extinguish the flames applied by the torch of a vandal soldiery” at Elizabeth City illustrated “the justness of our cause and must have its effect in teaching our deluded countrymen a lesson in Humanity and Civilization.” Unfortunately for Rowan and Pasquotank’s unionists, the firefighting effort made no lasting impression on many local Confederates.32 After the fall of Elizabeth City in February 1862, a period of uncertainty commenced for both the unionist and Confederate citizens of Pasquotank County. At different points from the spring of 1862 through the fall of 1863, Union troops came ashore and occupied Elizabeth City. Federal soldiers, however, never permanently garrisoned the town with a major force as they did at other important coastal cities like New Bern or Plymouth, North Carolina. Only small recruiting and raiding parties were sent to the northeastern region. While the Confederate residents feared the loss of their slaves and other property to the invading Union soldiers, unionists faced a different kind of dilemma.33 During the periods when Federal soldiers occupied the city, some members of the unionist community stated their loyalty publicly, aided the Federal army with transport and supplies, or joined the Union army.34 But these local unionists then faced the problem of what to do when the Union army left and Confederates returned. Pasquotank County became the quintessential example of North Carolina’s coastal no-man’s-land, a region with a Confederate majority and unionist minority, at all times open to Federal incursion, but in reality controlled by neither government or army. 35 In the spring of 1862, Elizabeth City was tossed back and forth by the armed belligerents of the North and South. Confederate soldiers reoccupied the town during the first week of April, only to be briefly driven off when Union soldiers came ashore and captured seventy-three Confederate soldiers

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on 8 April 1862.36 Confederate soldiers seized the city again by mid-April with two regiments.37 Growing fear in the northern navy over armored Confederate warships, which might move from waters in Virginia into the Albemarle Sound via the canal, prompted the Union military to take action. Later that same month, Union troops returned to the region, this time with the intent of destroying the Dismal Swamp Canal locks at South Mills a few miles northeast of Elizabeth City. The threat of Confederate ironclads may not have been the only reason that Union soldiers wanted to destroy the locks. Confederate confiscation agents regularly visited the northeastern North Carolina counties to impress wheat, corn, and hogs for the Confederate army. If the locks could be destroyed and the shipping commerce between the North Carolina and Virginia interior bottled up, the Confederacy’s armies in northern Virginia would experience a significant reduction in vital sustenance from the region.38 On 19 April 1862, after landing in Pasquotank, Union soldiers of the Sixth New Hampshire and Ninth New York (Rush Hawkin’s Zouaves) marched north toward the Camden County line. During this march, a correspondent from the Richmond Dispatch then visiting Elizabeth City recorded the earliest evidence in the region of a shift in Union military policy away from conciliation and toward a pragmatic policy of treating civilians based on their loyalty. At the home of Confederate C. S. Whitehurst, Union soldiers took $120 from the old man as well as “bed clothing, crockery, spoons, knives and forks, glassware, baskets, razors, brandy, combs, paper, tobacco, window curtains, his own and his children’s clothing, and everything they could carry off.” The correspondent also alluded to a threatened rape when he recounted how Whitehurst’s daughter hid in the corner and covered herself with her elderly father’s body “to shelter her from worse than death.” The correspondent also described how Union soldiers tried “to persuade Mr. Whitehurst’s negroes to go with them; but they all refused.” While Confederates no doubt interpreted their refusal as slave loyalty, it was more likely that many of these slaves had family members in the area they did not want to leave behind. A more lighthearted incident occurred as Union troops visited the home of Confederate Jonathan Sawyer, whose daughter Mollie proudly proclaimed to a Union soldier that she was a secessionist, even telling a Union soldier she wished she had forty brothers in the Confederate army. After the same soldier told her he and the other

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soldiers were headed to Norfolk, Mollie quipped: “Yes, I expect your troops will march to Norfolk like they did to Richmond. You will meet a Manassas on the way!” After reaching the area just south of the Dismal Swamp Canal locks, the Union troops met the Third Georgia Infantry and local Confederate militia in a battle at Sawyer’s Lane, just below South Mills. The ensuing skirmish, known afterward as the Battle of South Mills, did not produce the results that northerners had hoped; Confederate forces successfully defended the locks. The ejection of Union soldiers, however, did little to permanently protect the northeastern counties from incursion.39 As local residents dealt with the reality of living on the periphery of Confederate control, the Confederate government struggled to create policies to cope with the reality of limited resources. In the spring of 1862, the government enacted two laws that would affect northeastern North Carolina in profound ways. In April 1862, the Confederate Congress passed the first national conscription bill in American history. This policy would become steadily more and more unpopular, especially in rural farming regions of the South where yeomen seemed to be doing most of the fighting and class differences were sharp.40 Less well known, but perhaps just as important for some areas of the South, was the Confederate Partisan Ranger Act, which was first announced by the War Department on 28 April and allowed the department to authorize irregular cavalry units for remote regions of the South where Confederate armies were not in control.41 By this point in the spring of 1862, self-constituted guerrilla bands were already a reality in many parts of the Confederacy, and the Richmond government wanted to bring order to these loosely organized groups. In theory, the Partisan Ranger Act would provide a way of controlling irregular soldiers by curtailing the number of these units and putting responsible officers in charge of them. In addition to the federally sanctioned Partisan Ranger units controlled by the Confederate War Department, North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance’s administration approved a handful of state-level North Carolina Partisan Ranger units for operations.42 While the goal of these two forms of authorized guerrilla service was to bring irregular warfare under state control, in practice the Partisan Ranger service created the widespread impression, among a people already inclined toward independence and violence, that their government was sanctioning local vigilante activity in the no-man’s-land areas.43

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Guerrilla violence is an intensely individualistic undertaking. To be effective, the Civil War irregular needed imagination, an understanding of geography, a fluency in the cultural mores of his environment, and familiarity with political and social resources. One eminent scholar of irregular warfare has described tactics of harassing the enemy, avoidance of pitched battle with opponents, destruction of vital supplies, interruption of communication, and surprise assaults on adversaries all under the heading of guerrilla warfare. This description fits with the role irregulars played on the Civil War home front, but the definition offered is still broad, requiring specific explanation and nuance for the Confederate context.44 Four types of Civil War combatants can be termed guerrillas or irregulars. The first group consisted of Partisan Ranger corps, or authorized guerrillas recruited and deployed under the 1862 Partisan Ranger Act of the Confederate Congress. The Confederate government sanctioned these units for remote operations in areas that the Confederate army did not control. North Carolina’s state Partisan Rangers also fall into this authorized guerrilla service type. The second group comprised unauthorized, self-constituted bands sometimes consisting of deserters, looters, outlaws, and other vigilantes. Champ Ferguson’s command operating in Kentucky and Tennessee and the Western North Carolina band of unionists Keith and Malinda Blalock fall into this category. The third type of irregular force consisted of regular cavalry units when they occasionally employed mounted lightning raids to strike fear into their enemies or gain strategic advantage. John Hunt Morgan, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Turner Ashby, and at times even James Ewell Brown Stuart encouraged their cavalry to engage in this manner of fighting. The fourth category consisted of individual politicized citizens. Like the second group, these people existed in both Confederate and unionist communities in the South.45 In addition to the four types of irregular combatants, another scholar has outlined three major typologies of irregular warfare that were evident in the upper South: people’s war, partisan war, and raiding war. Arkansas exemplified German military theorist Karl von Clausewitz’s “people’s war” (of self-constituted bands resisting the regular forces of the enemy); Virginia exemplified Napoleonic military thinker Antoine Henri de Jomini’s legitimate “partisan war” (of elite cavalry units, in this case Partisan Ranger units, sanctioned for the express purpose of employing irregular warfare behind

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enemy lines); and the war waged by General John Hunt Morgan in Kentucky and Tennessee demonstrated the “raiding warfare” of regular cavalry.46 In northeastern North Carolina, a combination of the first two forms of irregular warfare existed; self-constituted bands of Confederate guerrillas tried to join a state Partisan Ranger unit that subsequently never mustered into service. As a result, these men ended up serving under virtually no direction until most of the Confederate companies were brought under state control as an infantry regiment in 1864.47 It is important to point out the hybrid nature of the irregular war on the coast of North Carolina because of the role that Confederate military policy (and specifically the 1862 Partisan Ranger Act that fostered the idea of state-level North Carolina Partisan Rangers) played in sparking interest in irregular warfare among the Confederacy’s own civilian population. Following the surrender of Elizabeth City, Pasquotank’s Confederate citizens began an armed resistance to regular Union military raids. In early March, antebellum Democrat and wartime Confederate nationalist Richard B. Creecy, who lived in a lower district of Pasquotank on a large plantation, mentioned in his correspondence that southern sympathizers had begun a regular mounted patrol of the county for public safety.48 Although it almost certainly doubled as a slave patrol, this mounted group was the modest beginning of a coalescing Confederate guerrilla resistance. The armed Confederate opposition grew throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 1862 as more of Pasquotank’s early war enlistees like Daniel Bright returned home, were formally exchanged, or mustered out of the service. At the same time, resistance to Confederate conscription multiplied, Union naval ships continued to patrol the coast of Pasquotank, and Federal army personnel periodically visited the county seat. The presence of local militia units in the region also added to the white manpower available in the Albemarle country.49 Throughout the northeastern counties, these Confederate men quickly grew unwilling to reenlist in the Confederate infantry. Despite efforts by military and civil authorities in both Raleigh and Richmond to secure this manpower, a large number of white male citizens who sympathized with the southern cause remained under no formal Confederate military control throughout 1862 and 1863. James W. Hinton also provided an indication of when a guerrilla band first began to form in Pasquotank County. In early April 1862, Hinton wrote

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to Confederate secretary of war George Wythe Randolph asking for a release from the terms of his parole. “One great reason why I am anxious to get exchanged as speedily as possible,” implored Hinton, “is that I have an opportunity of raising a respectable force to conduct a guerrilla warfare in that portion of North Carolina lying upon Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds.” “Time and again have I been approached by those who are anxious to enter this branch of the service soliciting me to raise companies for that purpose,” Hinton argued, “but the terms of my parole would not permit me to give them any encouragement.” Furthermore, Hinton enticed Randolph with the possibility of recruiting and controlling the manpower in this remote region. “I have no hesitancy in saying that if released I could in a short while raise from 300 to 500 troops, who when properly organized would prove a terror to the base miscreants who are now committing depredations in that section of my native State.” Hinton also believed that “[i]t may not be amiss for me to state that my thorough acquaintance with the geography of that whole country would afford me peculiar advantages in prosecuting that mode of warfare.” Indeed, in the spring of 1862, Hinton was not the only man thinking these same thoughts in Pasquotank.50 In May 1862, Union naval personnel operating off the coast of Elizabeth City were angered by the persecution of local unionists; their correspondence offers the first indication from the Union army that they were aware of irregulars in Pasquotank. On 13 May, Lieutenant C. W. Flusser of the Federal navy mentioned his consternation that his men had not found and confronted a new local Confederate cavalry company during a recent expedition into the Pasquotank countryside.51 But in his official correspondence five days later, Flusser clearly stated that no regular Confederate troops were in the region. On 18 May, Flusser complained in a letter to the mayor of Elizabeth City that “there being no Confederate troops in this city or its vicinity, any persecution of Union people that may occur hereafter must be the work of evil-minded citizens.” “Many Union people have been taken from their homes and confined in prisons on frivolous charges,” he asserted. “It is my intention, on any recurrence of such outrages,” Flusser threatened, “to seize two secessionists for each Union man seized, and subject them to precisely the same treatment which the loyal man receives at the hands of the disloyal. . . . If [Union] officers or men are detained, I shall be obliged, however unwillingly, to fire on the town.”52

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After Flusser issued his ultimatum, Elizabeth City authorities requested three days to ponder his terms and issue a formal response. In order to gain the insight of the local citizenry, city authorities called for a county meeting. Nevertheless, when Flusser and his officers returned after three days, he found that local secessionists had prevented a meeting from occurring. In explaining why, Flusser did not mention guerrilla activity outright, but he clearly believed that some members of the local community (probably cavalry) were coercing the unionist population to remain silent and inactive.53 Throughout most of 1862, the Union army grappled with policy initiatives for holding northeastern North Carolina without expending vital manpower. At first, Federal officers secured the coast of Elizabeth City and the surrounding area by keeping naval forces floating offshore. This policy enabled the army and navy to control the greater region of inland rivers all along the northern coast of the Albemarle Sound without committing the manpower to a permanent garrison at any one spot.54 This policy, however, did not seem likely to stop the coercion by Confederate citizens and guerrillas in Pasquotank. In the late spring, Union naval personnel came ashore in Pasquotank and found “100 people who only wish a leader in order to take arms in their own defense.” During that visit, anxious unionist citizens in the county even asked that a Federal recruiting agent be sent to Elizabeth City.55 In August 1862, President Lincoln authorized the Union military governor of occupied North Carolina, Edward Stanly, who was headquartered down the coast in New Bern, to hold elections in both the first and second districts when enough citizens petitioned. Throughout the fall unionists farther south in the Second North Carolina Congressional District, which included occupied New Bern and Beaufort City, petitioned for a congressional election that would send a representative to the U.S. Congress from eastern North Carolina. Nevertheless, the situation in Pasquotank and other counties of the First Congressional District was far too dangerous and unstable for Union officials to hold an election. Unionists from Pasquotank did put forward the name of F. S. Proctor for consideration as a candidate in the first district, but no congressional election was ever held for a restored U.S. congressional representative from the district. Even in the second district when Union authorities conducted an election in early January 1863, polls were open in only a handful of precincts in four counties—Hyde, Craven, Beaufort, and Carteret. The winner of that election, Jennings Pig-

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ott, was not seated by Congress largely because of debate over how representative the election had truly been given the limited voting access.56 As a result of the growing Union sentiment and instability in the northeastern counties, Union authorities sent soldiers from the First North Carolina (Union) Regiment to the region on a recruiting expedition in the fall of 1862. This unit had recruited at Washington in Beaufort County in April and Plymouth in Washington County in June but had not yet enlisted enough men to form a complete regiment. The desire for more eager Union recruits brought Captain Enos C. Sanders of the recently formed Company D, First North Carolina (Union), to the northeastern counties.57 In mid-August, Sanders held a meeting in Camden County that was attended by three-hundred people, and he opened the muster rolls for recruitment. Sanders recruited only a handful at the meeting, but by the end of the month he had recruited thirty men from Camden into the company. While in the Albemarle district, Captain Sanders came face to face with the brutality of Confederate guerrilla violence. The unionist North Carolinians first established a camp in Camden County just east of the Pasquotank River, but while Sanders was away on a recruiting trip to Pasquotank in September 1862, guerrillas attacked his base at Shiloh, which was strategically positioned between the Dismal Swamp Canal locks at South Mills and the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal, which the Union navy sought to control. Confederate guerrillas killed three men, wounded three, took several prisoners, and pillaged Sanders’s supplies. It was unclear to Sanders at first exactly who the assailants were, but his men estimated that the guerrilla force was approximately fifty men. Sanders and his men had no intention of giving up on their recruiting mission and resolved to pursue the guerrillas into northern Pasquotank County, where they were hiding in the swamps.58 On 19 and 20 September, Sanders and his men caught up with the guerrillas on the edge of a cornfield in northern Pasquotank. The Union soldiers fired upon the rear guard of the irregular force and “made a dash for [the guerrillas], and without firing a shot[,] they [the Confederate guerrillas] took their guns and fled to the swamp across a corn field, leaving the muskets and [their Union] prisoners in our hands.”59 Unfortunately for Sanders and his men, the guerrillas’ knowledge of the local geography enabled them to quickly slip away to their swamp hideout. Sanders defiantly wrote

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after the pursuit that he now made “a practice to take all Secessionists arms and ammunition. But no other property except for those connected with the recent outrage upon us as they are a cowardly set of scamps[.] [Y]ou can tell a Secessionist since that affair as far as you can see him Shiver and hear his teeth chatters.” Sanders and his new recruits were not to be easily deterred.60 In October, the New Bern Daily Progress reported that the unionist citizens of the northeastern counties were forming mutual protection organizations to fend off the emerging Confederate guerrilla resistance.61 Enos Sanders and his Union army recruiters found many of the male Union sympathizers in Pasquotank hiding in the same swamps that Confederate guerrillas were using as bases. In eastern North Carolina, Confederates despised armed unionists living in the swamps and Federal soldiers recruited into the First and Second North Carolina (Union) regiments and referred to them as “Buffaloes,” but as the war wore on, secessionists in North Carolina often used the term to describe any unionist born in the state.62 Locally, in Elizabeth City, Confederates commonly used the term to describe the men of the U.S. Army company recruited in the county. Following the Confederate attack on his base at Shiloh, Sanders established a satellite Federal recruiting post in Elizabeth City.63 Over the next several months, the captain recruited forty-two white men from Pasquotank County. While many of these Pasquotank armed unionists had been forced into acting as irregulars for self-protection prior to the arrival of U.S. forces, once the unionist men joined the company of Captain Sanders, they operated as regular infantry in their recruiting efforts and counterguerrilla operations. Pasquotank’s Buffaloes made up a small portion of the roughly one thousand white men from eastern North Carolina recruited into the Union army during the war. In late October, Lieutenant Nathaniel Sanders (Captain Enos Sanders’s brother) turned over nineteen black contrabands for use as laborers outside the area near what was now called Camp Union at Shiloh, but sometime in October and November, following President Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, the Union troops also began recruiting local blacks as armed guards and escorts.64 On 20 November unionist William G. Pool, now the mayor of Elizabeth City, wrote Captain Sanders inquiring about his purpose in the county and whether his force would remain in the city for the winter. Pool probably

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wanted to know whether Sanders and his men were there to enforce public order and security or just recruit and then leave. During the fall of 1862, city officials were concerned with the number of blacks congregating at the town dock and ordered policemen stationed at the wharf to break up any groups of three or more blacks that might congregate there. Sanders declined communication with the city officials but ordered the bars of the town closed.65 By late November, Sanders happily reported to his superior, Colonel E. C. Potter of the First North Carolina (Union), that “this company is flourishing . . . improving in drill and numbers. . . . It now begins to make me feel proud as it seems more like what I have always tried to make it but after feared it never would be.” Sanders lamented, nevertheless, that “[r]ecruiting is rather slow in Elizabeth City . . . we get them faster here [at Shiloh, Camden County].” He ended the letter by assuring his commander that “I am preparing to give the guerrillas a shaking up[.] [T]he boys are all eager for the pray [sic].”66 Two weeks later, on 15 December 1862, Sanders again proudly wrote Colonel Potter that “I went to Elizabeth City last Saturday and we hoisted the Stars and Stripes for the first time since the rebellion. I fired a salute from the gun . . . and the Unionist Citizens got tight and had a glorious time. They were much overjoyed.” But Sanders added ominously at the end of report: “The guerrillas are in considerable force at different places in these counties.”67 The state of North Carolina opened up a Pandora’s box in the fall of 1862 when it sanctioned a state-level Partisan Ranger regiment to organize in eastern North Carolina. This unit, officially designated the Sixty-sixth North Carolina Partisan Rangers, an authorized guerrilla regiment, was ordered to recruit ten companies before it would be formally recognized as a regiment of North Carolina State Troops. Despite recruiting enough men for four companies from Northampton, Bertie, and Hertford counties in eastern North Carolina, this unit never reached the necessary ten companies. These four initial companies were transferred to other units in mid-1863. It is not clear whether these companies ever operated east of the Chowan River, but the attempted formation of a state Partisan Ranger regiment in the region around the Chowan River did have an effect on Pasquotank. When Captain Enos Sanders and his recruiting party operated in Camden and Pasquotank throughout the fall of 1862, they encountered Confederate guerrillas in the

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process of organizing a company for the Sixty-sixth Partisan Rangers.68 By early 1863, additional companies were organizing in the six northeastern counties in the hope of eventually joining the Sixty-sixth North Carolina Partisan Ranger regiment. Since the companies of Sixty-sixth never came together as one unit, the various companies remained in a state of organizational limbo with the Confederate government. They operated independently, under no formal Confederate hierarchy of military command and control, and were scattered across the counties of the northeastern region once formed. The legacy of an organizing but never formally mustered state Partisan Ranger unit would haunt this area for the remainder of the war by promoting irregular military service as a viable option.69 Captain John T. Elliott’s company, Pasquotank’s local irregular band, was responsible for the majority of violence attributed to guerrillas in the county during the war. Along with other men from Pasquotank, Elliott had joined the Confederate army in 1861 as a member of Company L, Seventeenth North Carolina Infantry (First Organization). In February 1862, however, he was captured at the battle of Roanoke Island. The captured men from Elliott’s unit were paroled to the home front in late February 1862 and remained there until their formal exchange in August of that year. After their parole but prior to exchange, some members of Company L continued to operate as an independent command on the home front. While John Elliott and many of his cohorts officially remained on the rolls of Company L, Seventeenth North Carolina (First Organization), until it officially disbanded, he appears to have led local men as a guerrilla captain from the spring of 1862 onward. Once Company L officially disbanded in March 1863, Elliott mustered a local group of men in an attempt to join the Sixty-sixth North Carolina Partisan Rangers.70 Many men in this new company had also been members of the old Seventeenth North Carolina Infantry (First Organization). Since the Sixty-sixth Partisan Rangers never reached the requisite number of companies to become a complete unit and no officer arrived to organize these men into a regiment, they continued to operate independently as they had done since their parole. Throughout 1862 and 1863, Elliott’s group consistently threatened all those who dared express fidelity to the Union.71 Elliott’s men provide another window into the makeup of the Confederate community of Pasquotank. Out of the ninety-one men who served

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in Elliott’s band during the war, forty-one could be identified in the 1860 census. Some of the men either moved to Pasquotank after 1860 or were not present when the census enumerator came through the county. It is very likely that at least some of the men not on the census were at sea or working in the Dismal Swamp when the enumerator was in Pasquotank. Of those forty-one, eleven of the men who fought with this guerrilla band were under the age of seventeen in 1860, the youngest being twelve years old. These men owned little real or personal property in 1860, and their average age was only twenty-five during that year. The average property ownership among these men was $433 in real and $535 in personal property. Those who were old enough to have an occupation in 1860 were almost all small farmers who owned no slaves. In fact, among Elliott’s guerrillas, only five soldiers owned slaves, and all of them owned fewer than nine (see Appendix, tables 5–8).72 If the guerrillas of Elliott’s command are juxtaposed with the Pasquotank Buffaloes (Company D, First North Carolina [Union] Regiment) recruited by Enos C. Sanders, a striking pattern emerges. Of the forty-two men recruited by Sanders, nineteen can be positively identified in the census. The average age of these men was twenty-six in 1860, only one year older than Elliott’s guerrillas. Seven of these men were under the age of seventeen on the eve of the war, and the youngest member of the U.S. force was twelve. Furthermore, like their Confederate counterparts, the majority of the U.S. soldiers had been farmhands or farmers before the war, and most of them owned little personal or real property. The average real and personal property ownership was $130 and $98, respectively, making the Buffaloes even poorer than their Confederate guerrilla counterparts. Perhaps most striking, none of the Buffaloes identified owned any slaves. If the data on these two groups demonstrate any pattern clearly, it is that Pasquotank’s guerrilla conflict was certainly a poor man’s fight (see Appendix, tables 5–8). While their economic standing was quite similar, some of these two groups’ motivations for joining their respective form of service also paralleled one another. Buffaloes joined to avoid the Confederate Conscription Act, as did many of their counterparts in the Confederate guerrilla company. Confederate military impressments and the tax in kind hit men of both these groups hard and may have compelled them to resist service in

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favor of protecting their crops and limited property. Desire to remain close to home and hearth was probably the strongest common denominator pulling men into the local conflict, however. Not all the motivations were common to both groups. Buffaloes clearly lacked a direct interest in slavery, whereas Confederate guerrillas desired to uphold the existing institution, even if they did not actually own many slaves. Furthermore, the Buffaloes likely joined the Union army to protect their families from the Confederate irregulars. Given the local dynamics of the war, this may have been the single most important driving motivation for a unionist man to join the army. By the end of December 1862, Enos C. Sanders and his Nathaniel Sanders had moved from Shiloh back to Elizabeth City. Confederate Richard B. Creecy harshly criticized the winter administration of Elizabeth City by the Sanders brothers. Desiring to dehumanize their enemy, Creecy and other Confederates described Nathaniel as “Black Sanders” and Enos as “White Sanders” because of the color of their hair. Creecy derided how the Sanders brothers “affiliated with the ‘buffaloes’ and negroes, administering the ‘oath of allegiance’ to some of the people in the town and adjacent country. . . . [T]hey did all they could to equalize the negro race by getting up negro socials, which carousals they seemed to greatly enjoy.” Creecy also noted, however, that all the while “[o]ur local guerilla company had their eyes upon them and were secretly keeping informed of all their movements.” Unfortunately for Sanders and his recruits, Confederate irregulars were well informed of their activities.73 On the evening of 5 January 1863, as four soldiers from the First North Carolina (Union) Regiment walked down the main street of town, they were attacked by a small group of local irregulars. The guerrillas, hidden behind the ruins of burned-down buildings, fired a volley at the Union troops. Lieutenant Nathaniel Sanders, having just left a “negro dance party” at a local home that was probably celebrating the recent Emancipation Proclamation, was mortally wounded in the incident and died shortly after running away from the scene of the attack. Another local man, Joseph McCabe, was killed by the same volley. Immediately following the shooting, the men of Company D, First North Carolina (Union), quickly assembled to search for the perpetrators, managing to capture several of the men before they could even get rid of their weapons.74

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The day after his brother’s death, Enos Sanders angrily reported to Major General John G. Foster, the commander of the Union Department of North Carolina based at New Bern, that “the Guerillas have killed my brother the 1st Lt. of Company D. 1st NCUV and I am compelled to revenge his death. We have (3) or (4) of the devils which I intend to hang.”75 One local Confederate woman reported that after the shooting Sanders posted a sign that required all white men over sixteen years of age to take the oath of loyalty or leave Elizabeth City. Had this been enforced, it would have amounted to a depopulation order for Confederates, but he did not have the manpower to enforce this order. Even if Sanders had had the manpower to execute it, it would have been difficult given the presence of the guerrillas and the unwillingness of U.S. authorities to stretch their lines around all the northeastern counties. Apparently, Captain Sanders and his men calmed down after a few days, however, because he later released the imprisoned men after they gave a $250 bond and took “the oath of neutrality.” As brutal as it was, the murder of Lieutenant Nathaniel Sanders and Joseph McCabe was only the beginning of a series of high-profile murders and retaliatory attacks in Pasquotank.76 In early February, guerrillas perpetrated another act of violence that angered Union army authorities and terrified local unionists. When unionist B. F. Keaton learned of threats against Lieutenant Thaddeus Cox of the First North Carolina (Union), he attempted to warn the prominent Buffalo “that the guerrillas were . . . in wait to catch [him].” Keaton then “paid one James Banks to carry a letter to [Cox] telling him of the guerrillas and their whereabouts.”77 Lieutenant Cox then rode out in a buggy to his home in lower Pasquotank County hoping to bring his family into Elizabeth City for safety. The thirty-three-year-old Cox, who had been a schoolteacher before the war, was the most outspoken among the Buffaloes in the lower districts of Pasquotank.78 On Cox’s return trip to Elizabeth City, as he and his family crossed the “Trunk Bridges” over Newbegun Creek, about fourteen miles south of the county seat, Confederate irregulars sprang their trap. Cox, along with his four-year-old daughter and wife, were “attacked by a gang of guerrillas, who came upon him from a thicket and fired a volley.” Lieutenant Cox and his small daughter were shot and killed instantly; his wife died a few days later. In response, the Union commander at Elizabeth City again ordered his men to hunt down those responsible for the killings.

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In the wake of the Cox murder, the local unionist community grew restless for justice. Increasingly weary of the violence, several unionist citizens of Elizabeth City approached Captain Sanders asking “that something be done to avenge . . . or at least to set an example to prevent the committing of such brutal outrages.”79 After a brief period of thought, Sanders ordered the public execution of an “obstinate, unyielding, and an intense Confederate,” a prisoner of war and suspected local guerrilla named Addison White. White had been captured by Sanders’s men a few weeks before while attempting to “rendezvous” with local irregulars. According to a Confederate account of White’s execution, he was taken down to the Elizabeth City wharf, where several Union troops “put him up as a target, one by one they shot at him until they killed him & refusing to allow his body to be moved, would let no one come near it.” The Union account of the incident places Lieutenant Cox’s brother among the party of soldiers who carried out the shooting at the wharf. As a warning to any locals who might consider engaging in irregular activity, Federal soldiers did not permit White’s family and friends to remove his body until the following day. Doubtless, Enos Sanders was also still deeply angered by the murder of his own brother, and this time his rage boiled over.80 The murder of Lieutenant Cox and his family confirmed the threat to local men who joined the Union army. And the execution of Addison White signaled the willingness of both guerrilla and regular soldier, Confederate and Federal, to participate in retaliatory acts of violence. Throughout the fall and winter of 1862 and 1863, Union soldiers operated in the area with a weak force, recruiting for Company D, First North Carolina (Union) Infantry, and fighting what had evolved into a protracted guerrilla war in the northern Albemarle counties. The force had been so weak that they had even found it necessary to arm blacks in the late fall. Captain Sanders and his men had the upper hand in Elizabeth City, where many of the local unionists resided. The Confederate irregulars, however, clearly controlled the roads and fields surrounding the town, where both Confederate and unionist citizens produced bountiful supplies that could be easily confiscated by irregular forces. If Confederate confiscation and guerrilla violence were unpopular among the local white populace, Union recruiting efforts during the first

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months of 1863 were equally controversial. During their time ashore in Elizabeth City, Union soldiers received word that President Abraham Lincoln had issued the formal Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, and shortly after hearing about the proclamation, Sanders declared all slaves free in the region, which would have only limited impact. Captain Sanders took another fateful step in early January 1863 when he enlisted at least 80 and perhaps as many as 250 local black men in the Union army and drilled them on the streets of Elizabeth City for all to observe. These men were not the first armed blacks in Elizabeth City, but it was the first time such a large force had been constituted. These men were probably recruited from the large free black population in the county, since the slaves of the region were not freed in large numbers by his Union troops. The weakness of his force had prevented any major emancipation operations. Individual slaves, however, may have escaped into Sanders’s new force of black troops; his letters do not specify whether the black men were free or slave when recruited. Sanders, no doubt, hoped that black men both free and slave might augment his weak force of local Buffaloes and aid in defending the county seat from the swelling ranks of the Confederate irregular force.81 Clearly armed blacks in northeastern North Carolina terrified many local Confederates, but unionists reacted with more reserve. In early January, unionist James C. Johnston, who owned plantations in both Chowan and Pasquotank, began paying his slaves wages in order to keep them working. While slavery had not completely collapsed in the region, the system was eroding with each slave runaway, each armed black recruited, and every half measure employed by a master to keep his labor force intact. Paying wages did not necessarily signal absolute belief in the collapse of slavery, but it was clearly a pragmatic solution to keeping the number of runaways to a minimum. The war was changing the labor system in the region, but even unionist slaveholders were not convinced of its complete demise, even with a small number of armed blacks aiding the Union troops in the county. It would take a major U.S. military operation to completely end the institution and enforce the proclamation at the point of the bayonet. Although many unionist residents of Elizabeth City reacted skeptically to the recruitment of blacks into the Union army, interestingly, the unionist community was not substantially weakened by President Lincoln’s proclamation. None of the open unionists shifted their loyalty toward the Confederate cause as

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a result of the policy, probably owing to the immediate factors of the local guerrilla war. Outspoken unionists already known for their loyalty had little choice but to support whatever mechanism might defend them from Confederate guerrillas.82 The threats and harassment of Confederate irregulars likely shored up any doubt that unionists had about where their own loyalties lay.83 Furthermore, the Emancipation Proclamation was probably viewed by many of Pasquotank’s unionists as simply the new rule of law, and since many owned few slaves or were wealthy enough to begin paying their slaves wages in the hope of keeping their plantations running, at least some began to do so.84 Nevertheless, the sight of armed black men drilling in the streets of Elizabeth City did not sit well with all of the locals, even if armed blacks were needed to prevent guerrillas from taking over the town. In late January 1863, “several gentlemen, residents of Elizabeth City,” contacted the Union military governor of North Carolina, Edward Stanly, and lodged a complaint. Stanly, who wanted the Union restored as it was—that is, with slavery intact—was not happy with the African American recruitment activity of Union soldiers or Lincoln’s proclamation. Stanly’s response demonstrated both the community’s skepticism and his own about how best to employ President Lincoln’s new soldiers. “Is every provost-marshal or captain to judge . . . the ‘suitable condition’ of the negroes?” Stanly asked in a letter to Major General John G. Foster. Stanly, who according to one historian was a “rabid proslaver,” resigned his position as military governor on 15 January 1863 over the Emancipation Proclamation, but he found time to write a letter to Foster five days after his resignation about the black soldiers drilling at Elizabeth City.85 In a frustrated tone, Stanly queried, “Are no instructions to be given that they are not to be sent out into the field or allowed to go on foraging excursions, committing pillage and robbery at discretion?” “My attention has been called already to several instances of this kind,” Stanly lectured. He invoked General Foster’s “assistance to prevent if possible the most deplorable calamities that will fall upon our loyal citizens and upon the negroes if superior discretion and experience do not now control them.”86 Likewise, James W. Hinton was outraged by the use of black soldiers in Pasquotank in the early months of 1863. Hinton wrote to North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance that “the citizens of that devoted town are

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more inhumanely and brutally treated than in any other place in the entire South of which our enemies are in possession.” Hinton, who had been released from his parole, was serving outside the northeastern region with the Eighth North Carolina Infantry. He had received a letter from his wife on 2 February detailing that “over two hundred Negroes are already armed [at Elizabeth City] and they are day after day sent in the country in marauding bands to prey upon the citizens. They have already destroyed a great deal of property. . . . Private homes both in town and country are constantly being searched by armed negroes greatly to the terror and alarm of the women and children.” Hinton finally begged Governor Vance to send a military force to the relief of Pasquotank County, commenting that he “had no hesitancy in believing that [the Confederate citizens] would rise en masse for the protection of their homes their wives and their children.”87 Most of these actions involving local black troops appear to have been minor, involving only a few dozen soldiers who went to local plantations to confiscate supplies and other property and perhaps to convince slaves to flee. Apparently Vance did not consider the incidents important enough to send troops, since no expedition was sent by the Confederate government and the guerrilla war continued unabated. Following President Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and allow black troops to enter the Union military, slaveholders along the Albemarle grew restless. On 5 February 1863, after hearing of efforts to recruit black soldiers in Elizabeth City, Brigadier General James Johnston Pettigrew wrote to Governor Vance about the growing racial fears of the Confederate citizens in northeastern North Carolina. Pettigrew, a graduate of the University of North Carolina and a Tyrell County native, stressed that “the Yankees seem to have selected this State and Louisiana for the practical experiment of arming the negroes in the midst of the white population.” “Now that the Yankees have openly declared the reign of terror,” Pettigrew worried, “I fear more of our people, will succumb to fear and be as dangerous to us, as though they were regular traitors.” He ominously asserted that “from all appearances the ‘black flag’ is imm[inent].”88 For Pettigrew, one of the largest slaveholders in eastern North Carolina, the black flag meant that social chaos and merciless home-front violence would follow the enlistment of black soldiers. One of the northeastern North Carolina families Pettigrew worried about was Richard Benbury Creecy’s. Creecy, whose sympathies were with

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his “guerrilla friends,” used slave labor on his elderly father-in-law’s plantation, Cloverdale, fourteen miles south of Elizabeth City. Creecy’s father-inlaw, Edmund Perkins, had been an antebellum member of the Democratic Party and owned forty-four slaves on the eve of the war but because of his age was unable to administer the farm by 1863.89 Although he did not serve during the war in any military unit, Creecy managed Cloverdale and remained active in supporting the irregulars. Creecy’s oldest son, Edmund, who was fifteen in 1863, was even a member of John T. Elliott’s guerrilla band. The uncertainty of slave control during 1862 and 1863 and the frequent presence of Union soldiers near his farm vexed the planter. Creecy’s wife, Mary, confided to her daughter, Elizabeth, her worry that their slaves might at any moment run away to the enemy. In one letter, she told their daughter that “everything is sad and desolate in this country, every body is losing all of their servants nearly some have lost all, Mr. Joseph Poole has lost thirty two, Mr. Mark Sawyer all that he had, and Mr. Munden 19 and your Grand Pa eleven. The Yankees go and take them at night. There is great distress throughout the country.”90 But in another letter Mary assured Elizabeth of Richard Creecy’s own steadfast commitment to the Confederate cause. Despite regular visits by Union troops, she avowed that Richard Creecy had “no idea of taking the oath,” referring to the loyalty oath that Union troops compelled some southerners to take to prevent seizure of property.91 In an exasperated letter to the U.S. War Department, General Foster laid out the precarious position of Elizabeth City and the surrounding country that had compelled Enos Sanders and the First North Carolina (Union) to recruit black soldiers. “We armed them at Elizabeth City during the time that post was threatened by guerrillas,” wrote Foster. According to the commander, Sanders and his recruiters “obtained about eighty, and they did their duty well enough, but we found they could not be trusted in any outward movement or raid, probably owing to their lack of discipline.”92 The general’s final comment may or may not have been an accurate judgment of the black men’s soldiering, since it is unlikely that Foster ever saw the men drill or “raid” with his own eyes. At least one historian of the black military experience has concluded that Union soldiers and officers were prone to the same racist beliefs about the unruliness and childlike behavior of black soldiers that most white southerners were.93 Foster did, however, offer an accurate assessment of the military situation in the county; guerrillas were indeed threatening the area constantly.

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During the late winter and early spring of 1863, numerous guerrilla attacks were made upon Federal supply expeditions in Pasquotank. At the end of February, Major J. W. Wallis arrived at Elizabeth City with a company from the Eighth Massachusetts Infantry and one from the Third Massachusetts Infantry as reinforcements. Wallis succeeded Captain Sanders as commander of the Elizabeth City recruiting post, but Sanders continued to recruit and scout in the county until his resignation in May 1863. Wallis arrived with explicit orders from his superior, Brigadier General I. N. Palmer, to disarm any blacks and restrict any resupply missions or raids outside Elizabeth City unless they were under the close supervision of a commissioned officer. Palmer also ordered that property should be seized only under army regulations that provided both for a receipt to loyal individuals and for a superintendent that would ensure that the disarmed black men “were regularly and constantly employed”; sixty of these men who had no families were eventually taken to Hatteras Island to work on fortifications there. Shortly after his arrival Wallis met with the mayor and commissioners of the town, who expressed their deep dissatisfaction with the administration of Captain Sanders and anger over the alleged depredations of his men, especially the armed black men working with his company, who had been recently disarmed. The commissioners estimated fifty thousand dollars’ worth of property seized from people who had not taken the oath of neutrality. The commissioners even told Wallis that if Sanders remained he was likely to be shot, as his raiding was the cause of the presence of guerrillas. Clearly Sanders was not the root cause of the guerrilla conflict as the commissioners claimed; their comments were self-serving in their attempts to garner protection for property. But Sanders’s actions were doing nothing to stamp out the presence of Confederate irregulars and were exacerbating tensions in the region.94 Even after the arrival of reinforcements, a low-intensity conflict continued. In two similar incidents, one in March and the other in April, men from Company D, First North Carolina (Union), were taken prisoner. During both confrontations, small groups of men sent out to chop wood were attacked, surrounded, and captured by a superior force of Confederates.95 Preparing to withdraw from the northeastern counties in the spring of 1863, Union soldiers launched several small expeditions to secure the families of men from the northeastern counties who had joined the Union

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army. Captain Enos C. Sanders recounted how one of these expeditions to retrieve a unionist and his family led to an ambush. On 6 April, Sanders and a small party of men left Elizabeth City in the schooner Patty Martin and headed around the Pasquotank peninsula toward Thomas Moss’s home at Nixonton, Pasquotank County. Sanders and his men “arrived at the landing of Thomas Moss’ place . . . came to anchor; sent a boat ashore with 6 men, with orders not to land till they found all right; a large flat at the landing looked suspicious. As the boat approached the land they saw a handkerchief waived in the window of Mrs. Moss’ house.” Sanders then described what had become all too familiar to Union soldiers sent to Pasquotank; his men “were fired upon by the guerrillas.” Sanders’s troops “returned the fire from the boat, and we commenced a brisk fire from the schooner, which was kept up till the boat came alongside.” The expedition then retreated downriver in the schooner. The next day the men returned to Nixonton and rescued Moss and his family; the party of Union soldiers then left Pasquotank for Roanoke Island, likely taking many of the black soldiers to the Freedmen’s Colony there. Sanders lamented that he had “left 11 men in Camden, 3 in Pasquotank, and 2 in Elizabeth City. It was impossible to get word to them in so short a time, as they have to keep hid in the woods most of the time.”96 After the attack on 6 April, Major J. W. Wallis, commanding the recruiting post at Elizabeth City, complained to his superior that with “a company of cavalry here I think we might rid this section of the country from the guerrillas. As it is now, unless we go out in a large force, we are liable to be picked off.”97 Even after he left Pasquotank County, Captain Enos Sanders could not escape the legacy of the guerrilla war he left behind. Brigadier General Palmer initiated an investigation of Sanders for his conduct at Elizabeth City and role in the public murder of Addison White. Suspecting that Sanders had not been fair with some citizens, Palmer also ordered all seventeen of the men incarcerated at the Elizabeth City jail released after they took the oath, save three who were recently captured Confederate soldiers. In May 1863, Sanders resigned his commission and returned home to Chicago under a cloud of suspicion for his activities while commander in Elizabeth City. He was charged with murder by Union authorities in November 1863 for the death of Addison White. A provost in Chicago arrested Sanders on 21 December 1863 and transported him back to North Carolina, but he never

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stood trial for the murder because the physical evidence for the crime curiously vanished. Regardless, it is clear that the local war in northeastern North Carolina cost him both his brother and his career as an army officer.98 Disaffection with the war grew among Pasquotank’s population during the spring of 1863. Both unionists and Confederates were daily experiencing the horror of war: property confiscation or destruction, the threat of conscription, and guerrilla violence. Although not as shocking as being threatened with physical violence by Confederate irregulars or Union soldiers, property confiscation was disconcerting for Pasquotank’s citizens. During the hostilities, several Pasquotank residents overheard a frustrated unionist, Percival D. Sikes, declare “that the secessionists brought on the war—that they were fighting for their negroes and damn them they might fight it out” but that “he would never help them.” On at least one occasion, Confederates in the area had threatened to torch Sikes’s vessel, the James Norcum, because of his political opinions. Confederates never succeeded in destroying the boat, but Sikes lost the James Norcum anyway. Despite his unionist sentiments, his vessel was pressed into thirty-six months of uncompensated wartime service by the U.S. government.99 Another local man who lost property to the Union army was a free black farmer named Isaac Griffin. Griffin complained that in April 1863 his only horse had been impressed by soldiers from the Eleventh Pennsylvania Cavalry while they were camped about five miles from his Rosedale, Pasquotank County, home.100 Around the time Griffin’s horse became a fine Yankee cavalry mount, rumors of a major Confederate military force moving into the region reached the Union recruiting post at Elizabeth City. As a way of protecting the spring planting in the eastern counties of the state, General Robert E. Lee ordered Lieutenant General D. H. Hill to move his corps from the North Carolina interior toward Goldsboro in eastern Wayne County.101 In the face of major Confederate military maneuvers in the eastern section of the state, regional commanders ordered all Federal forces consolidated and Elizabeth City abandoned. On 18 April, the Union soldiers pulled out of Elizabeth City, leaving the county to the irregulars. But not even their evacuation could proceed without some response from the Confederate guerrillas. As they sailed out of the harbor at Elizabeth City and down the coast of the county, the “[c]ountry [was] full of guerrillas,” and their gunboats had to shell the banks of the river to keep them at bay.102

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Throughout the spring of chaotic violence, the small but close-knit community of unionists in the Elizabeth City area was constantly under duress, and at least two men had to flee for their lives. One of these citizens was Josiah Simmons, a local mariner. According to another Pasquotank unionist, George W. Cobb, Simmons was a “very ultra Union man,” well known in the community for his strong political beliefs. Unionist John Pailin asserted that Simmons “carried the flag of the Union [on his vessel] as long as he dared to do it.” Sometime in early 1861 before North Carolina left the Union, Simmons had dared to fly the Stars and Stripes on the mast of his vessel in the cradle of secession. In Charleston Harbor, South Carolina troops fired upon Simmons’s vessel and detained him; they released him only when they affirmed that he was a resident of the South. Upon his return to Elizabeth City, Simmons’s political views continued to place him in danger. In February 1862, he fled Pasquotank after local vigilantes threatened to torch his vessel. After a few months away from the county, he returned when the Union forces controlled the town. Pailin asserted that during the first three months of 1863 Simmons “hardly knew whom to talk with” and “was afraid to express himself publicly.”103 Even members of Simmons’s own family disagreed with his views. Pailin overheard Simmons’s brother-in-law Banister B. Balance, a former chief of police for Elizabeth City, refer to him as “a damn black abolition son of a bitch.” Some of Simmons’s blood relatives were also Confederate. He had two cousins in the Confederate service, one of whom was killed during the war. When Union soldiers left the city in April 1863, Simmons again fled the county, this time carrying many of the evacuating Federal soldiers to Roanoke Island on his boat.104 Josiah Simmons’s story offers an in-depth look at how some people in the no-man’s-land coped with persecution. According to Simmons, in 1861 he and a group of other unionists were called to the Pasquotank County courthouse to appear before the local Confederate vigilance committee, and all the men but him were impressed into the Confederate service. Simmons believed that the intercession of “influential friends” was the only factor that prevented his arrest or impressment by southern authorities. These “friends” may have been unionists William G. Pool and R. F. Overman, who were then serving as commissioners. Even if his in-laws disagreed with his political views, it was clear to Josiah Simmons that a strong network of other personal relationships in the community kept him from being arrested or worse.105

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Simmons was not alone in his experience with intimidation. John Tatum, “an opened mouthed Union man,” barely escaped Pasquotank with his life in April 1863, having been shot at twice, the final time as he fled the local Confederate guerrillas.106 Even with the evacuation of Elizabeth City in April by Union soldiers, Pasquotank and the no-man’s-land of northeastern North Carolina remained a vexing problem for Confederate officials. Union naval power continued to dominate the Albemarle Sound and the inland waterways. This region, although under guerrilla control when Union soldiers left on their ships or stayed in their Elizabeth City quarters, was at all times open to the return of Federal soldiers. And the vulnerability of the northeastern counties frustrated Confederate administrators in North Carolina; their state had contributed a huge amount of manpower to the Confederate cause, yet they could not find an army to permanently protect their own coast. The constant threat of Union soldiers returning to the northeastern counties made enforcing Confederate loyalty and the conscription law increasingly difficult, especially given the violence and local chaos that Confederate irregulars propagated. Moreover, despite the presence of Union troops in Elizabeth City for sporadic, short periods of time, Pasquotank and the surrounding counties remained an important supplier of fresh meat and corn for the Confederate army, but Union naval operations threatened this supply line by preventing blockade running and interdicting the smuggling of corn, salt, meat (especially swine), and other vital goods from Pasquotank into the Confederate interior throughout 1863.107 Governor Vance wanted to protect this supply for future campaigns. But little could be done by manpower-strapped North Carolina officials to indefinitely protect this remote, easily exploited, and not absolutely vital section of the Confederacy.108 During the spring of 1863, Confederate officials in Raleigh struggled with the problem of how to effectively enforce the conscription law in Pasquotank. Pasquotank County remained one of the few areas of North Carolina with a large, previously untapped pool of manpower. One Union commander who visited Pasquotank County in 1863 observed that “[t]here is at this moment a larger proportion of able-bodied whites [in this region], than in any other part of the South.”109 In addition, many of the local men from Pasquotank who had left the region in 1861 to enlist in the Confederate army were now deserting to the home front and evading the April 1862 Confed-

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erate Conscription Act by joining local guerrilla bands.110 Some local men who had never supported the Confederate war effort simply took to the woods when conscription officers came around or joined the Buffaloes.111 With Confederate manpower shortages, guerrilla violence, racial tension, and supply troubles coming to a head, Governor Vance knew he had to solve the problems of northeastern North Carolina. One solution was to organize the loose and undisciplined bands of irregulars forming in the six northeastern counties. In early 1863, as a way of protecting this coastal region from Union invasions, Vance approved a policy that would transform the then organizing Sixty-sixth North Carolina Partisan Ranger unit (which included Elliott’s guerrilla band) into a tightly controlled and formally recognized group of state troops with a regimental commander.112 Vance hoped that the white men of the region would allow themselves to be organized into a regiment or battalion and respond to his authority. This would give him a way of keeping an active Confederate force in the northeastern counties, protecting loyal citizens, growing crops, and fighting the Yankees, all in a place where Rebel armies desired supplies. Governor Vance wanted to reassure local Confederates that their new southern government had not abandoned them to the black and white soldiers of the Union army. Having devised a solution, Vance now needed a local man of respectability to organize, discipline, and lead the guerrillas as an effective state infantry unit. Vance contacted Pasquotank’s most prominent politician, John Pool, then residing in nearby Bertie County, to ask him to organize and take command of all the military companies organizing east of the Chowan River.113 Pool, however, declined the offer, believing that “[t]he Rangers are of service to the people east of the Chowan, as a sort of police force, & ought to be kept there for that purpose. But they can do nothing for the Confederacy.” Pool did suggest, though, that “[t]he Rangers will succeed in limiting the depredations & outrages of the few miserable ‘Buffalos’ who infest that section, by waylaying the roads & killing some of them, now & then.” Pool, the shrewd politician, noted that “no military enterprize [sic], that would reflect credit on a commander, is possible. Large forces of the enemy, by land and water, completely environ & possess that whole section of the country.” He further worried that the guerrillas “would sooner disband and go home—leaving the commander to be held responsible for calling down

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upon the people a raid which could do nothing to repel or punish.” Despite his own apprehension, two weeks later Pool forwarded to Governor Vance the name of James W. Hinton as a man who had the local respect, experience, and wherewithal to organize and command the irregulars. Hinton, whom Pool knew from his own days as a lawyer in Elizabeth City, probably seemed like a logical choice for bringing discipline to the guerrillas. Not long after Pool’s endorsement, Hinton received permission to organize a regiment of infantry from the irregular soldiers operating in the region.114 Pool, whose family members in Elizabeth City were among the most prominent unionists, had managed to sidestep the issue of his own loyalty by suggesting someone else for the leadership of the region’s Confederate force. By doing so, he removed himself from the debate about guerrillas and the rampant disloyalty to the Confederacy in the region. He referred to the “few miserable ‘Buffalos’ who infest that section,” but it is more than likely he was referring not to unionists generally but specifically to Union soldiers recruited among the poorest class of North Carolinians.115 Even though Pool at one point in his letter referred to Union soldiers as “the enemy” and his response to Vance was worded carefully, it is difficult to determine whether in the early months of 1863 the pragmatic Pool had actually thrown off his prewar centrist unionism for strict obedience to Confederate authority. Pool probably was no more than a cooperationist with the Confederate regime, a man who wanted to ride out a difficult period for southern politicians who had been old-line Whigs and opposed to secession. Like James W. Hinton, Pool probably believed his greatest duty was to North Carolina and the northeastern counties; yet unlike Hinton, he was not willing to join armed resistance against the Union. Within a year, Pool would support the peace candidate William Holden for governor. In 1864, he was elected to the state senate, where he became the principal champion of the peace movement in that body.116 Beginning in the late spring of 1863 and continuing into the summer and fall, Union forces commenced a series of sporadic counterguerrilla operations along the shores of the Albemarle. In May 1863, after the Union army had abandoned Elizabeth City, guerrillas seized control of most of rural Pasquotank and captured two Union vessels and their crew in the nearby Currituck Canal, one of the many waterways used for commerce in the area.117 The Union army responded to these irregular operations with four

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separate raids over the next several months designed to disrupt, capture, or kill men from Elliott’s guerrilla band and the other companies of irregulars that had formed in Camden, Currituck, and Chowan counties.118 An expedition in May by the Eleventh Pennsylvania Cavalry attempted to intercept Elliott’s guerrillas after they captured the boats on the Currituck Canal, but this operation ended in frustration. The boats and prisoners were not recovered.119 Over the next several months, Union forces returned periodically to Pasquotank and Elizabeth City, but their raids and expeditions met with only limited success. They killed or captured a few local guerrillas in each raid but could not destroy the threat posed by Elliott’s band or any of the other guerrilla groups in the northeastern counties.120 The expedition Union forces launched in June came as a result of an escape from a Union transport vessel, the Maple Leaf, which was overtaken by Confederate prisoners and guided to the shores of Currituck County. The Confederate officers among the escapees then made their way into the Confederate interior via Pasquotank County. Union soldiers traversed Currituck, Camden, and Pasquotank in search of these men but failed to recapture them. Once the expedition arrived in Elizabeth City, the Union troops learned that the Confederates had escaped across the Chowan River with the aid of local sympathizers, probably members of the guerrilla forces.121 One soldier who was part of that pursuit of Confederate escapees described growing ambivalence and disaffection in the Pasquotank no-man’sland. When asked to state their loyalty, many citizens in Pasquotank said “they ain’t go[t] no interest no how in the war. They don’t assist no side, and only want to be let alone to take care of their farms.” The experience of this Union soldier illustrated an increasing sense of abandonment by the Confederate government. As the violence continued in the county, more and more white citizens became disillusioned with the Confederate government and the war effort.122 Local government in Elizabeth City, which could only sporadically hold meetings because of the violence, convened on 11 July to discuss the impact of the war. At the meeting, the Elizabeth City commissioners complained that “it is known to this body that a large number of persons, citizens of this town & vicinity have banded themselves together & have agreed to resist the execution of some of the Ordinances of the town, & have with forces

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& arms violated the Ordinances of the town & threatened that they will repeat their unlawful acts.” The primary ordinance the city officials were concerned with mandated that the municipality keep the bridges and roads in good order. Since local guerrillas had destroyed the bridges during their nightly attacks, Elizabeth City officials, despite the abundant lumber in Pasquotank, could not construct new bridges or even collect a tax to fund their reconstruction. The officials adjourned their meeting in frustration.123 In July 1863, Colonel James W. Hinton arrived home to command what was now tentatively the Sixty-sixth North Carolina State Troops. In 1860, Hinton had been a successful and influential attorney; at thirty-three years of age he was also one of the wealthiest men in Pasquotank. He owned $24,350 worth of real estate and personal property valued at $7,600. His personal property included five slaves.124 Despite his antebellum influence in Pasquotank, Hinton struggled over the next several months to command the respect of the local independent companies, enforce conscription, and organize the irregulars into a regular infantry regiment.125 Union counterguerrilla operations only complicated the difficult duty facing Confederate colonel James W. Hinton back in his home county. In mid-August, the First New York Mounted Rifles and the Eleventh Pennsylvania Cavalry struck out from South Mills in Camden County across Pasquotank and Perquimans counties toward Edenton in Chowan. On their way, they skirmished with Elliott’s irregulars and destroyed more than one hundred shotguns and rifles. They also lost one man killed by the guerrillas. On their return trip from Edenton to South Mills, guerrillas again attacked a Union cavalry company of the Eleventh Pennsylvania on its way through Pasquotank. This time no casualties resulted, and the cavalry made it safely back to its base in Camden.126 Clearly, however, the guerrillas were still a viable threat, and Hinton had been unable to bring them under his authority. During this period in late August, a company of soldiers from the First U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) were involved in at least one operation outside Elizabeth City, a raid on Chowan County. Local Confederates recount the presence of one black company of soldiers with the other Union soldiers making counterguerrilla raids into the region, and this company may have been from the First USCT. Disgusted local Confederate Mrs. Lucius Johnson, who lived in Edenton, the county seat of Chowan County, explained that during these raids Union “regulars . . .

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buffs and a company of armed negroes . . . would arrest every citizen they could find. They would steal anything they could put their hands on, they would come in a house with their heavy cavalry boots on, and go out with them filled with knifes and forks.” It was during this period that Union soldiers burned Wingfield and raided Edenton in Chowan County and searched the home of Mrs. Johnson several times for arms. Mrs. Johnson described how during one raid in late August Union soldiers came to the town “to demolish every gurilla [sic] in this country and last week 1700 made a tramp through here coming through Suffolk down to Edenton thence through Hertford and E. City back to Norfolk” and in the process destroyed a large amount of property and confiscated horses, including the property of local unionist slaveholder James C. Johnston.127 This raid on Chowan County pushed federal military policy closer toward a new strategy but did not completely destroy the policy of discerning loyalty and then basing treatment on that loyalty. James C. Johnston, although clearly a unionist, was also the largest slaveholder in the entire region and was likely seen by Union soldiers as deeply suspect as a result. While it appears as though the black soldiers spent most of their time at Elizabeth City building fortifications, their incursion into the region was brief. Unfortunately, little detailing the operations of the First USCT has survived, and one of the only documents to mention these troops specifically details their evacuation. At 2 a.m. on the morning of 31 August, Union troops, including elements of the First USCT, which had also probably recruited among the black population, left in Union ships bound for Morehead City, North Carolina.128 Yet the irregulars remained active. In September a small crew from the USS Bombshell landed at Elizabeth City and was quickly captured by the Confederate irregulars who were lying in wait in the town. In response the ship briefly shelled the town. Guerrillas were clearly bringing increased hardship upon the lives of the townspeople from both branches of the U.S. military as they attempted to break up the guerrilla camps.129 In October another small detachment of Union soldiers—under Colonel Simon H. Mix, with men from the Third New York Cavalry and First Rhode Island Artillery and including Captain William L. Kent commanding part of the Twenty-third Massachusetts Infantry—reconnoitered the military and political situation in Pasquotank and attempted to disrupt

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Confederate conscription enforcement. Mix’s party landed at Elizabeth City, where the officers then stationed pickets along the roads leading into town to prevent a surprise attack. During Mix’s expedition to Pasquotank, Union pickets briefly engaged guerrillas who attacked their picket posts, and Union soldiers foraged at the homes of local Confederates Major Bell and James Scott. Captain Kent reported no casualties during his reconnaissance of the county and retrieved valuable information about the loyalty of many residents and even spoke with some unionists who desired a permanent garrison of Union troops at Elizabeth City. While Captain Kent was in Elizabeth City, unionist George W. Brooks provided him with list of local Confederate sympathizers, unionists who were being harassed by the Confederates, and a partial list of Elliott’s guerrilla band. Kent wrote after his visit that unionists in the county “incurred much risk from these same guerrillas and their sympathizers, both to life and property, in producing these facts. Emissaries of these outlaws are everywhere watching doubtful men, and in the absence of Union troops they roam the country freely, threatening with fire and sword all who do not aid and encourage them.” The experience of Colonel Mix and Captain Kent illustrate that the Union military had not abandoned the practical policy wholesale for a harder strategy.130 Mix’s men had been sent into the region largely to break up recruitment efforts launched in October by James W. Hinton. In early October, Hinton issued a call for volunteers to join his organization, but his summons fell on deaf ears. Traveling with Hinton was a medical examiner who was assigned to evaluate potential soldiers for exemption from conscription. Hinton also had at his disposal several hundred Louisiana Zouaves who were sent to South Mills to cover his efforts to enforce conscription.131 By 24 October 1863, however, a frustrated Hinton wrote to Governor Vance about the continued difficulty in securing the manpower from Pasquotank. “The almost total loss of slave labor from that section,” he asserted, “imposes upon nearly every man of family the necessity of laboring daily for their support.” That comment to Vance was not entirely truthful. Although some slaves had escaped bondage during the first two years of war, a large number of black residents both slave and free remained in Pasquotank County until late 1863. It is impossible to gauge how many remained; perhaps as many as twentyfive hundred blacks (free and slave) continued to labor in the northeastern counties as of December 1863.132 Hinton further complained that “there

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are a large number of young [white] men who do not labor at all, and who have no earthly excuse for being out of the service.” He qualified his assessment of the regional situation by stating that “in Chowan [County] I met with no difficulty; but . . . in Pasquotank . . . am inclined to the opinion . . . that but few will respond to the call.”133 And indeed, few men did respond. Elliott, who sought to remain autonomous and in control of his own men, even made a separate requisition to the Confederate authorities in Raleigh for sixty Enfield rifles and supplies for a company on 31 October.134 What is perhaps more interesting than the content of Hinton’s letter was who carried it to Governor Vance—unionist George W. Brooks. Brooks, who practiced law in Elizabeth City and owned twenty-five slaves, was one of the few large slaveholders among the unionist community.135 Hinton, who knew Brooks before the war, probably believed he was a loyal Confederate. Like many residents of Pasquotank, however, Brooks was disaffected with the war generally and had learned to hide his unionism when it was expedient to do so. By giving Captain Kent a list of ardent Confederates and guerrillas, he hoped to protect the unionist community, and by carrying Hinton’s correspondence to Governor Vance, he wanted to convince Confederate authorities to exempt Pasquotank from conscription, which would also help unionists in the region. In the fall of 1863, the Confederate government in Richmond and state officials in Raleigh wrestled with how to get the uncooperative white men from Pasquotank County under Confederate military control.136 In an urgent letter to Confederate secretary of war James Seddon following the visit by Brooks, Vance wrote that “conscription . . . has operated very well except in the counties east of the Chowan River; there they have lost all their negroes.” Furthermore, “They are cut off by gun-boats from aid or communication with the State, and are exposed to almost weekly raids from the enemy, which, from the nature of the country, it is impossible to resist.”137 Seddon’s response acknowledged the “embarrassing question” of the northeastern counties, which, while not “being in the actual occupancy of the enemy[,] are at all times open to their control.”138 Seddon and Vance, however, could do little but agree that conscription of white males with families should be suspended in the region. In an extraordinary letter from late November, Pasquotank’s justices of the peace pleaded for exemption from conscription. The justices included

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men who represented all shades of the loyalty spectrum: unionists George D. Pool, William G. Pool, William Newbold, James B. Shaw, Christopher Wilson Hollowell, and D. D. Raper; cooperationist John Pool (still living in Bertie County); Confederate P. A. R. C. Cohoon; and five other justices of unknown loyalty.139 “As you are aware we are thoroughly blockaded on all sides. The enemy in their frequent raids upon us have carried off & are still carrying off & destroying large quantities of our grain provisions & other property,” the justices complained. Because of this constant persecution, the Justices believed a special exemption from conscription should be authorized for Pasquotank. Some of the justices clearly lied to Vance when they ended the letter: “We cannot let this occasion pass, without saying to you that we believe the people generally, of this county to be as loyal and as devoted to the interest of the South, as those of any County in North Carolina.”140 This letter is the first clear example of unionist and Confederate elites coming together to alleviate the pressures of war on the county and reassert their own power of authority. The letter brought a speedy reply. In late November, Governor Vance gave Colonel Hinton permission to excuse in the six counties east of the Chowan River “all men, heads of families, whose wives and children are absolutely dependent upon their labor,” but only if a male family member “beyond the age of conscription” was not available to do the work of supporting the family.141 Even with leniency on the conscription issue, Colonel Hinton continued to face organizational troubles. The newly minted colonel had to impress upon the uncooperative local Confederate guerrilla leaders that he was their new commander. He also had to persuade the local community that he was now in control of the situation. When Colonel Hinton arrived in July 1863 with orders for the guerrillas to meet, organize into a new regiment of infantry, and begin drill, he met with resistance. By December 1863, only five of at least eight separate irregular companies in the six-county region had responded to his authority, and these companies followed his direction only when it suited their needs. The guerrilla companies east of the Chowan River that responded to Hinton’s call by December 1863 included John T. Elliott’s (Pasquotank), Cyrus W. Grandy’s (Currituck), Willis B. Sanderlin’s (Camden), Caleb Walston’s (Camden and Currituck), and Richard Keogh’s (Chowan).142 Hinton faced a difficult task, even without knowing that the Union army was preparing to send its largest expedition yet into the county. His

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efforts were constantly hampered by the independent structure and mentality of the guerrilla forces. These men, some of whom had been irregulars for more than a year by October 1863, were happy with their home-front duties and did not want to take the chance of becoming a line infantry regiment that could be removed from northeastern Carolina and the relative safety of neighborhood swamps. Union forces reported that the peaceable men left in the county were almost entirely heads of households who did not want to leave their families to serve in the Confederate army.143 Like many of the men in Elliott’s company, Daniel Bright was also reluctant to leave the northeastern North Carolina home front. While it is virtually impossible from the extant primary resources to establish when Bright first determined to rejoin Confederate service, it is plain from the muster rolls of the northeastern North Carolina guerrillas that he never joined Elliott’s local company when he returned to the home front from his infantry service earlier in the war. It is likely that during the period from mid-1862 when he returned to Pasquotank to the time he picked up arms again, he spent time working his farm, only 40 of 260 acres of which were improved in 1860. Slave control and loss of property may have also played a roll in his not running off to join the irregulars immediately, or maybe it was his experience with imprisonment in the North prior to his parole. The five hundred dollars’ worth of livestock property he owned in 1860 was valuable, and unless military service was going to offer something more than what he had seen on Hatteras Island in 1861, it would not be worth the costs to leave it unguarded. In the end, it is not clear what ultimately drove Bright back into service. Perhaps it was the opportunity to raise his own company, or maybe it was to protect his home from the Union military.144 What is clear is that sometime in the late fall of 1863 Daniel Bright elected to rejoin the fight, and this decision would be a fateful one for the young farmer.145 Matters grew more complicated for Union forces attempting to discern loyalty during their small-scale operations in the region in 1863. In November, Dr. J. R. Winslow, a Quaker living in Baltimore who had family in Perquimans County, complained in a letter to General John G. Foster that several months earlier a Union cavalry operation involving the two companies of the Eleventh Pennsylvania and two companies of New York Mounted Rifles had plundered the farms of white and black residents there. When the colonel of the regiment of Pennsylvania troops was questioned about this matter, he swore that J. R. Winslow “is not or was not a Union

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man” then and had likely shifted his loyalty for personal gain. While Union operations were sometimes overstepping the line of pragmatically assessing loyalty and doling out treatment accordingly, it is not always clear whether the U.S. forces knew that some unionists were indeed loyal in the region when they confiscated or destroyed property. Increasingly, however, the U.S. forces were garnering intelligence that made targeted operations based on loyalty possible.146 Since the fall of Elizabeth City to Union forces in February 1862, the guerrillas of Pasquotank had exacted a heavy toll on the citizens of the county. Irregular military forces in other regions of the Confederacy were often weaker in number than the Union volunteers facing them and therefore could rarely do more than slow the advance of the blue troops. But the environment of the Albemarle enabled the guerrilla companies of this region to hide and attack from unexposed positions with much greater effect than in more open country. What made guerrilla warfare during the Civil War so dangerous to any community was that it was an internal menace. The community could be held hostage collectively by a minority of its own members. The presence of these unruly and unconventional soldiers was a threat to both Confederate and unionist sympathizers in Pasquotank, since the irregulars in the county did not hesitate to live off the citizens as individuals or as a group.147 Not even the Confederate citizens could completely control the Confederate guerrillas who operated in their midst. Their activity brought the wrath of Yankee troops to their farms without any recourse. In Pasquotank, the harassment of unionists became routine by mid-1863, and several among the unionist community felt that fleeing the region or remaining silent were the only recourses to death at the hands of murderous irregulars. Those who fled guerrilla attack included many of the most vocal unionists in Pasquotank.148 But if neither Confederate authorities nor local southern sympathizers could control their own irregular military forces, Union troops could do little more to protect the citizens of Pasquotank from the devious activities of these men. Between May and October 1863, four separate Federal raids sent to stop guerrilla maneuvers ended in frustration. Union soldiers succeeded in capturing a few of the troublesome guerrillas, but the irregular bands largely eluded Federal efforts and continued to recruit new men to their ranks. Neither could the Union raids succeed in completely stopping the flow of smuggled or confiscated supplies going into the Confederate interior.149

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Despite remoteness from the great battles and campaigns of the war, the populace of Pasquotank County endured a great deal of discord from 1861 through 1863. The regional environment was well suited for defense by Confederate irregulars, who could hide out in the swamps when Union soldiers came in large numbers to hunt for them. The northern fringe of the Dismal Swamp provided a perfect haven for Confederate draft evaders and guerrilla forces during the period following the adoption of the Confederate Conscription Act. Likewise, the Federal raids in this region, aided by the U.S. Navy, would not have been possible without the open waterways and easy access to land from the Albemarle Sound. Geography was clearly a factor that put this community at risk. By December 1863, the Civil War in Pasquotank County had become a contest for power over a local white community of divided allegiances. The civilian population of this North Carolina locality, unionist and Confederate alike, were at the mercy of two seemingly inexorable and uncontrollable forces, determined Union soldiers and Confederate guerrillas. As Pasquotank’s white community struggled to retain the social and racial order of its prewar society, a Union general was about to force the divided community to fundamentally reconsider the social impact of the Confederate war effort on northeastern North Carolina.

Colonel James W. Hinton. Hinton’s efforts eventually led to the organization of many northeastern North Carolina guerrillas into an infantry regiment in early 1864. From Walter Clark, ed., Histories of the several regiments and battalions from North Carolina, in the Great War 1861–’65 (Raleigh, N.C.: E. M. Uzell, 1901): vol. 3, p. 712

Brigadier General Edward Augustus Wild. Massachusetts MOLLUS Photograph Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, PA

Abner Grandy, a member of a northeastern North Carolina guerrilla unit commanded by Capt. Caleb Walston and identified on the muster roll of “N.C. Defenders” captured during Wild’s 1863 raid. This wartime picture offers a better idea of what guerrillas in the region looked like. Photograph reproduced with permission of Alex H. Leary, Camden County, NC, www.geocities.com/gatesguards/vetphotos.html

“Negro Soldiers Liberating Slaves,” Harper’s Weekly, 23 January 1864. This lithograph depicts an important moment from the December 1863 raid into northeastern North Carolina. At the center, Edward Wild is mounted as he questions a black man and his troops free plantation slaves. In the left foreground is a local white man being interrogated under guard. To the right is a black soldier embracing a slave, who may have been a family member.

“Elizabeth City, North Carolina,” Harper’s Weekly, 15 March 1862. This lithograph pictures events following Union general Ambrose Burnside’s capture of Roanoke Island in the naval battle off the coast of Elizabeth City in early 1862. It also shows the release of Confederate prisoners to the home front that helped spark the guerrilla conflict.

3 “An Elysium and an Asylum to the Buffaloes and Union Men” Edward Wild’s Raid and the Execution of Daniel Bright

Edward Augustus Wild was an unorthodox Union general. Born in Brook­ line, Massachusetts, in 1825 of sturdy antislavery stock, Wild spent his formative years being educated first at Harvard and then as a physician at Jeffer­son Medical College in Philadelphia. The future Union commander left for study and adventure in Europe in 1848 and again in 1855. While on his second trip abroad, he served as both surgeon and soldier of fortune in the armies of the Turkish sultan during the Crimean War. When he returned to the United States after his travels, Wild joined a militia unit in Brookline. When Civil War came, Edward Wild left his successful practice as a physician to become one of Massachusetts’s first volunteer officers.1 Wild’s early Civil War service was distinguished but harrowing; he nearly lost his life on two different battlefields, one in Virginia, the other in Maryland. After a bullet crippled his right hand during the Battle of Fair Oaks in June 1862, Wild went home to convalesce. He returned to the army quickly, only to suffer the loss of his left arm at the Battle of South Mountain in September 1862. Nevertheless, Wild’s zealous belief in the abolition of slavery kept him committed to the cause of preserving the U.S. government and eager to return to the war as soon as his body mended. Wild worked his way through the ranks quickly, first as a captain in the First Massachusetts Infantry and later, in August 1862, as the colonel of his own regiment, the Thirty-fifth Massachusetts. Following his wounding at South Mountain, Wild was promoted to brigadier general in April 1863. Shortly after this pro-

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motion to a brigadier generalship, Wild’s dedication to abolitionism led him to recruit one of the first all African American combat units, partially from North Carolina’s freed slave population. This green unit, with a freshly minted brigadier general as its leader, would be referred to in official correspondence as “Wild’s African Brigade.”2 By late 1863, Wild’s distinguished combat record and his racial beliefs won him a spot serving under Union major general Benjamin Butler, who was then in command of the Norfolk, Virginia, garrison as well as the Department of Virginia and North Carolina, which included northeastern North Carolina. In December 1863, the passionate General Wild led his eighteen-hundred-man force of black soldiers, recruited only months earlier from towns in North Carolina, Ohio, and Massachusetts, in an expedition to the coast of the Old North State. Some of Wild’s black soldiers had even been slaves in northeastern North Carolina counties but by late 1863 had made their way to the Union lines at Roanoke Island, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Plymouth, or New Bern, where they were recruited into combat regiments.3 Even with the loss of early war runaways, the northeastern region of North Carolina was still populated with a large number of slaves who could easily be liberated if a Union commander were inclined to press the issue. General Wild later estimated that he freed roughly twenty-five hundred black people during his raid; even if this estimate was exaggerated, it still can be taken as evidence that a large number of blacks remained in the county as of December 1863.4 Such an operation might also deny Confederate forces needed supplies from this wealthy agricultural district. Once emancipated by their brethren in arms, the remaining male slaves might join the ranks of Wild’s new command. Furthermore, Wild and Butler focused on northeastern North Carolina because of the recalcitrant guerrilla resistance in the counties along the northern side of the Albemarle Sound. Wild’s soldiers would be the first African American brigade to be sent on a major counterguerrilla operation against white Confederate guerrillas in the eastern theater of the war.5 The Confederate guerrillas were daily harassing the minority unionist community of northeastern North Carolina, especially those unionists residing in Elizabeth City. Wild’s command hoped to stop the guerrillas and blockade running while confiscating the surplus crops and livestock of Confederate citizens, which might otherwise fall into the hands of Confederate commissary

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officers. Indeed, during this period General Butler himself acknowledged the problem of sutlers and supplies moving freely from Roanoke Island to Pasquotank County, asking, “What is the use of blockading Wilmington and supplying the rebels through Roanoke Island?”6 With these objectives in mind, Wild secretly prepared in the late days of November 1863 to dash into the hostile no-man’s-land of Pasquotank, Camden, and Currituck counties. The demography of Camden and Currituck counties was slightly different from that of Pasquotank. Compared with the large free black population of Pasquotank County, the free black populations of the other two counties were much smaller but not insignificant: 274 and 125, respectively. Like Pasquotank County, Camden and Currituck both had large slave populations. By 1860, Camden slaveholders held 2,127 blacks in bondage, in a county with exactly 2,942 white residents. Similarly, Currituck slaves numbered 2,523, while the white population was significantly larger, with 4,669 residents. Unlike Pasquotank, where the black and white populations were almost equal in size, these counties had white populations that clearly outnumbered their sizable black populations. In Currituck, the ratio was not quite 2 to 1, white to black, and in Camden the white population was about 15 percent higher than the black population. The slaves and free blacks in Camden and Currituck, as in Pasquotank, primarily worked as agricultural laborers on corn and wheat plantations or as hired labor on smaller farms.7 Wild’s forces would attempt to succeed where earlier counterguerrilla raids in the northeastern region during 1862 and 1863 had failed. When Wild started his troops from their bases in Virginia on 5 December, they marched in two separate columns. The first, which he led himself, left from Norfolk and included the Fifth U.S. Colored Troops, one hundred men from the First North Carolina Colored Volunteers, and the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts.8 The other column left from Portsmouth, Virginia, and consisted of the First U.S. Colored Troops and the Second North Carolina Colored Volunteers.9 Altogether Wild had parts of five different infantry regiments under his command, and some of his men knew the region where they were headed very well. By the end of the war, 94 black men from Pasquotank had enlisted in Wild’s African Brigade; 53 joined the First North Carolina Colored Volunteers, and 41 served with the Second North Carolina Colored Volunteers. The average age at enlistment of the men from Pasquotank who joined both

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of these units was twenty-four years old. At their enlistment, the majority of the 94 men listed their occupation as farmer or laborer, 44 and 39, respectively. Nevertheless, a small number listed their occupations as cook (1), servant (2), shingle maker (1), carpenter (2), sailor (1), barber (1), steward (1), or underage (1) or did not give an occupation (1). Among these soldiers were 18 free blacks, 9 of whom owned less than $150 in personal property and 1 of whom owned $200 in real property. The remainder of the men had probably been slaves before their enlistment in the Union army. Although a few of these black troops were recruited following the raid, seventy-nine of them actually were with Wild on the expedition through the three northeastern counties.10 During the early days of December 1863, Wild and his “sable braves” meandered their way south, past the canals and through the forests of southern Virginia, across the state line, and into the heart of northeastern North Carolina.11 As they entered the Albemarle region, the black soldiers skirted swamps on narrow footpaths and sauntered confidently by large plantations. A New York Times correspondent known only by the pseudonym Tewksbury attached himself to Wild’s command and described his journey into this difficult country. “The [region’s] inhabitants being almost exclusively ‘secesh,’ the colored boys were allowed to forage at will along the road,” the reporter wrote.12 General Wild also commented that during the early days of the raid “we were . . . obliged to live on the country for a few days; which we did judiciously discriminating in favor of the worst rebels.”13 Wild and his soldiers congregated at South Mills in Camden County, just north of Pasquotank, on 7 December. While at South Mills, Wild was reinforced by two companies of cavalry and a section of artillery from Norfolk. Of this group, both the Fifth and Eleventh Pennsylvania Cavalry companies had previously operated as a reconnaissance force in the northeastern region during the fall of 1863. At South Mills, Wild’s men busied themselves with rebuilding a bridge across the Pasquotank River that had been destroyed earlier in the war. As part of the rebuilding project, Wild ordered the home of a local captain of the Confederate guerrillas torn down and used as wood for the bridge.14 Wild likely selected this home with the help of the Pennsylvania troops that had been operating in the region for several months. The tearing down of the captain’s house was the first recorded destruction of a building during Wild’s expedition, but it would not be the last. Wild then crossed the river and started southward toward Elizabeth City.

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When the African Brigade arrived at Elizabeth City on 10 December, General Wild established a headquarters at the home of unionist Dr. William G. Pool.15 “Three years ago it was a busy and beautiful little city, noted for the number of its stores and manufactories, the extent and variety of its trade, for its enterprise and the rapid increase of its population,” wrote Tewksbury. But he continued, “Now most of the dwellings were deserted; the stores all closed; the streets overgrown with grass, its elegant edifices reduced to heaps of ruins by vandal Georgian troops [who had occupied the town during 1862]; the doors of the bank standing wide open, and a sepulchral silence brooded over the place.”16 Wild decided to determine the loyalty of the local citizens once he set up headquarters in Elizabeth City. The general had already heard about the minority unionist population, and with the help of the prominent unionist Dr. Pool and almost certainly his black soldiers from Pasquotank, he identified virtually every assertive unionist who remained in the county. This list totaled fifty-three, nearly every one a head of household (see Appendix, tables 1–4).17 “After careful inquiry,” Wild later recorded, “I have been able to make out a list of genuine Union citizens of Elizabeth City and vicinity.” He continued by describing the loyalty of the entire region: “We found the majority of people along our track to be reasonably neutral; that is to say, although sympathizing with the South, they were tired of the war, or weary of their own distresses and privations; harassed by the frequent alternation of masters, being plundered by both sides; or despondent of the ultimate success of the South; or convinced of the doom of slavery; or aware of the mischief arising from the presence of guerrillas in their midst.” With true New England skepticism, Wild further qualified his assessment of local loyalty: “[O]r if really neutral, or sympathizing with the North, they were usually (and reasonably) afraid to speak their minds, on account of Guerrillas etc.” In short, Wild noted disillusionment with the Confederate cause among the white population of Pasquotank. As he soon learned, however, when the property of disloyal men was threatened, men who claimed neutrality or Confederate sympathies would rapidly shift their public political statements to support the Union.18 At Elizabeth City, General Wild also began carrying out his principal order to free local bondsmen. “Slaves belonging to isolated plantations were constantly coming to headquarters and asking the General to protect them in the removal of their families,” Tewksbury recorded.19 He described one

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incident in which a member of Wild’s brigade likely recruited on Roanoke Island asked the general for permission to retrieve his son, who was enslaved at the farm of his own former master. In response to the black soldier’s request, Wild sent him on that mission with a contingent of guards to ensure their protection. In the end, the man rescued his son from bondage.20 As Wild and his soldiers set about the business of removing slaves from all local plantations and offering them safe passage to the Union Freedmen’s Colony at Roanoke Island, they encountered resistance from irregulars in the vicinity.21 Since some of Wild’s men had at one point been Pasquotank residents, there was an added dimension to Wild’s upending of the racial order. Not only was he putting black men over white by giving black men the power to confiscate white men’s property and fight them on the battlefield, but he was also placing former slaves or black employees in a position of power vis-à-vis their former owners or employers. This blatant defiance of racial hierarchy clearly disturbed the local guerrilla companies and must have been on their mind as they planned operations against Wild’s troops.22 During one of Wild’s first encounters with the local Confederate forces, Captain John T. Elliott’s Pasquotank guerrillas captured Private Samuel Jordan of the Fifth U.S. Colored Troops. Fearing that Jordan would not be treated as a legitimate prisoner of war but as a rebellious slave, Wild used an unusual, if not unprecedented, method to ensure his protection.23 He took two hostages, Elizabeth Weeks and Phoebe Munden, the wives of local irregulars then serving in Elliott’s company. Wild likely would have settled for the wives of any local irregular; Weeks and Munden were probably just the most accessible. In addition, Wild captured twenty male citizens suspected of being Confederate soldiers home on leave.24 The day after Jordan’s capture, Wild sent out a party to Hertford, the seat of neighboring Perquimans County, to break up the organizational camp of Colonel James W. Hinton. Hinton had apparently established a camp in nearby Perquimans after meeting with recruitment problems in Pasquotank. The expedition succeeded in destroying two guerrilla camps in lower Pasquotank County, but when the Union soldiers arrived at the banks of the Perquimans River, they found the bridges across the waterway destroyed and the channel unfordable. They returned to Elizabeth City never having reached Perquimans County and having captured only one suspected guerrilla, local farmer Daniel Bright.25

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During Wild’s raid in Pasquotank, his men destroyed two homes and a barn, all owned by Confederate sympathizers. The barn burned by Wild’s troops was the property of Ed Jennings and was a likely base of supply for local guerrillas. The two homes included Daniel Bright’s and that of the guerrilla commissary officer William T. White, a member of Elliott’s guerrilla band. All in all, these actions demonstrated a measured level of violence aimed specifically at guerrillas and their Confederate supporters.26 Meanwhile, the Confederate guerrillas east and west of the Pasquotank River watched, scouted, and waited for evening to fall. “The Guerrillas pestered us,” General Wild later noted in his report. “They crept upon our pickets at night, waylaid our expeditions, and our Cavalry scouts, firing upon us whenever they could.” Even though the Confederate guerrillas were deeply annoyed, they did not seem to fear Wild’s troops, since they continued to attack and lay traps for his soldiers. No doubt, however, the seizure of two local women and twenty men and the destruction of Confederate property sent fear through the hearts of the peaceable Confederate community, and the fact that all this was carried out by African American soldiers was impossible for either local unionists or Confederates to ignore. Confederate Richard Creecy described Wild as “a monster of humanity, cousin to Beelzebub,” and later wrote that his raid “was a subjugation to the decent white population that remained in the town and an elysium and an asylum to the buffaloes and union men who were in the town.”27 Confederate officers in northeastern North Carolina looked on with great frustration as Wild and his black troops accosted Pasquotank’s residents. During mid-December, two Confederate colonels, who were both perplexed with Wild’s activities and afraid of the consequences to both men and supplies from the region, sent off a flurry of correspondence to their regional commander, Major General George E. Pickett. Pickett, who had lost his position in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia following the debacle at Gettysburg, now commanded the Confederate forces in all of eastern North Carolina from his base at Petersburg, Virginia.28 On 14 December 1863, worried about his inability to hold Wild and the African Brigade at bay, Colonel Hinton wrote to Pickett that “[m]y little force— about 500 strong—are doing all they can to hold them in check, but cannot operate successfully against so large a force.” Pleading with Pickett, Hinton asked, “Can you not, general, send a brigade to the relief of that commu-

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nity?” Fearing serious repercussions, Hinton warned that “[i]f they are not Speedily dislodged, the Confederacy need not expect to get any more provisions from that section of country, but it they are driven off, the quantity of pork and bacon that will come to the Confederacy from the east side of the Chowan [River] will be truly incredible.”29 The next day another dire message came from the Confederate forces near Pasquotank. Colonel Joel R. Griffin of the Sixty-second Georgia Cavalry/Partisan Rangers, who operated independently of Hinton in southern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, also sent Pickett an urgent message. “Enemy, 1,500 strong, negroes and whites,” Griffin wrote frantically. The black soldiers are “committing all kinds of excesses; insulting our ladies in the most tantalizing manner.”30 In response to the impassioned pleas of his subordinates, Pickett grew deeply concerned about the further loss of resources from his theater and the continued embarrassment to his own reputation. He fired off a letter to the Confederate War Department suggesting that “we could send a cavalry expedition of our own down in such neighborhoods to collect and bring in the negroes . . . as every day loses so much valuable property to the Confederacy.” Irritated with the inability of his own forces to respond efficiently and effectively, Pickett charged that “Butler’s plan, evidently, is to let loose his swarm of blacks upon our ladies and defenceless families, plunder and devastate the country.” He then openly threatened retaliatory execution: “Against such a warfare there is but one resource—to hang at once every one captured belonging to the expedition, and afterward any one caught who belongs to Butler’s department.”31 Writing the same day to his troops stationed in the Albemarle, Pickett reinforced his earlier statement with an unequivocal order: “Any one caught in the act (negroes or white men) of burning houses or maltreating women, must be hung on the spot, by my order.”32 Pickett was not the only commander growing frustrated with the military situation along the Albemarle. Wild was irritated with the incessant guerrilla attacks on his troops and on 17 December sent a dispatch to the guerrilla captain Elliott. In the letter Wild threatened that he held “in custody Mrs. Munden and Mrs. Weeks as hostages for the colored soldier taken by you. As he is treated so shall they be, even to hanging.”33 Later that day, Wild busied himself with the proceedings “of a drumhead court-martial.” At this hearing, he reviewed the status of the twenty

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prisoners seized during his excursions to local farms and plantations. Most of these individuals Wild probably detained for aiding and abetting Confederate forces. But he believed that one of those captured, farmer Daniel Bright, was in fact a deserter from the Sixty-second Georgia Cavalry/ Partisan Rangers, who had returned to his home to join the Pasquotank guerrillas (Bright apparently claimed to have been a member of this unit during the hearing). Wild accused Bright of engaging in pillage and other illegal activity. During the “court-martial” General Wild acted as both judge and jury. Little else is known about the proceedings, except that he based his decisions largely on whether the accused could prove legal status as a conventional Confederate soldier. His prisoners could do this by producing paperwork stating that they were given legal furloughs from the Confederate army. At the proceedings, Phoebe Munden and Elizabeth Weeks were ordered detained, and eight men were sent to jail in Norfolk charged with “various offenses.”34 The latter were most likely the soldiers at home who were granted official leave from their units. The rest of the twenty prisoners were released without punishment and without any further discussion of their status. Perhaps they were suspected of supporting the guerrillas and, after arraignment, Wild decided that they were not worth incarcerating.35 Daniel Bright, however, could not produce proof of his own legitimacy as a conventional soldier. Bright, unlike the other men, was charged with robbery and desertion from the Confederate unit to which he allegedly belonged. Wild’s men had captured Bright in lower Pasquotank when they were on an expedition sent to Hertford. More than likely, Wild’s soldiers seized Bright as a suspect when they were searching for the perpetrators who had destroyed the bridge over the Perquimans River. During the court proceedings General Wild produced three witnesses, Henry Borough, William Russell, and Henry James, who confirmed that Bright had actively supplied the guerrillas living in the swamps of Pasquotank County and had been in arms while doing so. While Henry James testified to having seen Bright only with a pistol in his hands, William Russell swore that Bright had helped him “carry arms and powder into the swamp,” and Henry Borough positively confirmed Bright’s status as an irregular: “I saw him with a musket in his hands when he belonged to the [guerrilla] company.” For General Wild, Bright’s activities and inability to prove his status as a legitimate combatant led him to pass a sentence of execution and condemn Bright to

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hang. Following the court-martial, Wild began the withdrawal of his troops from Elizabeth City, which they had occupied for seven days.36 “About noon” on the following day, 18 December, Wild stopped on his march north from Elizabeth City and executed Bright, leaving his body to hang in the small hamlet of Hinton’s Crossroads (also known as Hintonsville on contemporary maps of the county) on the edge of the Dismal Swamp.37 His choice of where to execute Bright is telling. Wild exhibited the body at a crossroads close to the swamps of northern Pasquotank County, where many of the irregulars lived. It was also directly across the road from the dwellings of people who may have been supporting the swamp denizens. Wild obviously wanted to send a clear message to the irregulars and the local community of unionists and Confederates. Attached to Bright’s dead body was a message condemning the man for his guerrilla activities. Bright’s body became a declaration about who wielded power over the community. Wild’s use of African Americans to guard the captured white wives of the guerrillas, who looked on helplessly as Bright swung in the wind, also sent a strong racial message to the few people living near Hinton’s Crossroads. Those few residents of the small hamlet bordering the swamp must have carried news of the hostages and the hanging to Elizabeth City, only a few miles down the road. The presence of the newspaper correspondent Tewksbury at the execution ensured that the sensational events of Wild’s raid would reach regional and national newspapers within a few days. By January 1864, from Milledgeville, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, southern newspaper readers learned of the hostage taking and hanging of the guerrilla Daniel Bright.38 Upon quitting Elizabeth City, Wild had divided his men to strike at a broader area. One of these groups went by water to Powell’s Point in lower Currituck County. The other columns moved north to Hinton’s Crossroads. After Bright’s hanging, Wild marched his portion of the force into northern Camden and Currituck counties. Of Camden Tewksbury noted: “At first, the country was poor, and the houses were mean,” but by afternoon, Tewksbury described “spacious corn-fields on every side.” Finally, the black troops came upon an area of wealth and splendor. “In no portion of the South had I seen more magnificent plantations,” he wrote of lower Camden.39 A local Confederate irregular later reported that Wild burned “six or seven houses in Camden County.”40

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But amid all the grandeur there was significant danger. As the African Brigade marched toward Indiantown in Currituck County on the afternoon of 18 December, it was ambushed by three different companies of guerrillas. The following day Wild retaliated with fire. He burned every suspected guerrilla home within a four-mile radius of Indiantown. He also detained Major D. Gregory, an elderly man in his seventies, who was suspected of aiding the irregular forces. Wild’s troops seized Gregory as insurance, since a second of Wild’s black soldiers had been captured.41 As with Pasquotank County, Wild found neighboring Camden and Currituck full of hostile irregular forces living in the deepest parts of the local swamps. He also discovered that destroying the guerrilla menace could be time-consuming and difficult owing to the environmental conditions. “Finding ordinary measures of little avail” in his hunt for irregulars, a frustrated Wild “adopted a more rigorous style of warfare, burned their houses and barns, ate up their live stock, and took hostages from their families. This course we followed throughout the trip [through Camden and Currituck] . . . [and] we learned that [the guerrilla companies] grew disgusted with such unexpected treatment.” Although he and his men clearly had changed their methods between the initial phase of the expedition in Pasquotank and the later phase in Camden and Currituck, Wild did not acknowledge his own escalation in violence until writing his official report.42 Wild explained that during one of the forays against irregulars he “drove them a long chase into their swamp, and after much trouble, struck their trail . . . a succession of single felled trunks leading in to their citadel. We filed in singly, burned their camp.” Following another encounter in Camden and Currituck, he wrote that “after burning the neighboring houses and giving them another chase, we . . . sent out Col. Draper with 170 to attack Captain Grandy’s [guerrilla] Camp, situated like the others in the center of the swamp . . . accessible only Single file over a pathway of felled trunks, from a third to a half mile long.” After destroying this irregular fortress, Wild then sent his subordinate Colonel Alonzo Draper to Knott’s Island, where more slaves were in bondage and where another band of irregulars was reportedly operating. During Draper’s brief independent excursion, he took another woman hostage—Nancy White, the daughter of a lieutenant in Coffey’s company of Confederate irregulars.43 With three local women then in custody, Wild and his men were violating traditional gender norms,

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and this tactic raised the stakes in his effort to root out irregular forces in the region. On 22 December, Wild again attempted to communicate with the irregulars. He sent a letter to Captain Willis Sanderlin of the Camden County guerrillas threatening retaliation for the capture of a second black soldier from his command. Wild took Major D. Gregory as a hostage because Gregory’s name appeared on a muster roll of “N.C. Defenders” that Wild and his men seized at one of the guerrilla swamp hideouts. Wild also determined that Gregory’s farm was a major supplier of corn for Willis Sanderlin’s guerrillas.44 Ultimately, he released Gregory, but the old man died, probably of a stroke, not long after the traumatic experience. According to Confederate accounts, the black soldier for whom Gregory had been taken hostage later escaped; Samuel Jordan, the first black soldier captured by the guerrillas, remained in their custody.45 Edward Wild and his men had now been away from their base in Virginia for more than two weeks. On 23 and 24 December, his men exhausted and foot sore, Wild turned his troops back toward Virginia, laden with confiscated goods and trailed by a large assembly of blacks, a group whose number probably included both former slaves and free blacks from all three of the counties Wild visited. Soon thereafter, Wild summarized his raid’s accomplishments: “We sent by water 9 loads [of blacks] to Roanoke Island, and two to Norfolk, besides 4 long trains overland. The exact numbers it was impossible to count, as they were constantly coming and going,” Nevertheless, Wild estimated “2500 Negroes released and migrated.” “But few recruits were gained,” he complained, “as the ablebodied negroes have had ample opportunities to escape heretofore, or have been run over into Dixie.” Despite this assessment of recruitment, he estimated that between seventy and one hundred African American soldiers were enrolled from Pasquotank and the surrounding area. Wild was equally proud of his counterguerrilla operations: “We burned 4 Guerrilla camps, took over 50 guns, 1 drum together with equipment, ammunition etc, burned over a dozen households, two distilleries etc, took a number of prisoners.” Neither did he shy away from discussing in his report his use of hostage taking to coerce and deal with the guerrillas. We took “four hostages for our men taken prisoner, 3 women and one old man, hanged one Guerrilla, captured 4 boats engaged in contraband trade, took

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many horses.” He finished his official account by thoroughly endorsing the performance of his black troops. “The men marched wonderfully—never grumbled, were watchful on picket, and always ready for a fight. They are most reliable soldiers.”46 Wild astutely discerned the nature of the guerrilla forces that he faced and attempted to gauge his response to them accordingly. His brief description of the resistance provides interesting background on the composition and operations of Confederate irregular forces in North Carolina. It is clear from his assessment of the Confederates he faced that Wild detested everything about irregular warfare. “The organization of the guerrillas is loose and improper, and ought not to be recognized,” he asserted in his official report to General Benjamin Butler. “They are virtually bandits, armed and hired by Governor Vance,” Wild continued. “They have not defended and cannot defend their State, nor any portion of it. They can only harass us by stealing, murdering, and burning; by stopping negroes from reaching us, and by driving them over the lines, and harass their own State by plundering, terrifying, and even murdering Union citizens,” the general believed. Wild also offered the revelation that the Confederate government was tacitly recognizing the actions of the guerrillas even though they could not control them. Wild noted that the guerrillas were calling themselves “N.C. Defenders,” that the men expected payment from the state of North Carolina, and that Confederate officials had even provided new Enfield rifles to the guerrilla units.47 Edward Wild’s report provides rare insight into the mind of a Civil War commander dealing with the intractable problem of guerrilla war. During his three-week occupation of the region, his troops tried and executed a guerrilla and publicly displayed his corpse. His men also burned the homes of other suspected irregulars, took hostage four family members and supporters of the guerrilla resistance, and ultimately hauled off thousands of dollars in farm products, livestock, and slave property that might have otherwise been used to support the Confederate cause. Through his actions, Wild demonstrated the power of violence in communicating the will of the state to this rural community. For Wild and his command, violence became the most effective educational tool for a community filled with guerrillas. But violence was not the only form of power Wild wielded over these North Carolina communities. Racial and mild sexual displays of power also

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became ways of communicating to the Confederate, unionist, and guerrilla members of the population his expectations regarding appropriate conduct. Wild’s message to the guerrillas was clear; he wanted the irregulars to abandon their activities and join the regular Confederate service. In fact, during the raid Wild had even sent a message to Captain John T. Elliott unequivocally stating his feelings. “Guerrillas are to be treated as pirates,” Wild wrote, and “you will never have rest until you renounce your present course or join the regular Confederate Army.”48 Clearly, what Wild disdained even more than Elliott’s Confederate loyalty was the irregular nature of his military unit. To the local community the message was less explicit. Local blacks saw his raid as an opportunity for freedom, and by the end of it, more than twenty-five hundred (free and slave blacks) were ushered north to Virginia under the guard of black soldiers.49 The situation for white residents was complex. By capturing and guarding white women with black soldiers, Wild used race as a weapon that enraged Confederate guerrillas and unnerved local Confederate citizens. According to the New York Times journalist Tewksbury, secessionists were “completely panic-stricken. Scores of families fled into the swamps on [Wild’s] approach. Never was a region thrown into such commotion by a raid before.” The Yankee journalist also believed that “[a]n army of fifty thousand blacks could march from one end of rebeldom to the other . . . the terror they would inspire making them invincible.”50 “General Wild . . . understands the guerrilla pathology,” believed Tewksbury, “and can give prescription that will cure every time.”51 The New York Times reporter was clearly convinced of the racial power at play in northeastern North Carolina, and he explicitly described the military prowess of black soldiers in this southern guerrilla war. “This raid possesses historical importance,” he commented. “It is the first of any magnitude undertaken by negro troops . . . and by it the question of their efficiency in any branch of the service has been practically set at rest.” Furthermore, Tewksbury was “confident” that black soldiers “will prove far better guerrilla-hunters than the whites.” He even defiantly charged that “[w]hen the rebellion shall have subsided into partisan warfare, so far from lasting forever, as Jeff Davis threatens, our colored troops will take care that its end is soon reached.” He concluded: “It is an instructive turn of the tables that the men who have been accustomed to hunt runaway slaves hiding in the swamps of the

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South, should now[,] hiding there themselves, be hunted by them.”52 This final comment published in the most widely read northern newspaper focused on psychologically shaming white southerners for both guerrilla violence and their racial beliefs. It also had a direct connection to Daniel Bright, who had served as a slave patroller prior to the war. Local white unionists faced a different problem than that confronting Confederates. When Wild discussed the situation of the unionist minority in the region, he was empathetic. Some of these men “have hired their slaves on share of profits, a few even . . . pay them money. [Unionists] have, of course, been cautious and silent; but they have been persecuted more or less,” the general thought. He concluded, “I would respectfully suggest that such men deserve some extra discrimination in their favor, in the way of protection, &c.”53 An angry member of Pasquotank’s unionist minority, perhaps Dr. William G. Pool, suggested a public message to the entire community concerning the problem of guerrilla war.54 It is not clear whether Wild ever issued this unionist statement to the people of Pasquotank County, but the proposed declaration highlights two factors both Wild and local unionists perceived as being most important to citizens of the northeastern counties: peace and property. According to Wild, this letter was “written by a professional gentleman of excellent judgment, discretion, and experience, residing at Elizabeth [City]. He, with all the rest, supposed that we were intending to occupy the city permanently, and he urged me to issue a proclamation and follow it up by action.” Wild included a copy of this letter in his official report to Major General Butler: a timely warning. General Butler intends to exterminate all guerrillas east of Chowan River, and will use any and all means to do so. If it cannot be done otherwise, property of all sorts will be destroyed, and the country entirely laid waste. If citizens wish to prevent such universal destruction of their property, they must aid our authorities in ridding this country of these land pirates. It now rests with them to save themselves and property, or not. We have force now here sufficient to accomplish our purpose, and we shall immediately enter upon the work. Now is the time for the people to come forward.55

Wild himself suggested the following as the formal edict to the entire region if it were to be occupied and the Union line extended to the Chowan River:

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To the inhabitants of Currituck, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Gates, and Chowan Counties: All guerrillas are on a par with pirates, and are to be treated as such. The fact of their being paid by the State, and being called “Partisan Rangers,” does not help the matter. Neither the Governor of the State nor Jefferson Davis can legalize such a style of warfare. You will never have any rest from us so long as you keep guerrillas within your borders. It will be for your interest, therefore, to exert yourselves actively in driving them out. You can do this, not only by refusing them food, shelter, and support, but by giving information against them to the military and naval authorities at every opportunity, and by arming yourselves against them whenever possible. All slaves are now at liberty to go where they please, or to stay. By assisting them on their way with food and transportation, you can save yourselves the necessity of visitations from the colored troops. By thus avoiding the two causes of molestation, you can preserve peace within your borders.56

Wild’s empathy for Pasquotank unionists like Dr. William G. Pool caused him to suggest a more proactive Union military strategy in this part of North Carolina. He urged the extension of the Union lines around the northeastern region, noting that “the Pasquotank [River] is a natural barrier, being wide and deep.” And if the river were to be controlled by Union forces, “the advantages of such communication would be very great. It would go farther towards reclaiming the inhabitants of that region than any other measure.” Wild believed that “the only drawback or danger arising from the Guerrillas, I could rectify in two weeks of stern warfare. The included territory comprises exceedingly productive tracts which would be brought to bear next season, if the inhabitants could be assured against other alternation of masters and have confidence on protection.” He asserted that in this sector of the state “the rebels have been and still are drawing vast supplies for their Army and for their great works.”57 Wild and his men were caught up in the ongoing debate about Union military policy toward southern civilians, especially the amount of violent force that should be applied to local communities in order to coerce Confederate guerrillas.58 At first glance, he appears to have used extreme violence against the guerrillas and civilians throughout his expedition. He took innocent civilians hostage, executed a man, and destroyed or confiscated a significant amount of personal property during the course of his December 1863 raid. Earlier writers who have focused on Wild’s conduct during this

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expedition have portrayed him as a man desperately trying to live up to his own name. Wild has been represented as both a complex abolitionist who could not control his urges to punish southern slaveholders and a man who consistently tried to buck authority. In short, earlier scholarly work has created an image of Edward Wild as a wild Union general, a man who could not be trusted to perform his duties prudently when southern slaveholders were at his mercy. Because his men “foraged for food from the very beginning of the raid” and selectively destroyed the homes of guerrillas and some of their supporters, Wild’s actions in northeastern North Carolina have also been interpreted by his biographer as “wanton destruction.”59 Despite his unusually strong commitment to black equality and his zeal for fighting guerrillas, Wild never systematically or indiscriminately used violence to kill civilians. Although he clearly moved from a more lenient strategy of confiscation and destruction based on loyalty to a harsher warfare later in the raid, he never completely abandoned restraint toward the civilian population at any point. During the first phase of his occupation of the northeastern region, Wild discriminated between Confederate and unionist southerners and targeted those who were disloyal to the Union government for confiscation of certain kinds of property: corn, wheat, and livestock.60 But during the second phase, Wild did not remain as concerned with the issue of loyalty; anyone in his path might be a guerrilla supporter and therefore might have his or her property destroyed or confiscated. As the general left Pasquotank for Camden and Currituck counties and his frustration grew, he reevaluated his military policy toward southern civilians in northeastern North Carolina and shifted toward a harsher strategy. Between 18 and 24 December, Wild’s method of “judiciously discriminating” among all civilians gave way to “a more rigorous style of warfare” toward the guerrillas and their supporters, especially as he entered the area around Indiantown in Currituck County. Guided by the captured muster rolls of “N.C. Defenders” that his men had discovered at a guerrilla camp, he put roughly a dozen homes to the torch in Camden and Currituck.61 Wild was still relying on a list of secessionist guerrillas to target and did not indiscriminately use violence against civilians, but he stopped trying to discern the loyalty of the civilians he targeted with nonhuman property confiscation and home destruction. During the second phase of the raid, Wild confiscated both unionists’ and Confederates’ property. In the brief

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period of a few days surrounding Daniel Bright’s execution, one can see Wild’s mind-set shifting from a careful and discriminating policy in Pasquotank to a harsher and more indiscriminate strategy during the final days of the incursion. One incident documented by a correspondent for the New York Daily News involved a unionist from Camden County whose property was confiscated by Wild and his troops. The reporter believed that “[m]any of these people [from the northeastern region] to my knowledge, were loyal, and had been so for months. . . . They had certificates of protection from the former commandants at this post, and no man questioned their good faith.” Nevertheless, the critical journalist described how “[w]hen [General Wild] took the property of Mr. Morrisetts [sic], of Camden County, North Carolina, [Wm. J. Morrisett] interposed his certificate of loyalty; Gen. Wild paused for a moment, took the property, however, promising to return it when he reached Norfolk.” In the aftermath, however, “[t]he old man followed him to this city, and again pressed to his attention this promise and the shield of a Government manifesto, but in vain. [General Wild] flatly told [Wm. J. Morrisett that] this property belonged to his negroes, and his [unionist] loyalty did not protect him.” “I saw the tear gush from the old man’s eye as he turned away,” the reporter recounted, “muttering in the anguish of his broken heart, ‘I am a ruined man; my children are beggars.’”62 Another unionist, John Bottoms of Camden County, described how Wild’s men came to his house and camped in his yard. While at the house, Wild’s men seized “one Horse, 10 hogs, 1 sow, 5000 lbs. of fodder, and 40 barrels of corn.” Likewise, unionist R. R. Guirkin of South Mills in Camden County had a large amount of property taken by Wild’s troops, including “8 barrels of corn, 8 head of cattle, 1800 pounds of fodder, 18 head of hogs, 2 horses.”63 Some northeastern North Carolinians were clearly disillusioned with the war and desired to drop out of the conflict entirely. Yet they were not spared the hardship of Wild’s expedition. In Currituck County, Edmond Simmons, whom unionist Thomas G. Munden called “a quiet citizen, who remained at home and attended to his own business and did not meddle with public affairs,” had fed both Union troops and Confederate guerrillas when they came to his property, but only because “[h]e was forced to do this.” Citizens who claimed neutrality made Wild’s job even more difficult,

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and when his troops visited Simmons’s property during the second phase of the raid, they seized “two horses, one yoke of oxen, two carts, fifteen barrels of corn, fifteen bushels of peas, four thousand juniper rails for fire wood, twenty-five hogs, fence rails worth one hundred dollars.”64 These incidents show that Wild became less concerned with discerning loyalty during the second phase of the raid. Moreover, disillusioned citizens made Wild’s expedition more difficult by making it nearly impossible to determine their loyalty, and without adequate intelligence (like the list he made in Pasquotank with the help of William G. Pool), he saw no other option but to confiscate the material of any citizen who could not prove loyalty. Perhaps the most striking evidence of Wild’s shift toward a harsher military policy is the absence of a “Wild list” of unionists from Camden or Currituck like the one he made for Pasquotank County.65 Even though Wild moved away from loyalty as a criterion for confiscation of goods and destruction of property during the latter part of the raid, the expedition was not an early example of what one historian has called “localized total war.”66 The line between combatant and noncombatant never completely broke down. Even during the period when he adopted a harsher scorched-earth policy, Wild did not kill civilians rampantly. Though he changed his mind about how to deal with the guerrilla threat after the execution of Daniel Bright, he never subjected the civilian population to systematic extermination or forced depopulation. The line between soldier and civilian remained relatively intact even during the second stage of Wild’s expedition.67 The Massachusetts general’s racial policy demonstrated one clear use of harsher warfare. This policy did not evolve throughout the raid but was applied to all civilians regardless of loyalty during the entire course of the three-week operation. In just under three weeks, Wild emancipated a large portion of the slaves left in Pasquotank, Camden, and Currituck counties.68 If unionists in Pasquotank were paying wages to their former black slaves, that was a highly unusual phenomenon, but it did not guarantee that these blacks would not elect to leave with Wild’s troops and head north. Clearly, forced emancipation ordered by Butler and carried out by Wild was aimed at destroying the economic infrastructure of the Confederate community.69 The execution of the guerrilla Daniel Bright and the hostage taking of several members of the community also throw into stark relief the issues

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that pushed Union generals toward rethinking their methods on the southern home front. Wild used violence as a form of communication when he publicly executed Daniel Bright. Through this execution, which he carried out personally, Wild sent a message about the appropriate conduct expected between honorable belligerents. In making a public display of violence near the stronghold of local guerrillas, he shrewdly calculated the effect that one concentrated demonstration of power would have on this southern community. There is significant debate among historians about whether Bright’s execution was, in fact, legal under the existing laws of war. Wild’s biographer argues that the general incorrectly believed that Bright was a “war rebel” as defined under Article 85 of “Frances Lieber’s Code.” Frances Lieber, a Columbia College jurist, analyzed guerrillas and their official military status under the laws of war in his legal writings at the request of Union general in chief Henry Halleck. Halleck, a renowned military scholar in his own right, deferred the question of guerrilla legitimacy to the foremost legal mind of the day. Lieber’s thoughts, first published in 1862, were later formalized and issued to officers as Union General Orders No. 100 on 24 April 1863.70 Lieber defined the war rebel as a person or “persons within an occupied territory who rise in arms against the occupying or conquering army or against the authorities established by the same.” If he categorized Bright as a war rebel, Wild believed that he deserved execution under the laws of war. Bright, according to Wild’s biographer, was not a war rebel but a legally operating member of Company L, Sixty-second Georgia Cavalry/ Partisan Rangers. This position is essentially the same one that a Confederate congressional committee adopted in February 1864. This committee, set up to investigate Wild’s raid, subsequently referred to Bright as “a member of the Sixty-second Georgia Regiment, under command of Col. J. R. Griffin, [who] had received authority from the Governor of North Carolina to raise a company in that county for local defense. Failing in the effort, he had retired to his farm, and was there seized, carried off, and executed.”71 If Bright failed to raise a company commissioned by the governor, why did he retire to his home and not return to the Sixty-second Georgia? No document has surfaced from Governor Zebulon Vance to Daniel Bright or even Colonel Griffin about a new company being formed. Colonel Griffin acknowledged afterward that Bright was a member of his unit. Even so,

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Griffin offers no explanation in his correspondence about why Bright was away from his company.72 If Bright really was a member of the regiment, it is virtually impossible to prove because no compiled service record for him exists. He appears on no muster roll for the Sixty-second Georgia, and the rolls for this unit do not even list a Company L, to which Bright supposedly belonged.73 Unlike several other soldiers whom Wild captured in the raid, Daniel Bright was not sent to Norfolk as a prisoner of war because he had no papers proving his status as a legitimate combatant. His lack of papers is strange, indeed, if Bright had really been given permission by the governor of North Carolina to raise a new company. He might at least have had papers proving a legal furlough from the army. Furthermore, according to Tewksbury, who watched the execution, Bright was not in uniform.74 Without a uniform, he could not be categorized as a lawful Partisan Ranger operating independently from his unit. If, indeed, Bright was engaged in pillage as Wild suspected, was not in the uniform of his regiment, and had no documentation to prove his status, then he fell within the legal bounds for execution. The Federal account provides a more practical answer than the Confederate investigatory committee. Farmer Daniel Bright, according to Wild and later Major General Benjamin Butler, who defended his subordinate’s position, most likely deserted the Sixty-second Georgia to join the Pasquotank guerrillas or to start his own irregular company.75 Wild and Butler believed that as a deserter Bright fell into the categories laid out in Articles 82 through 85, Section 4, of Lieber’s Code. These sections describe the appropriate punishment for irregular soldiers. If Bright was a deserter and not a Partisan Ranger “belonging to a corps which acts detached from the main body,” he was not entitled to prisoner-of-war status as a legal Partisan Ranger. Under Lieber’s Code Bright fell into several categories including “armed prowlers,” “armed enemies not belonging to the hostile army,” and “war-rebels.” Each of these categories called for summary execution of the captured person.76 Wild adhered to the law by holding a hearing for his captured guerrilla during which he could assess his status. In the end, the general reasoned that if Bright was involved in destruction of property, pillage, bridge burning, and supplying guerrillas, he deserved execution.77 Another indication that Bright may have been a deserter was the high rate of desertion from the northeastern region. One historian has argued

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that the northeastern region experienced 23.6 percent desertion among its enlisted troops during the war. This figure is significantly higher than even the 16.0 percent among enlisted troops in the allegedly disloyal mountain counties of the state. It is very likely that Bright was exactly what Wild and Butler said he was—a deserter turned guerrilla.78 Wild’s use of hostages is also open to debate. Other examples of hostage taking during the Civil War preceded Wild. In Sumter County, Tennessee, the wife of a guerrilla was taken hostage in retaliation for the capture of a local unionist by irregulars. Other extreme measures were taken by Union forces facing guerrillas in the western theater, such as the burning of entire villages at Randolph, Tennessee, and Hopefield, Arkansas, in 1862 and 1863, respectively. According to Frances Lieber’s Code, such actions were legal under extreme conditions. When Wild took hostages, he was acting under the legal parameters of protective retribution. Lieber outlined this portion of his code as a way to use retributive acts to curb devolution into a state of chaos in war when no laws or boundaries applied or were adhered to by belligerents. In May 1863, the Confederate Congress had adopted a policy that would have (re)enslaved any blacks captured in Federal uniform. Desiring to prevent this (re)enslavement, Wild seized local citizens to prevent what he viewed as an even greater injustice than hostage taking: being enslaved. Nonetheless, hostage taking was unusual and went further than most officials were willing to go in search of a solution to the guerrilla problem.79 Wild showed restraint in not killing every guerrilla sympathizer he captured, but he saw his failure to destroy the entire guerrilla population in Pasquotank and contiguous counties as the consequence of applying violence too sparingly. In his official report, he came to the conclusion that many other Union commanders were also coming to during this period: that only “stern warfare” toward irregulars coupled with support for local unionists had a chance at solving the problem of guerrilla violence.80 Following Wild’s expedition, General Benjamin Butler defended his subordinate’s military strategy and the conduct of his soldiers while in the Albemarle. “I think we are much indebted to General Wild and his negro troops for what they have done,” asserted Butler in a letter to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, “and it is but fair to record that while some complaints are made of the action, authorized by Gen’l. Wild against the inhabitants and their property . . . the negro soldiers made no unauthorized

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interference with property or persons, but conducted themselves with propriety.” Butler seemed to think that Wild had operated with practical restraint during most of his raid. Yet even Butler had some criticism of the operation. Referring to the confiscations and property destruction of the final phase of the raid, Butler commented that Wild operated “with great thoroughness, but perhaps with too much stringency.”81 Wild’s brief incursion into the northeastern region of North Carolina demonstrates the difficulties of waging a limited war against resisters on the Confederate home front. In Wild’s response to the guerrilla problem one can see his initial attempts to curb guerrilla violence while also retaining unionists’ loyalty in a politically divided community. But one can also see how easy it was for a commander in a difficult position to become less restrained in his treatment of innocent civilians while fighting an irregular war. Moreover, Wild’s personal experience in northeastern North Carolina shows that Union military policy was not always created in Washington, D.C., or even at the headquarters of the army theater commander in the field. Policy could be created by any local commander operating independently of the larger field armies, and this commander’s policy did not have to conform to the dominant doctrine of the Federal government. Wild’s raid and the execution of Daniel Bright remind us that the recalcitrant problem of guerrilla activity in no-man’s-land communities, like Pasquotank, Camden, and Currituck counties, was a key element that pushed Union commanders in many localities across the South toward the harder tactics that became dominant by 1864, and the reaction of Pasquotank’s war-weary white population to Wild’s raid was about to make that harsher Union policy seem a very good idea.

4 “Without Aid or Protection from Any Source” Negotiating Neutrality for Pasquotank County

Guerrilla violence was a statewide problem in North Carolina by late 1863, involving both unionist and Confederate irregular groups from the mountains of western North Carolina to the central Piedmont counties to the coast of Pasquotank. In some North Carolina communities, especially in the mountains and Piedmont region, Governor Vance had authorized local Confederate home guard companies to protect the citizens of these communities against unionist guerrilla bands, enforce Confederate conscription, and round up unruly deserters and recusant conscripts. As part of their mission, these Confederate home guards, along with regular cavalry, fought self-constituted anti-Confederate groups across more than onethird of the state, but the protracted irregular conflict in which they were engaged disrupted the residents’ daily lives and threatened their safety.1 In other communities, like Pasquotank and the rest of the northeastern counties, it was Confederate irregulars, not Confederate home guards, regular cavalry, or politically dissident elements, who were the source of chaos and fear among the local citizens. The Confederate experiment with statesanctioned irregular units had negative results in many localities across the South, but in northeastern North Carolina it was an unequivocal disaster. Not only could Confederate irregulars not be controlled by North Carolina officials, but they also brought upon Confederate citizens retaliation from Union generals like Edward Wild. Although some white Confederates had been slow to recognize the menace that guerrilla war had created in Pas-

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quotank County during 1862 and 1863, they did recognize it after Wild’s counterguerrilla operation, and they reacted adversely to the consequences of that operation—the sensationalized violence of Daniel Bright’s execution, the hostage taking of local women, the use of black soldiers in combat roles, and the shock of lost slave labor. Pasquotank county’s white and black populations responded to Wild’s demonstration of power over their lives in different but equally profound ways. Members of the free black and slave community used Wild’s operations as an avenue to freedom or movement north. A small number of former slaves saw the black troops in blue and joined their ranks. But however individual blacks chose to respond, the majority of the black community regarded Wild as a liberator who had provided an opportunity for them to free themselves from slavery on the plantations of the Albemarle district or peonage in the swamps of northern Pasquotank County. Although it is difficult to gauge how many free blacks chose to stay in Pasquotank after the raid, it is clear that virtually all the slaves left, many of them making their way to the Freedman’s Colony on Roanoke Island.2 If most blacks viewed the events of December 1863 positively, the white citizens of the county, divided by internal political disagreement, saw the Wild raid quite differently. At the end of December 1863, the whites in Pasquotank, unionist and Confederate alike, faced a dilemma. For nearly two years, since the fall of Elizabeth City, neither the government in Raleigh nor the Union army had been successful in protecting their county. At times, both governments seemed indifferent toward the plight of this remote but prosperous agricultural sector of the state. Only one factor had remained constant: a contest for power over who would dominate the politically divided population. Prominent Confederates in Pasquotank feared further reprisal by Union troops, but their local guerrillas, who reigned supreme at night on the roads outside Elizabeth City, were unable to protect them. In the wake of Wild’s raid, the local economy was in shambles, the antebellum racial and social order shattered, and the population war weary from constant violence. Confederates were ready to be rid of Union raiders for good. Some of these Confederate leaders were committed enough to preserving peace and property that they were for a brief period willing to work with unionist community members in order to restore social stability.

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General Wild’s fifty-three “truly loyal” Union men faced a different kind of problem once Wild and his black troops left the region. Wild had not spared their slave property, but he had shielded them from the violence of his troops and confiscation of their other possessions. The loss of slaves hurt them economically, but at least their homes and farms had been protected. Yet these supporters of the Federal government continued to fear for their safety. The unionists in Pasquotank wanted to get Confederate or Union authorities to control the irregulars in order to prevent future incursions from either side that might disrupt their local economy. Since the Confederate irregulars were community members who knew the unionists and where they lived, the shifting tides of power on the coast of the Albemarle left the unionist population most vulnerable. However General Edward Wild’s raid into Pasquotank affected individuals within white society, unionists and Confederates faced the same quandary in 1863: how to stop the violence perpetuated by both sides upon their community. Many leading white citizens, regardless of political allegiance, were tired of war, and the peaceful majority of this politically divided community was ready to see its local war end. Thus on Saturday, 19 December 1863, only one day after Daniel Bright’s execution, influential citizens from both sides gathered for an urgent meeting at Elizabeth City.3 The meeting brought together prominent unionists and Confederate leaders, bridging divided allegiances. It also brought many disillusioned members of the community who were now calling themselves “neutral” when Union or Confederate troops came to their property. One of the men who participated in the meeting was Confederate Richard Creecy. A Confederate sympathizer throughout the war, Creecy arrived in Elizabeth City with few answers to Pasquotank’s problems. Creecy, who probably knew Daniel Bright from service in slave patrols during the 1850s,4 provided a complex explanation for why the community held the meeting after Wild left the county and why he attended. Years later Creecy wrote that, for a Confederate like himself, “not going meant death” at the hands of Union soldiers and that his “whole family begged [him] in supplication to attend the meeting and sign the petition [put forward by the community].” Creecy recounted how in 1863 “he had ten children, most of them small, an invalid wife with an infant child, our only means of transportation a lame mule, and the sole person to handle a large household and their append-

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age, [my]self.” “So, from necessity,” Creecy explained, “we had to stand our ground, [and] face the consequences or attend the Wild meeting, sign the petition, and pretend to be in sympathy with an enemy that we abhorred in every fiber and tissue of our constitution.”5 But Creecy’s discussion of the meeting as published in 1900 may have been disingenuous given his actions following the December 1863 gathering. His desire to cast himself as a Confederate to the bitter end in his postwar writings may have clouded his memory of precisely why he attended. After all, Creecy stood as much to lose from future Union and Confederate incursions as anyone else in the county. Furthermore, even though his own fifteen-year-old son, Edmund Perkins Creecy, served in John Elliott’s band, Creecy voted with the majority opposing the guerrillas publicly at the Pasquotank meeting.6 What Creecy saw once he got to Elizabeth City on that Saturday in December “almost paralyzed” him. There in the heart of the county seat only one day after Wild and his troops moved beyond Pasquotank’s borders “stood a man, clad in a confederate grey uniform, with a captain’s cap on and a musket on his shoulder, grim, fierce looking, the embodiment of hate and defiance. It was Tom Tamplin, the captain [actually second lieutenant in Elliott’s company] of the guerrillas, as brave a man as ever lifted arm in a fight—blessed be his memory.” Creecy thought Tamplin “was making a note of every wretch he saw coming to attend this meeting of buffaloes.” Although he in fact supported the guerrilla resistance and his own Confederate sympathies must have been known by the irregulars, Creecy seemed somewhat concerned about the uncontrollable nature of the Pasquotank guerrillas.7 Creecy assessed the loyalty of the crowd in attendance with disparaging comments, including a scornful reference to antebellum Whig conservatism in the county. “We went up in the courthouse with the crowd,” Creecy described. “The room was packed. Only about a dozen secessionists were in the crowd. The rest were spies, buffaloes, union men and fence men who kept on the side of the upper dog, and were buffaloes with buffaloes, confederates with confederates, union men with union men, and fooled nobody.”8 Clearly men representing a cross section of the county’s loyalties were in attendance. Creecy then “[over]heard a union man say to another, ‘This is a glorious time.’” To which his companion replied, “We

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have never had such a time since the day that [the Whig and American Party leader Kenneth] Rayner spoke on no [sic] nothingism.”9 Creecy, a staunch Democrat, was obviously not pleased with the people with whom he was associating, but his own concern for the safety of his family and fear of further economic loss pushed him to briefly swallow his pride and his political sentiments. In his postwar writings, Creecy stated that he went to the gathering only because he thought his life was in danger, but given his own weariness of the guerrilla leader Tom Tamplin, it was probably fear of both the unionist raiders and the Confederate guerrillas that drove him to go. While at the gathering he agreed to represent the community as an ambassador to meet with Governor Vance; his sole purpose in so doing was to gain the withdrawal of the guerrillas from the county—an action that would have largely shielded the county from future incursions by Union troops and simultaneously restored a social order in which wealthy elites, not poor Confederate irregulars and unionist Buffaloes, controlled daily affairs. Despite his postwar explanation, Creecy had permitted the entire community of unionists, Confederates, and “fence men” to send him as part of their three-man delegation to Raleigh.10 Also present at the 19 December meeting were notable members of the unionist minority. These men included Isaiah Fearing, an Elizabeth City merchant; John D. Markham, a poor farmer; and George W. Brooks, a wealthy planter and lawyer. This group represented a cross section of class in the county and at the same time a cross-class alliance among the unionist minority. Fearing served as secretary of the meeting; Markham was assigned the task of gathering signatures of men from his district of the county; and Dr. William G. Pool, another wealthy local who according to Richard Creecy “looked as happy as a sun flower,” presided as chairman of the gathering.11 It is not clear how each man was selected, but it is likely that their influence among their respective class groups within the community played a role. While Confederates across North Carolina tended to stereotype and deride unionists as poorer citizens—and many of them were—in Pasquotank and elsewhere in the South some of the most influential unionists were established businessmen.12 Isaiah Fearing also represented the mutability of loyalties in the community, since he had served in the Seventeenth North Carolina Infantry

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(First Organization) and when mustered out returned home to Pasquotank. Either Fearing was yet another unionist who had been forced by a local vigilance committee to serve in the Confederate army in 1861 and 1862, or sometime between his return to the home front in 1862 and Wild’s raid in December 1863 he shifted loyalties. Wild and his men identified Fearing as a unionist during their operation. Perhaps the local economic pressures on the prominent merchant forced him to side with the Confederacy during the early war and by 1863 he had become disillusioned with the Confederate cause. Little is certain about Fearing and his allegiances. What is clear is that he took on a prominent role in the meeting led by many unionists, and General Wild listed him as a loyal man. Fearing’s apparent shift in allegiance, however, is representative of the difficult position in which many in the community were placed during the conflict and why residents chose to hold a meeting that day in December 1863.13 The men who attended the meeting took four important steps in an attempt to solve their wartime security dilemma. First, the community appointed two committees of men, one to go to Raleigh, the other to meet with General Butler at his headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia. The committee sent to meet with Governor Vance included Richard Creecy, Dr. J. J. Shannonhouse, and William H. Clark; the delegation to Butler consisted of George W. Brooks, George D. Pool, and John J. Grandy. None of the men sent to Raleigh were on Wild’s list of unionists, and all three of the men sent to Butler were identified by General Wild as loyal. That the committees included both Confederates and unionists indicates that both sides supported the meeting’s resolutions. The two committees were charged with carrying the community’s message to the authorities of both governments. The second decision made at the gathering was to appoint five men to act as emissaries to the other counties of the northeastern region. These citizens were appointed “to bear the proceedings” of the Pasquotank meeting to the other counties of the northeastern North Carolina no-man’sland, including Gates, Perquimans, Chowan, Camden, and Currituck. The community then “unanimously” approved two separate resolutions to send with all of the county’s representatives.14 Finally, the men at the meeting appointed a person in each of the seven districts of the county to secure the signature of every white male over the age of eighteen on the resolutions.15 The proceedings of this meeting provide a window into the thoughts of a divided community. “The county of Pasquotank has suffered immensely

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since the fall of Roanoke Island, without aid or protection from any source,” wrote secretary Fearing on behalf of the gathering. According to the proceedings, General Wild and General Butler had brought “universal panic and distress” to the county. Furthermore, they were “assured by General E. A. Wild, in command of this force, that he will continue to operate here, even to the destruction, if necessary, of every species of property for the purpose of ridding this county of ‘partisan rangers.’” The citizens at the meeting “believe[d] that these rangers cannot be of any service to us, but that their further presence here will bring upon us speedy and inevitable ruin.” Having been “promised to be ‘let alone’ if these rangers be removed or disbanded,” the community decided to send emissaries to ask for the withdrawal of local Confederate guerrillas.16 After recounting their plight during the previous two years of war, the citizens approved two resolutions as messages for the North Carolina legislature, Governor Vance, and General Benjamin Butler. Their modest goals were clearly stated in the two declarations. The first resolution “earnestly petition[ed] the Governor and Legislature of North Carolina satisfied that you cannot protect us with any force at your command, to remove or disband these few rangers.” The second statement “denounce[d] that species of business carried on here by private citizens for private gain known as ‘blockade running,’ and that we will hereafter use our best efforts to suppress such trade.” By the end of December, the petition included the signature of 523 people, every white man remaining in the county who was not fighting in the guerrilla resistance, including Richard Creecy.17 In the days following Wild’s raid, the community demonstrated its Whiggish/Constitutional Union political heritage by searching for a middle ground between the two belligerents, just as the majority of the county’s voters had done in late 1860 and early 1861. Pasquotank’s voters supported the Constitutional unionist John Bell as their presidential candidate in 1860, voted against a secession convention in February 1861, and promoted a Union delegate for that convention, and now they sought a middle road to defend their community from the ravages of war. Both unionists and Confederates promoted a platform of neutrality, protection from both belligerents that was to be negotiated by local leaders on behalf of a beleaguered community. But why did the community of divided loyalties come together? What compelled citizens to briefly put aside their loyalty to a regional or national

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cause to support local resolutions? Three overlapping motives worked in concert to bring this divided community to support the resolutions of this public gathering: desire for peace and social stability, protection of property, and preservation of racial order. Social stability and property were two major factors inspiring people to subordinate ideology to the cause of immediate safety. In the wake of Wild’s raid, the citizens described “panic and distress” and fear of “destruction . . . of every species of property.” The leading members of the Confederate and unionist communities thus temporarily put aside their political differences and agreed to work together for the restoration of public order and relief for their particular locality from the stress of guerrilla war. After many in the county watched the war come to their doorsteps, peace from outside threats, whether it was a local guerrilla or a black Union soldier, became more important in late December 1863 than public proclamations of political loyalty. Furthermore, the elites who made up the committees to Norfolk and Raleigh were concerned with the local chaos caused by Confederate irregulars and unionist Buffaloes of the lowest social class fighting one another. Only the reestablishment of an antebellum social hierarchy and local elite rule would prevent the situation from continuing down an already bloody road.18 The third major factor that brought the divided community together was a desire to reestablish the racial order that had been destroyed by General Wild. The white community’s reaction to the presence of Wild’s black troops demonstrated its unwillingness to accept a new social order: even if white citizens in Pasquotank realized that slavery was threatened as a social and economic institution after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, they were not ready to proclaim black equality and destroy the cultural mores of their locality. The citizens at the meeting, however, probably did not include a denunciation of black troops, since they understood that doing so would not have secured them any safety from future Union raids. The immediate reaction by Pasquotank citizens to this emancipation raid should be viewed in context of this community’s long history with trying to control its black labor force. Even though few blacks remained in the county after the raid, it is easy to see how reestablishing safety from armed black soldiers would be a driving force for a community seeking neutral status. The confluence of racial fears, property loss, and desire for social

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order mitigated loyalty conflict for a short period, and during that phase, unionists and Confederates developed resolutions for neighborhood protection. Pasquotank County organized its own negotiation for neutrality between two opposing governments for immediate reasons specific to its private, local war. Negotiating neutrality blazed a path between two enemies locked in a deadly struggle on the coast of North Carolina. By appealing to the better senses of both Union army authorities and North Carolina officials, the community sought a respite from the violent incursions of irregulars and raiders. The resolutions adopted at the meeting were not feigned unionism meant to appease Federal authorities, since they were not a declaration of loyalty to the Union. Unionists had compromised some of their loyalty to attempt to gain something from the North Carolina Confederate authorities. Neither were the resolutions an outright repudiation of Wild and his activities that would persuade the North Carolina state authorities of the community’s unfailing devotion to the Confederate cause. The resolutions were a central course, a plea for peace, and a renunciation of the violent practices of guerrilla war by a community that had for nearly two years overwhelmingly sponsored it. Despite being under extreme duress, Pasquotank Confederates could have remained politically inactive and silent as a defense mechanism. And, indeed, it is surprising that the disaffected Confederate majority did not do just that by not attending the meeting—after all, in May 1862, Elizabeth City secessionists had prevented a similar county meeting when the Union navy had threatened retaliation for persecution of local unionists by Confederate irregulars. Or, since Wild and his men had left the county, the majority Confederate citizens could have forced a strong denunciation of the raid at the meeting. Yet nearly every white male left in the county signed the resolutions, a remarkable display of solidarity, even if temporary.19 Since the community was overwhelmingly Confederate in 1861, with more than three hundred of its white men entering Confederate service when the hostilities began, it is safe to assume that a large proportion of the signa­ tories of the 1863 petition at one time considered themselves Confederates, or at the very least loyal to North Carolina.20 Nevertheless, many of these people were disillusioned with the Confederate war effort. In addition, since most Pasquotank Confederates had not been ardent secessionists

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during early 1861, they were prepared to briefly subordinate their Confederate leanings in the hope of securing peace from an outside threat, be it from a Confederate guerrilla or Union raider. The Pasquotank resolutions declared publicly that the social bonds of community, public safety, and the preservation of property were stronger forces than regional loyalty and sacrifice to a larger cause at this time and in this particular home-front locality. Feeling abandoned by the Confederate authorities in Richmond and Raleigh (except when they needed supplies and manpower) and persecuted by Union African American troops, this southern locality adopted a carefully calculated neutral position as a way of surviving the war. The citizen meetings held in the northeastern region of the state fit into the broader “Quiet Rebellion” that one historian has observed among the disaffected citizens of Civil War North Carolina, which included more than one hundred peace meetings being held across the state in late 1863. While some historians of North Carolina’s war experience have tied disaffection with the war directly to a class division between many nonslaveholders who withdrew their support for the war and the slaveholders who remained committed to the Confederate cause, in Pasquotank it was not just the nonslaveholders who ultimately supported a neutral position in late 1863 and early 1864. Part of the reason many wealthy elites supported neutrality and negotiation was to avoid further class upheaval at the hands of poorer Union Buffaloes and Confederate irregulars. The wealthy slaveholders and elite leaders of the community along with a great many poorer but peaceable citizens became so frustrated with the social chaos on the home front that they were prepared to put aside their loyalty to the Union or Confederate cause and plead their region’s case to both governments in a desperate quest for peace.21 In late December, General Benjamin Butler greeted with enthusiasm the resolutions and the committee that arrived at his headquarters from Pasquotank. “The effect” of General Wild’s expedition “has been . . . that the people of Pasquotank, Currituck, Camden, Perquimons [sic], and Chowan Counties have assembled, and all passed resolutions . . . and three of the counties have sent committees to me,” wrote a confident Butler.22 From the number of committees Butler met with in late December, it appears as though the delegations Pasquotank County sent to the surrounding communities were successful in spreading the gospel of neutrality beyond their

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own borders. In his description of the Pasquotank committee, Butler noted that “the resolutions are signed by 523 of the inhabitants of the County, the average vote being eight hundred. Every prominent man, I am informed by the committee who present the resolutions, that has not signed them has left, and gone across the lines.” This last sentence probably meant that the white men had fled over the Chowan River to Bertie County, as some residents, like John Pool, had done in 1862 and 1863. Butler, reassured by the community delegations, asserted on 31 December 1863 that “the Guerrillas have also been withdrawn from these counties, to the relief of the inhabitants.” Within only a few weeks, he would find that his verdict on the guerrillas and their fate in Pasquotank was hasty.23 General Butler not only met with community members from Pasquotank about the raid and its social and political fallout; he also defended General Wild to the Confederate sympathizers in the Norfolk area.24 On 10 January 1864, Butler responded to a letter from Elizabeth W. Upshur, a Virginia woman who condemned Wild and the use of black soldiers against innocent white civilians. “You are entirely mistaken and misinformed as to what was done at Elizabeth City,” wrote Butler dispassionately to the woman. “I have had the committees from five counties, Pasquotank, Currituck, Camden, Perquimans, and Chowan, here, and their universal testimony is that the negro soldiers did nothing but what they were ordered to do. They committed no acts except under the orders of their officers.” He qualified this earlier statement by arguing “that we had to burn the houses and carry away the families of guerrillas . . . but it was done under orders.” Going even further in his defense of the black soldiers, Butler asserted that he had “yet to learn of a single outrage by a colored soldier committed upon any of the people of Norfolk or Yorktown, and there are three regiments at one place and four at the other.” Butler was a careful politician in the aftermath of the Wild raid. Clearly, Butler was being disingenuous with the woman in order to protect the image of Wild and his black soldiers. He would make his unhappiness with the second part of the raid clear that same week by issuing a new directive on the treatment of civilian property.25 During the same week he received the letter from Upshur, Butler laid out a clear policy dealing with destruction of homes and confiscation of property. “No officer should do an act which he is not willing to certify having done,” Butler ordered. “It is therefore the duty of every officer taking

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any property from any peaceable citizen, whether loyal or disloyal, to give a certificate to the party . . . from whom it is taken.” Butler also stipulated that the certificate should include “an accurate inventory of the property, the time when and place where and person from whom [the property was] taken, with the name, regiment, and company . . . of the officer actually making the seizure.” Furthermore, Butler authorized that “[i]n case it becomes necessary . . . to destroy any houses, buildings, or other property, a certificate stating the cause of the act should be given by the officer making the order or doing the act to the person claiming, or it should be affixed to the nearest prominent object . . . and in each case a report made to the immediate commander of the act done.” By issuing these specific directives on destruction, Butler was seeking to shore up a pragmatic policy that was being steadily eroded across the South and prevent the new, harsher form of warfare used in the second phase of the Wild raid from permanently taking hold.26 While Butler was fending off private complaints, southern outrage at Wild’s raid morphed into a nasty and vituperative racial attack on the black Union troops. When the Virginia fire-eating secessionist Edmund Ruffin sat down to pen his diary entries in the winter of 1863 and 1864, Butler and Wild were on his mind. “A Yankee force . . . moved from Norfolk upon Elizabeth in N.C. The inhabitants of that town had been subjected to every kind of robbery & insult by the occupying negro troops,” wrote the disgusted Ruffin. “Among such insults, a common one was to compel respectable & formerly wealthy ladies not only to furnish meals for any requiring parties of the negro soldiers, but to cook & serve meals, for the hated guests, under still more insulting & degrading treatment.” He further added with scorn that “Brute Butler is in command for lower Va & N.C.” and “his recent government in Norfolk is worse than ever.”27 Ruffin went on to comment about the execution of Daniel Bright and the hostage taking. “The most atrocious outrages are perpetrated by the [Union] military officers not only on men, & civilians, but on respectable families, on the pretended ground of retaliation, for capture & refusal to release captured Yankee soldiers, & especially negro soldiers.”28 Ruffin, who regularly abused Confederate president Jefferson Davis in his diary, “predict[ed] that nothing will be done on our part to retaliate for the murder of Bright, the imprisonment of [Major D.] Gregory, & the imprison-

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ment in handcuffs, & ten-fold worse indignities, & even the future hanging, of the two innocent ladies.” But if disgusted with his own government’s inaction, he also defended Daniel Bright and his status as an irregular. “Even if a man’s acting as a guerilla, in defence of his family, home & property, was an offence deserving death by hanging after capture, Bright was not so amenable, as he was an enrolled confederate soldier, & not a guerilla.”29 Ruffin’s comments about black soldiers and Bright’s legal status would become the two most popular defenses of Confederate irregular activity in the region and condemnations of Edward Wild’s raid. Diarist Catherine Anne Devereux Edmondston, who lived on a plantation in nearby Halifax County, was equally distressed by the violence in Pasquotank. In a diary entry for 17 January 1864, she wrote that the “papers [are] filled with . . . details of the outrages committed by Wild in Eastern N C . . . Private letters tell us that the half is not told. Armed negroes . . . rove through the country & seize from the defenceless inhabitants what they list. God help them & keep us from a like fate.” Holding little respect for northern generals and the Emancipation Proclamation, she sarcastically added that such acts represented “the tender mercies of Abolitionism!” But Edmondston was most angry with the treatment of white women. She condemned General Butler and his soldiers, whom she described as “[u]nfitted to cope with armed men or to manoevre [sic] an army in the field,” adding that Butler’s “sphere is to triumph over the defenceless, insult innocent women, and to add hardship to an already severe lot.”30 Ruffin and Edmondston were not the only concerned southerners studying Wild’s raid; the southern press was also attracted to the story, and their coverage sensationalized the record of events. The Charleston Mercury, not known for its moderation in discussing incidents involving purported black-on-white violence during the antebellum period, put forth a vehemently racist interpretation of wartime events in Pasquotank. “On the streets the ladies of the place were jostled by the negro troops, and had to permit them to walk by their side and converse with them, on pain of arrest and punishment for insulting ‘United States troops!’” Moreover, the journalist commented that “any information laid by a negro against a white man was received as conclusive evidence and brought swift punishment upon the alleged offender. The negro ran riot during the Yankee stay in the Albemarle country.” Trying to reassure its readers about the poor qual-

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ity of black Union soldiers, the Charleston paper noted that black soldiers “fled like wild deer on being fired upon, and were shot as they ran.” Using tactics similar to the arguments employed by white racists to justify the lynching of black men during the Jim Crow era, the Mercury also insinuated sexual advances by black soldiers toward Pasquotank’s women. The paper described how Phoebe Munden and Elizabeth Weeks “were kept in handcuffs until taken to Norfolk, where they are kept in jail. They were guarded by Negroes, who never left them under any circumstances. . . . We have not space to narrate the many heartless cases of cruelty perpetrated by these fiends.”31 It did not take much imagination for many white southerners to understand what “the many heartless cases of cruelty” narrated by the Mercury’s journalist may have involved. While Butler was fending off attacks from southern letter writers and the Confederate press denounced the abolitionist Edward Wild for alleged abuses, the Confederate delegation from Pasquotank County, including Richard Creecy, made its way across the Chowan River to the state capital. Creecy arrived at Vance’s office, and the other committeemen appointed him to be the spokesman for the group. Creecy’s willingness to participate in the delegation sent in 1864 to request the removal of the guerrillas demonstrates that he supported the neutrality proposal formulated at the 1863 meeting. Creecy described to Governor Vance the difficult situation east of the Chowan River. At one point, he mentioned how Benjamin Butler was in overall command, and Vance angrily asked if he wanted him to negotiate with “damn Beast Butler.” Vance received the committee with some reticence given the purported unionism of the region from which it hailed, but Creecy assured Vance that “we execrated Butler as much as he did, and that the true Southern men of Pasquotank whose patriotism had been tried by fire and outrage, thought the same.” It is clear that Creecy was trying to assure Vance that Pasquotank remained loyal to the Confederate cause when in actuality most citizens of the locality wanted peace and stability, not a Confederate nation. Creecy, nevertheless, ended his own account of the meeting by simply stating, “We accomplished our purpose.” The outcome for Pasquotank and its proposal for preserving local peace and safety, however, remained unsure, and with few Confederate troops available, Vance could only continue his policy of attempting to force guerrillas to organize as a regiment.32

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Making a solution to the guerrilla problem even harder on Pasquotank citizens was the fact that the southern newspapers picked up on the story of the Pasquotank resolutions and the trip to meet with Vance in early January 1864 and interpreted these public meetings in eastern North Carolina as disloyalty to the Confederacy. The press angrily responded by condemning the resolutions that asked for the removal of the guerrillas. The editors of the Mercury claimed that hundreds of names on the Pasquotank petition were those of conscripts avoiding the Confederate government. “The fact is,” wrote one southern journalist, “this portion of North Carolina is reported to be disloyal, and to be a convenient harbor for deserters and fugitive conscripts, who, with the black banditti and other elements, make up a population unrivaled, perhaps, in Christendom, certainly in the Confederacy, for lawlessness, outrages, and atrocity.”33 Ultimately, Governor Vance responded to the Pasquotank resolutions and Confederate press by condemning the hostage taking and wondering in his official correspondence whether his North Carolina troops then organizing and operating in Pasquotank County were, in fact, lawful soldiers entitled to prisoner-of-war status when captured. Writing to the commissioner of prisoner exchange, Robert Ould, Vance asked “if some arrangement cannot be made to include these troops within the cartel of exchange and repress if possible this horrible, cowardly and damnable disposition on the part of the enemy to put women in irons as hostages for negro soldiers!” Like others, Vance made the direct connection between white women and black soldiers. He also attacked General Wild personally: “Such men as this Wild are a disgrace to the manhood of the age, not being able to capture soldiers they war upon defenceless women! Great God! What an outrage.”34 Ultimately, however, there was little Vance and the legislature could do. Since they were strapped for resources, their best course of action was to ask local military commanders to muster guerrillas into regular service, organize a defense, and bring the raid to the attention of the Richmond government.35 In early January 1864, the Confederate Congress in Richmond, a body often lethargic and slow to act, speedily appointed a committee to investigate “the recent outrages alleged to have been perpetrated in the northeastern part of North Carolina by the armed forces of the United States.”36 The investigating committee was chaired by an eastern North Carolinian, W. N. H. Smith. Smith, the former Whig who had been elected

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in 1859 to represent the First North Carolina Congressional District, also sat on the important joint House and Senate Military Affairs Committee of the Confederate Congress during much of the war. He would hardly have a chance to begin his inquiry before more violence gripped northeastern North Carolina. While the government waited on “persons and papers” to arrive relating to the Bright execution and the hostage taking, the spectacle of a public hanging again shattered the peace of the Pasquotank countryside near the crossroads of Hintonsville. 37 Using General George E. Pickett’s order to retaliate as pretext, the irregular soldiers under Captain John T. Elliott rode into northern Pasquotank on 12 January 1864 and hanged one of the captured soldiers from Wild’s command, Private Samuel Jordan of Company D, Fifth U.S. Colored Troops (USCT).38 Jordan had been captured by the Pasquotank irregulars on or around 11 December 1863 and may have been initially mistaken for a white man, since he was apparently light skinned.39 Samuel Jordan was at first misidentified by both Union and Confederate authorities; both sides referred to him as “Pvt. Samuel Jones” of the “Fifth Ohio” Infantry, the confusion arising because the Fifth U.S. Colored Troops were recruited in Ohio.40 Using the same beam from which Bright’s body had been hanged, the guerrillas reasserted their vision of racial hierarchy in their southern community. Like the execution of Daniel Bright, the Samuel Jordan hanging was a demonstration of power meant to convey a message. Guerrillas reaffirmed their power over their community and at the same time briefly reestablished the white-over-black racial hierarchy that existed before the Wild raid. In Jordan’s hanging, the local Confederate irregulars also acted out their belief that black soldiers did not deserve status as prisoners of war.41 At least one black soldier in Wild’s command, Milton M. Holland, an orderly sergeant in the Fifth USCT and one of only sixteen black Civil War soldiers to win the Medal of Honor, was not frightened by the guerrillas’ execution of Jordan. After learning that the irregulars had pinned their note of retaliation to Jordan’s flesh, Holland icily wrote home to his family and friends in Athens, Ohio, that “[b]efore this war ends we will pin their sentences to them with Uncle Sam’s leaden pills.”42 Holland, whose regiment included four black Congressional Medal of Honor winners by the end of the war, would fight in many hard engagements with the Fifth USCT, which ended the war with the sixteenth-highest death rate out of the 166 USCT

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units that served in the Union army.43 Clearly the men of the Fifth USCT were not deterred by the actions of Pasquotank’s homegrown irregulars. The execution of Samuel Jordan represented an attempt by the irregular forces to assert their own legitimacy as legal warriors and as community protectors. By publicly retaliating and showing their power to the community and to the Confederate press, the irregulars were assuring Confederates that the white soldiers in the swamps of the Albemarle were trying to uphold the time-honored white southern commitment to the racial order of white over black. For the few remaining blacks in Pasquotank, this hanging was a stern reminder that locals were still willing to use violent means to uphold racial supremacy.44 At the same time, by retaliating for Bright’s execution, guerrillas could claim that their own methods were justified in the face of Wild’s tyrannical acts of violence. Despite this demonstration of power, local residents remained unconvinced of the guerrillas’ ability to protect them, and many were terrified by their brutal tactics. The irregulars had a serious public relations problem, since they were unable to defend the community from any major show of force by the Union military and their presence even attracted Federal operations to the county. When a small group of unionists and “neutral” inhabitants living near Hintonsville discovered Jordan’s body hanging in their neighborhood, they removed it and fashioned a coffin for the remains. The unfortunate residents then wrote Federal authorities proclaiming their own innocence in the matter and pleading ignorance in the hope of avoiding further retribution at the hands of the Union government.45 These unionist and “neutral” citizens expressed the same worries that John Pool had in his letter to Governor Vance about the Albemarle guerrillas in 1862. Pool had asserted that the independent operations of these irregulars could call down upon the citizens of the whole locality a Union expedition that they could do nothing to stop. The irregulars were incapable of protecting the locality but could disrupt the lives of these citizens. General Wild had accurately described the situation when he wrote that the community felt as though it had “two everchanging masters.”46 Confederate guerrillas displayed their power over the community through execution because it was their only recourse to Federal economic warfare and the destruction of the local racial order at the hands of black Union troops. They could not prevent the emancipation of slaves by Wild’s

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soldiers, but they could publicly reassert the supremacy of white soldiers over black troops through an execution. Since guerrillas in Pasquotank also operated as a wartime slave patrol, they were responsible for the preservation of slavery as a system. Although they could not ensure the permanency of their racial hierarchy through force when faced with overwhelming Union military superiority, they could use execution of a black man as a symbolic gesture to reinforce racial order among the few remaining blacks and attempt to shore up the damage done to the psyche of southern planters. Confederate planters and yeomen were accustomed to commanding blacks, not being dominated by them. In the minds of Confederate guerrillas, Samuel Jordan’s execution symbolically reestablished the fragile antebellum racial order in the aftermath of its destruction. The hanging was an attempt, albeit a weak one, to show Union authorities that despite Federal military power the southern racial hierarchy could not be altered. By late January, the incidents of the Wild raid were well known in many parts of the American South, and accounts of the raid grew more racist and ridiculous in the southern press. “It is difficult to find words of description for the pictures, given us by our informant, of the wild and terrible consequences of the Negro raids in this obscure, but romantic theater of the war,” penned one commentator from the Charleston Mercury. “The country is traversed by negro banditti; they burn houses, they enter the parlor of their masters; compel ladies to entertain them on the piano, and chuck them under the chin.”47 This analysis of black soldiers and their operations in Pasquotank prefaced the racial justification offered by Confederate authorities at the local and national level for the actions of Confederate guerrillas in northeastern North Carolina. Even though Confederate irregulars were operating in the county long before Wild and his soldiers arrived there to enforce Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the subsequent events of the December 1863 occupation became the justification for all the wrongs of the past year and a half committed by the Confederate guerrillas. In the aftermath of Private Samuel Jordan’s execution, the Confederate congressional committee responded with two different explanations of Confederate irregular activity in the region. The investigating committee used an innovative defense of Confederate irregular soldiers. By attacking Wild and his black troops for their behavior, the committee could defend the misdeeds of its own irregulars. Confederate explanations of the Wild

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raid amounted to a frail legal defense of the irregulars closely followed by a racial justification for guerrilla violence. In his official report on the Bright execution, Congressman W. N. H. Smith argued “that both the companies which the Federal officer designates as ‘guerrillas,’ commanded, the one by Captain Elliott [Pasquotank], the other by Captain Sanderlin [Camden], were raised in those counties, under authority of the Governor of North Carolina, for local defense and to repel invasions.”48 According to Smith, these units “were duly organized, and their officers commissioned by [Governor Vance]; and for a year or more had been in the regular service of that State. At the time referred to they had been attached to, and formed part of, the Sixty-sixth [later mustered as Sixty-eighth] North Carolina Regiment, under command of Col. James W. Hinton.”49 Hinton had asserted this same defense when he wrote Benjamin Butler about the raid in late January. “The Sixty-eighth Regiment of North Carolina State Troops . . . was organized under authority obtained from the Governor of the State, and its officers are regularly commissioned.”50 Essentially both Hinton and the government argued that since the officers were commissioned, the enlisted men could use whatever tactics were necessary to wage the war in their locality, including hit-and-run assaults on defenseless families. At the local level, Colonel Griffin of the Sixty-second Georgia Cavalry/ Partisan Rangers articulated the Confederate feeling and prefaced the Congress’s racial argument. “Probably no expedition during the progress of this war has been attended with more utter disregard for the long established usages of civilization, or the dictates of humanity, that was your late raid in the country bordering the Albermarle,” wrote the Georgia colonel to General Wild. “You burned houses over the heads of defenceless women and children, carried off private property of every description, arrested noncombatants, and carried off ladies in irons, whom you confined with negro men.” Griffin’s outrage about the jailing of white women under black guards mirrored the sentiment of Confederate public who read about the incidents in the papers. Griffin’s anger, the fear of the local white community, and the violence of Confederate irregulars were partially reactions to what one scholar has called “symbolic rape,” an emotional and psychological violation of women that occurred at their own homes and farms.51 Although these women were not physically abused, they were taken from their homes

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and rendered helpless by armed black Union soldiers. This sexual innuendo (helpless white women jailed and left at the mercy of black guards) became a powerful justification for the guerrillas’ actions. Griffin also alleged that black soldiers were uncontrollable in nature. “Your negro troops fired on Confederates after they had surrendered, and they were only saved by the exertions of the more humane of your white officers.”52 Based on what the committees from the northeastern counties told Butler about the conduct of black soldiers in the region, there seems to be little basis for this accusation.53 Nevertheless, by reinforcing this image of undisciplined black troops firing on helpless white soldiers or harassing white women, Griffin provided a rationalization for Confederate guerrilla violence in the Albemarle district. The legal defense of the guerrillas in the Albemarle was tenuous. Colonel James W. Hinton had admitted to Governor Vance just prior to Wild’s raid that North Carolina’s Confederate authorities did not have control over much of the available manpower in the region.54 And even though Vance had sanctioned on paper a unit in this portion of the state, it was not until late January 1864, after the executions of Daniel Bright and Samuel Jordan, that this composite force, the Sixty-eighth North Carolina State Troops, actually mustered into service as a regular unit. Although these Albemarle companies had regularly commissioned officers, their organization and conduct had been for more than a year anything but regular. In fact, even though many of the guerrillas considered themselves legitimate Partisan Rangers, the Confederate government had never formally accepted them as such. If it had accepted the Partisan Ranger unit that had been in the process of formation since 1862, the legal justification for the Albemarle irregulars would have been clear under the Union government’s Lieber Code. Without this formal designation, the unit was operating outside the existing law of war.55 For this reason as well as their own racial beliefs, local Confederates felt the need to attack black troops and offer a racial defense of irregular operations. In a way, Wild’s raid provided a convenient ex post facto justification for adopting guerrilla warfare to control the no-man’s-land of northeastern North Carolina. Even though irregulars had been present long before Wild and his black soldiers arrived in the region, the Confederate congressional committee needed a convincing argument for the legitimacy of Daniel Bright’s alleged activities and the events of the previous years. It could not prove Bright’s legal military status to Generals Butler and Wild, who be-

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lieved he was a deserter and guerrilla, and it could offer only a weak legal defense of the military units operating in the region. Race became the committee’s trump card. In its final report, the Confederate congressional committee meticulously reported the treatment of the two white women taken hostage. The women were “confined in a room without fire, bed, or bedding, with several male prisoners, and tied by the feet and hands.” Phoebe Munden and Elizabeth Weeks “were constantly guarded, and neither [woman] was allowed to leave the room for the most necessary duty but in company with a negro armed soldier.” “For a more minute recital of the indignities offered the sensibilities of the sex,” the committee continued, “Mrs. Munden was in delicate health, was forced from a home immediately laid in ashes, with all it contained . . . and [she] passed several nights in the cheerless and cold apartment, to which she was confined at that inclement season, before the humanity of her captors was so far softened as to permit blankets to be furnished for her use.” Moreover, “[i]t has been represented to her husband that when Mrs. Munden was carried off her wrists were bleeding from the stricture of the cords with which she was bound.” While this type of treatment would have certainly enraged white southerners regardless of the race of the U.S. troops involved, these actions came at the hands of General Wild’s “African Brigade.” For that reason, it is not surprising that the deeply disturbing thought of white women under the control of black men caused a violent uproar in the highest echelons of the Confederate government.56 The Confederate congressional committee even cited a northern account of the Wild raid from the New York Daily News as proof of rampant racial discord in Pasquotank. “Negroes were permitted to curse and abuse defenseless ladies, to strip them of their jewelry and clothing, and offer them indignities which would offend delicacy to repeat.” The “indignities” that the newspapermen had in mind insinuated sexual interaction between black male captors and the two white female prisoners. The northern paper described how “a small Confederate force captured two of [General Wild’s] negroes, in a skirmish, and for this he outraged all the laws of civilized war. He arrested two ladies of high character, permitted a brutal negro soldiery to tie them hand and foot (as I believe and am credibly informed), and kept them in this condition for two days and nights.”57 By early 1864, many members of the Confederate government had deep doubts about guerrilla warfare’s role in their cause, but consistent references to bound women in the

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presence of black men only served to enrage members of the Confederate Congress who might otherwise have questioned whether the Confederate irregular activity in the Albemarle was a violation of legal military conduct or even simply the lack of control over Confederate soldiers in the region.58 In the final report, the only eyewitness testimony from Pasquotank came from William J. Munden, the husband of one of the female hostages, who was himself an irregular soldier with Captain John T. Elliot’s command, hardly an objective source on the incidents of the raid. Munden recounted the events leading up to the execution of Samuel Jordan as he saw them but spent the majority of his deposition discussing the treatment of his wife. “Both ladies [Phoebe Munden and Elizabeth Weeks] were tied by their hands and feet and detained three days, and were liberated only temporarily and to satisfy the calls of nature,” Munden explained to the investigating committee. “When permitted to leave for this purpose they were accompanied by a negro guard, who stood over them with muskets, and they were compelled to do this in a public street.” In the end, Confederate authorities spent the majority of their investigatory document outlining the alleged “brutalities” and abuses of the black soldiers in Wild’s command. They used these attacks on the U.S. Colored Troops as a way of defending the guerrilla violence and the disorder that had largely brought the raid to northeastern North Carolina in the first place.59 The aftermath of Daniel Bright’s execution and General Edward Wild’s raid brought about limited community cooperation, public outrage, and formal investigation in Pasquotank. Local citizens attempted to find a middle ground, and their efforts reaped one important success. In late January 1864, Colonel J. W. Hinton formally mustered the Sixty-eighth North Carolina State Troops into service. This effort to organize in January finally brought Elliott’s company and several other irregular bands in the region under more strict control. The measure did not put an end to all guerrilla violence in the county; some guerrillas remained and continued to disrupt peace around Elizabeth City into 1864. Nevertheless, this action by Confederate authorities brought a majority of those men who had been heavily involved in rampant violence under more stringent discipline.60 Sometime in either January or February 1864, General Butler rescinded Wild’s hanging notice for Phoebe Munden and Elizabeth Weeks and released from Norfolk both of these women as well as Nancy White, the woman captured during Colonel Alonzo Draper’s expedition to Knott’s

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Island in Currituck County. It is not clear exactly what date Phoebe Munden and Elizabeth Weeks were released, but Nancy White was set free on 12 January 1864. Munden and Weeks were probably released sometime after their husbands received a letter from Benjamin Butler seeking a trade of the husbands for their wives as prisoners.61 Never again would Butler or any other Union authority send a major raid of black soldiers into the county. Although some smaller Union cavalry expeditions would return to hunt for irregulars in mid- and late 1864, no expedition involving black soldiers would disrupt Pasquotank for the remainder of the conflict. General Wild was ultimately court-martialed for a separate incident involving Confederate civilians and suffered censure for the remainder of the war in both the northern and southern press. In May 1864, he ordered the whipping of a Virginia planter named William H. Clopton by his own freed slaves. Ultimately, a court-martial found Wild guilty of impropriety relating to this incident, but General Benjamin Butler overturned the conviction on a technicality. Thus Wild continued to serve in the Union army, garnering accolades for successful battlefield exploits in the Petersburg campaign. His commitment to black equality would be rewarded after the war; he served briefly as a supervisor with the Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia.62 During the same week that the Confederate Congress issued its investigation findings about the execution of Daniel Bright, a short debate took place over the then controversial 1862 Partisan Ranger Act. Guerrillas by this point had become an uncontrollable weapon in the Confederate arsenal and according to their detractors a waste of limited Confederate manpower. In the Albemarle country, only five of at least eight guerrilla companies formally mustered into state service when the government ordered it, and the organization of this unit, the Sixty-eighth North Carolina State Troops, took a year from the time Governor Vance initially ordered the irregulars to meet. Some guerrillas continued to roam in the region throughout the rest of the war. The northeastern North Carolina guerrilla companies of Captains Hughes, Ethridge, and Coffey that were also mentioned in General Wild’s 28 December 1863 report were never mustered into regular service with the Sixty-eighth North Carolina or any other unit; it is unknown what became of these companies.63 But through their pressure on Vance and Hinton, local citizens were successful in having the Confederate authorities remove the guerrilla bands of John Elliott (Pasquotank), Caleb

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Walston (Camden and Currituck), Willis Sanderlin (Camden), Cyrus W. Grandy (Currituck), and Richard Keogh (Chowan) from the region when the Sixty-eighth finally organized.64 Throughout 1862 and 1863, irregulars from the Albemarle did not respond to the Raleigh government and at times did not cooperate with military officials appointed to lead them. This same scenario was evident in many regions where guerrilla violence shattered the order of the Confederate home front. As a result, on 17 February 1864 the Confederate Congress abolished authorized guerrilla service in the Confederacy. Guerrillas had led to the forced depopulation of several counties in Missouri under Union General Orders No. 11. Irregulars were growing increasingly difficult to control in the backwoods of Arkansas, across the Appalachian region of the country, and even in northern Virginia, where General Robert E. Lee’s army operated. When Lee turned his attention to the issue of guerrilla warfare in early 1864, he wanted the Confederacy’s units abolished, believing it was “almost impossible, under the best officers even, to have discipline in these bands of Partisan Rangers, or to prevent them from becoming an injury instead of a benefit to the service.”65 While it is clear that the problems of guerrilla warfare in Arkansas, Missouri, and Virginia played the principal role in the Confederate Congress’s decision, the congressmen were well aware in February 1864 of the problems caused by Confederate irregulars in northeastern North Carolina.66 Coincidentally, the day after the Confederate Congress abolished the act, Colonel Hinton ordered the Sixty-eighth regiment to muster in preparation to move its headquarters east of the Chowan River.67 The suffering of Pasquotank citizens was a clear and immediate example of what guerrilla violence was doing to home-front morale in areas on the periphery of southern military control, and the Confederate legislature took the only action it could to remedy the problem of undisciplined and disobedient Confederate guerrillas across the South. Even though it was far too late to stop guerrilla violence from spreading social disorder across the southern landscape, the Confederate Congress ended the law that legalized a form of it. The fate of Pasquotank’s negotiation for neutrality remained undecided, but the situation that developed in Pasquotank County during the final year of the war only reinforced the point that guerrilla violence in the Albemarle had left a permanent mark on the locality.

Epilogue The Problem of Verifying Loyalty in the No-Man’s-Land

For the remainder of the American Civil War, Pasquotank’s citizens endured the no-man’s-land experience by adopting a new and versatile strategy, carefully crafting their loyalty story to make verifying loyalty to either side virtually impossible for both the Union and Confederate governments. By mid-1864, the removal of most of the Confederate guerrillas and the withdrawal of unionist Buffaloes provided hope that the local war would be less violent relative to 1862 and 1863, and indeed there were no other incidents of murder or execution recorded in the county for the remainder of the conflict.1 Nevertheless, Pasquotank remained open to raids by regular Confederate and Union soldiers attempting to secure supplies or prevent smuggling. Even though attempts to negotiate neutrality had achieved relative security from John T. Elliott’s guerrillas, it did not prevent further military incursions into the county. Blockade running and abundant supplies continued to make the white community an attractive target. In the Confederate army’s desperate attempt to feed itself, Confederate troops revisited the abundant agricultural lands along the Albemarle coast. And although Federal forces never again sent a large raid of African American soldiers into Pasquotank, the Union army’s desire to cut off Confederate provisions from the Albemarle brought the return of Federal troops. Without assertive protection from either the Union or Confederate government, many individuals in Pasquotank’s white community used obfuscation of loyalty as a way of surviving the final year of the war. In late February 1864, Confederate General George Pickett ordered Brigadier General Matt Ransom to raid Pasquotank to secure supplies

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for starving Confederate armies, especially bacon. Six regiments of North Carolina infantry (including Hinton’s Sixty-eighth North Carolina State Troops) supported by cavalry and artillery trekked into the county from their bases west of the Chowan River. In early March, Confederates engaged U.S. forces around South Mills and drove them back to Deep Creek in southeastern Virginia, but the U.S. forces returned to skirmish with Confederates until they withdrew on 4 March. The Confederate raid lasted seventeen days, and although few extant sources discuss the outcome of this Confederate expedition, it clearly reinforced a feeling of instability among white community members.2 Following the Ransom raid, Pasquotank continued to experience sporadic guerrilla activity from the small number of remaining irregular bands in northeastern North Carolina, but the most troublesome companies of irregulars (those of Elliott, Walston, Grandy, Keogh, and Sanderlin, which had joined the Sixty-eighth North Carolina) were sent out of the region. Throughout the first several months of 1864, these men camped west of the Chowan River in Northampton and Hertford counties, where they probably spent most of their days drilling.3 In May 1864, Confederate authorities ordered the Sixty-eighth regiment west of the Chowan River permanently, and by July these troops roamed the region around Morganton in western North Carolina, where Hinton was ironically ordered to “use every exertion to put down all insubordination, arrest deserters and repel raids” with his new command.4 Confederate officials elected to send the newly organized regiment of former guerrillas to combat unionist guerrillas, Confederate deserters, and draft evaders in Appalachian North Carolina. In July, the adjutant general of North Carolina troops even sent some of these men to Yadkin County to guard polls during the gubernatorial election. The Sixty-eighth State Troops returned to the eastern half of North Carolina in December 1864 but spent the remainder of the conflict operating farther to the south around Kinston in Lenoir County.5 Even with many of the irregulars gone, however, the loyalty of Pasquotank citizens in 1864 and 1865 remained difficult to gauge. Local Confederates in Elizabeth City faced difficult times, but unlike in other areas of North Carolina and the southern home front, Confederates in the region were not starving. John Lancaster Bailey, a superior court judge who served as a member of the North Carolina legislature in the late

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1820s, described to his uncle living in the mountains of western North Carolina how he was “as happy as the times will admit of, we have hard times in this subjugated country, but we get a plenty to eat and my wife makes clothes for us all to ware [sic].” Bailey, who had also been a member of the North Carolina constitutional convention of 1835 that had banned free blacks from voting in the state, clearly demonstrated a war weariness in his discussion of the local situation, especially a concern over the high prices for goods and his desire to “live among the mountains,” where he could “get good water and have good health.” While the elderly Bailey (born in 1795) longed for the company of his family living in western North Carolina, he seemed content with his new wife, “the youngest daughter of Alfred Perry Esq. of Parkville,” despite the daily threats of living in a dangerous region.6 For both the Union and Confederate authorities, the northeastern North Carolina loyalty issue never subsided. In late July 1864, Union forces again arrived in Elizabeth City and seized cotton, tobacco, horses, and other supplies from Pasquotank and the surrounding counties.7 The Union soldiers in this expedition were astonished at what they found. “The people of Pasquotank, Perquimans, and Chowan Counties have treated my men so hospitably and entertained them in such a friendly manner that myself and command are impressed with the conviction that by far the larger proportion of the people are loyal to the United States,” wrote Brigadier General Israel Vodges, the Union officer who replaced Benjamin Butler as commander of the Norfolk and Portsmouth garrison. He continued: “There is a deep Union feeling among at least three-fifths of the people.” Nonetheless, the general also noted that “the guerrillas still infest the country through which our troops passed, the citizens of which express a great desire to be rid of them.”8 Ultimately, Vodges requested permission from the head of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina to launch another incursion into the region. “If the commanding general could spare me 250 men of the Thirtyeighth U.S. Colored Regiment, who understand the country, and displayed much zeal on a former raid, to hunt these robbers and murderers out of the swamps to which they resort,” wrote the officer, “I have no doubt we can effectually rid the country of them. The citizens are robbed by these marauders and will do all in their power to put a stop to their further depredations.”9 There is no record of an expedition ever having been made by

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the Thirty-eighth USCTs or any other black unit in 1864 or 1865, but the Union incursions and the declarations of loyalty by both governments did not stop. Strangely, in early August 1864 Confederate officials also claimed that the majority of Pasquotank County residents were loyal to their cause. Confederate congressman W. N. H. Smith asserted his thoughts on the loyalty of his constituency. “This district has remained true and faithful under most adverse circumstances,” wrote Smith. “Left beyond the protection of their own armies . . . and exposed to hostile raids, unchecked and destructive, they adhere to our fortunes and look confidently forward to the day of their deliverance. Nearly all their valuable slaves are gone, but these losses have not abated their patriotism.”10 In August Zebulon Vance faced a tough reelection challenge from opposition candidate and Raleigh Standard editor William Holden, who ran openly as a peace candidate. According to Vance’s recent biographer, the governor tried to court potential Holden supporters during this election with rhetoric that promised that he was open to a peaceful solution as long as it was done in concert with other Confederate states. Another scholar of North Carolina has argued that Vance turned the tables on Holden by convincing North Carolinians that Holden was the war candidate because he would withdrawal from the Confederacy only to become embroiled in a civil war with North Carolina’s neighbors. The low voter turnout in Pasquotank due to the war makes the vote of 317 for Vance and 10 supporting Holden difficult to interpret, but it is likely that Pasquotank’s voters were grateful to the former Whig Vance for the removal of many of the irregulars and that they believed he was also searching for a peaceful and honorable end to the war. Only six months earlier 523 Pasquotank men had signed a petition in favor of removal, and the vote was roughly 200 less than the number who signed the petition to negotiate neutrality. The reason for the low turnout may have been that many unionists and neutral citizens were still afraid to vote given the potential threat of retribution. In any case, the Pasquotank vote during the 1864 North Carolina gubernatorial election is not an accurate indicator of the county’s loyalty during the final months of the war given the level of violence in the community and the daily threats to the lives of voters by both armies. Despite these threats and the genuine desire of many North Carolinians for peace, Vance won the election in a

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landslide 58,070 to 14,491, primarily owing to his deft use of the peace issue within the state. Clearly, Vance undermined the peace vote by working hard to claim that he actually was a peace candidate.11 Together these indications of loyalty from northeastern North Carolina demonstrate the difficult time both governments had in deciphering the loyalties in Pasquotank. This confusion over loyalty is evidence that most people had become adept at shifting their opinions as the situation required and that for those people caught between armed belligerents in the North Carolina no-man’s-land, surviving the war, no matter what it took, became their most important daily duty. The nature of loyalty in Pasquotank is illustrated by one late-war episode that occurred at Cloverdale plantation. In his discussion of the incident in a letter to his daughter Elizabeth, Richard Creecy provided insight into how some Confederates in Pasquotank dealt with Union incursions without forsaking their own allegiance to the South.12 During the Federal expedition in July 1864, Union soldiers went from farm to farm in search of supplies and irregular soldiers. Eventually the troops arrived at Cloverdale in the lower part of the county. As Union forces approached, Richard Creecy’s son Edmund, wearing his gray Confederate uniform coat (from his time serving in Elliott’s guerrillas), ran into the woods to hide one of their prized animals.13 But on his way back to the house, Edmund ran into Federal soldiers coming down the road toward the Creecy home. The Union cavalry escorted Edmund back to his family’s farm. When the Union soldiers rode up to the plantation house, they asked an anxious Richard Creecy if he had horses. Creecy stated that he had two, and the Union troops sent their farrier to ascertain the animals’ usefulness. Richard Creecy described the tense moments that followed. The Union officer in charge “inquired of your Grandpa [Edmund Perkins] & myself our political sentiments—were we Union men to which we replied that we were for peace—with the mental reservation myself as to the kind of peace I was for.” Following the loyalty inquiry, Creecy allowed the Union soldiers to roam through his fruit orchard and eat what they wanted. In the end, he was so affable toward the Union soldiers that they decided not to take any of his horses and left the property. Since several unionists had horses seized during this same raid, this incident at Cloverdale demonstrates both the difficult problem of discerning loyalty in

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Pasquotank and the precarious situation that unionists, Confederates, and neutral citizens were placed in by mid-1864. If a genial Confederate could convince Union soldiers that he might be loyal, how could the Union or Confederate army ever accurately recognize fidelity to its cause?14 The Creecys considered themselves fortunate, especially given Edmund’s attire on the day of the Yankee visit and his previous service with the irregulars (of which the Union soldiers were apparently unaware). Richard Creecy believed that it was probably Edmund’s young age (fifteen or sixteen years old in July 1864) that was his saving grace. Creecy recorded that, after that day, he heard from people all over the county that the Union soldiers “took horses without regard to political sentiment. Buffaloes [for Creecy any unionist was a Buffalo] fared like others.” This treatment of the community signaled a shift in military policy toward a broader strategy of what one scholar has called “hard war,” and Creecy and his family were spared only because of their careful choice of words (and effusive politeness).15 This incident is similar to the ones chronicled in Missouri, where survival lying became a regular part of daily life for civilians in that “inside war.”16 Frustration in the Union army and navy reached a peak in early September 1864 after Confederate troops from the ram CSS Albemarle, which was a serious threat in the region, burned the mail boat USS Fawn in the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal. Confederates seized twenty-nine prisoners in the raid. Aboard the ship was U.S. congressman George Washington Julian, the only congressman captured during the war by Confederates. Julian, however, was quickly released at Elizabeth City by Confederates without explanation. Lieutenant Commander Earl English of the U.S. Navy arrived at Elizabeth City to arrest the men responsible, but finding them gone, he took seven local citizens hostage.17 “If there was the least desire on the part of the inhabitants to guard against such raids,” English concluded, “they could all be checked or suppressed by their giving timely notice. . . . [S] hould the people of this district understand that they will be assessed and forced to pay the full value of this loss, hereafter the Government property passing through would be cared for with the same interest with which they cherish their own.” English ended his frustrated description of Pasquotank with his assessment of loyalty. “I have discovered that the people in this section of country are as fond of the almighty dollar as the Chinese and possess about the same amount of patriotism.” Clearly, officers continued

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to visit the region and express doubts about what the true loyalty of the majority of the inhabitants was. Only a month later the CSS Albemarle would be sunk while moored at Plymouth, North Carolina, ending any threat to U.S. naval supremacy in the Albemarle Sound.18 Even northern-born unionists traveling through Elizabeth City on business were not safe in this environment. Stephen Barton Jr., a native of Massachusetts living in Hertford County, came to the community to buy bagging for his mill, which manufactured plow handles and was involved in the lumber trade with Norfolk, Virginia. Barton, who was also the elder brother of famed Civil War nurse and founder of the American Red Cross Clara Barton, was representative of the rare northern-born businessman who had not abandoned his interests in North Carolina in 1861 but had tried to remain neutral during the early years of the war while quietly conducting his affairs. Nevertheless, upon his arrival in Pasquotank in September, members of the Twentieth New York Cavalry seized Barton’s papers and took approximately one thousand dollars in cash that he was carrying. The soldiers invited Barton to go to Norfolk to testify in a case involving illegal traffic in the region. Barton interpreted this offer as a ploy to get him to leave his money and then flee back into Confederate lines. Barton, however, made his way to Norfolk and demanded his money and belongings at the military attorney general’s office. In response, Union authorities incarcerated him on suspicion of violating the Union blockade. Only his sister’s influence with General Butler, now stationed outside Richmond, gained his eventual release. During the fall of 1864, Stephen Barton Jr. contributed to the confusion about loyalty in the northeastern region when he described in a letter to General Butler “a steady and regular increase of Union sentiment in the northeastern counties.” In late November, however, President Lincoln lifted the Federal blockade at Norfolk that forbade trade between the city and northeastern North Carolinians who did not have an approved Federal trade pass.19 In December 1864, Union authorities again returned to northeastern North Carolina to hunt for guerrillas. This time the blue troops were guided by a local unionist, Thomas D. Sanders. Sanders led the Union authorities to the homes of twenty irregulars in Perquimans and Chowan counties. These men claimed to be members of Company D, Sixty-sixth North Carolina, but it is not certain to which unit this group actually belonged,

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since the Sixty-sixth North Carolina Partisan Rangers had never entered the North Carolina state service.20 Perhaps these men, like John Elliott’s company, formed with the intent of joining the now defunct state Partisan Ranger regiment and remained an independent company even after this unit’s organization fell apart. Whatever the official status of these captured men, it is clear that the incomplete state ranger unit that never mustered into service during the early war left a legacy of independent guerrilla companies in the northeastern sector of North Carolina.21 Union efforts to curb Confederate blockade running and smuggling continued to the very end of the war. In January 1865, officers from the USS Shamrock found more than five thousand dollars’ worth of property at the store of Confederate William H. Clark, who had apparently taken the oath of allegiance to the Union at Norfolk sometime after the Pasquotank committee met with Governor Vance. When the Union officers found Clark’s paperwork and permits for trading with Norfolk in order, they were irate. Federal troops had discovered Clark’s Confederate allegiance from local citizens, and as a result, the Union officers questioned Federal authorities about the process of giving trade approval to citizens of questionable loyalty. “It is acknowledged by all, and even admitted by the dealers themselves,” Union naval officer H. H. Foster complained, “that the greatest portion of the goods find their way into the country under the control of the rebels, the largest part of the goods going across the different ferries on the Chowan.”22 This episode elucidates plainly that smuggling and the difficulty of verifying individual and community loyalty remained constant problems during the final days of the Civil War in northeastern North Carolina. The shifting tides of war shaped daily lives and political loyalties in Pasquotank County. As the dynamics of power changed on the North Carolina coast, so did the experiences of citizens in this community. After the fall of Elizabeth City in 1862, Pasquotank experienced constant raids from both Union forces and a coalescing guerrilla resistance. Between 1862 and 1863, the irregular conflict steadily developed into a pattern of retaliatory attacks whereby guerrilla and regular forces murdered and executed local white men. Edward Wild’s December 1863 incursion threw all these factors into graphic relief and demonstrated the frustration pushing Union commanders to wage “more rigorous” wars against Confederate guerrillas in divided communities.23 Daniel Bright’s execution and the seizure of white female

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hostages established Union military power over the community and communicated a potent message about appropriate conduct during war. The guerrilla retaliation for Bright’s execution attempted to reestablish a racial hierarchy erased by Wild’s raid and the freeing of the black labor force in the county; Samuel Jordan’s execution was a reassertion of racial power in a community familiar with power reversals. The violence of the Wild raid and guerrilla war of 1862 and 1863 left the white community war weary and willing to consider another option, public neutrality. In the aftermath of the raid, Pasquotank’s white residents sent committees to Raleigh and Norfolk seeking the end of guerrilla violence and a peaceful middle position between armed belligerents. The final year and a half of the war demonstrated one clear pattern—the loyalty of both individual residents and the majority became virtually impossible to verify for outsiders. Uneasy race relations played a fundamental role in shaping the community’s response to guerrilla war. Pasquotank’s white population had a long history of apprehension with regard to its free and slave black inhabitants. The white residents of this divided community saw many of their antebellum fears come to fruition when black soldiers arrived in their community under the command of a zealous abolitionist from Massachusetts. Wild allowed the black soldiers of his command (many of whom had previously been subordinate laborers in Pasquotank) to free the remaining slaves in the region and impress the property of those people Wild suspected of disloyalty. These actions flipped the antebellum social and racial order on its head. Furthermore, Wild’s raid was one of the first examples of black soldiers being used in a major operation to free African Americans from bondage. While blacks had been used as armed guards in Pasquotank under Enos Sanders, Wild’s expedition was also one of the earliest operations in the eastern theater of the war in which black soldiers served as a serious counterguerrilla force. Ultimately, Wild’s raid left Pasquotank with few remaining black residents. Most had emigrated from the county. Although it is virtually impossible to assess how many were left in the county after Wild’s incursion, many ended up at Roanoke Island for the remainder of the war. At least a few blacks did return to Pasquotank during 1865 and 1866, but some continued to live on Roanoke Island until their death.24 In many ways, Pasquotank’s war experience with unionism, dissent, and guerrilla violence was typical of other local conflicts across the South

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during the Civil War. Geography left Pasquotank open to Union raids, as was the case for many communities of the upper and border South, especially northern Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri. Likewise, the strength of the prewar Whig party in Pasquotank encouraged a unionist political outlook by a minority of citizens, much as it did in eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and western Virginia. The strength of conscription resistance and high rate of desertion to the Pasquotank home front were also similar to those of northern Georgia, eastern Tennessee, and Piedmont and western North Carolina. Moreover, the pattern of retaliation during the local guerrilla war resembled that in Arkansas and Missouri. Together with the other areas of the Confederacy where guerrilla wars marred the home front, the Pasquotank experience demonstrates the potential for even more widespread social chaos if Confederates had chosen to employ a regionwide guerrilla strategy after the defeat of the major Confederate armies in 1865.25 Yet other parts of Pasquotank’s local war were more exceptional. The use of black soldiers to combat Confederate guerrillas was perhaps the most atypical experience of Pasquotank residents. Virtually no other community in the eastern theater saw a similar African American counterguerrilla operation used against it. The frequency of public murders and executions as a whole seems unusual, but these tactics were common to many guerrilla conflicts.26 The obvious use of violence as an educational tool in Pasquotank, however, was similar to only the most bitter episodes of irregular war in Civil War America. Perhaps the most unusual dimension of the local guerrilla conflict was the attempt by many citizens to opt out of the war by negotiating neutrality between the two governments. People were often afraid and many times lied or remained silent during guerrilla wars to protect themselves, but few in the South walked down the path of negotiation with both sides.27 And although they were typical of no-man’s-land areas, the numerous power reversals between the Union and Confederate army also made the political situation in northeastern North Carolina a problematic case for frustrated Union and Confederate policymakers. The intransigence and resistance of Confederate guerrillas to following the orders of their own governing authorities, although far from atypical, were widespread in northeastern North Carolina and continued to be a thorn in the side of North Carolina and Confederate military officials throughout the war. In sum, the situation

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in Pasquotank offers yet another clear example of why the Confederate government in North Carolina did not survive beyond four years of war. The Civil War history of Pasquotank and the execution of Daniel Bright demonstrate one point clearly: guerrilla violence and interracial warfare played fundamental roles in the collapse of social order and the will to continue fighting the Confederate war on the northeastern North Carolina home front. During the worst parts of the conflict, the majority of white residents put social stability, economic survival, and most of all safety first over their own personal loyalty to a cause. While some clearly held on to those loyalties, they subordinated them to the cause of safety and stability when enemy forces arrived at their doorstep. Although loyalties became virtually impossible for either government to discern by late 1864, white residents remained committed to social stability, private property, and trade in the face of a deteriorating Confederate government war effort. Even the most committed Confederate nationalists like Richard Creecy were unwilling to risk public pronouncement of their positions and advocated peace when pressed. Locally it was personal relationships, despite divided political loyalties, racial fear, and guerrilla violence, that mitigated some of war’s cruelty. When put under extreme pressure, the divided white community came together to preserve racial and social order. Having lost the black labor force that both Confederates and unionists supported, and with no effective protection, white residents developed a third option, that of public neutrality between two armed belligerents. After neutrality failed and raids continued, misleading Union and Confederate authorities about personal loyalty became a dominant mechanism for defense. Farmer Daniel Bright’s community had endured a wide range of experiences over the course of the war, and Pasquotank’s remaining residents ended the conflict just trying to survive.

Appendix Statistics for Pasquotank Citizens and Guerrillas in 1860

The following tables show the economic background, occupations, and slave ownership for four separate social networks in Pasquotank County: Confederates, unionists, Buffaloes, and guerrillas. Confederates (tables 1–4) include those citizens from the county who either served in the regular Confederate army or remained on the home front but supported North Carolina’s decision to secede, Confederate nationalism, or both. Unionists (tables 1–4) include citizens who remained in the county throughout the war and did not join the Union army but publicly stated their fidelity to the antebellum Union. Buffaloes (tables 5–8) include only those men recruited in Pasquotank County by Federal captain Enos C. Sanders during his time ashore at Elizabeth City. These men formed the core of Company D, First North Carolina (Union) Infantry. Confederate guerrillas (tables 5–8) include only those men from John T. Elliott’s band, which eventually became a company in the Sixty-eighth North Carolina State Troops. The names for these four groups were culled from numerous sources, but all socioeconomic data on the four social networks can be found in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County, North Carolina, and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Slave Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County, North Carolina, National Archives publication, microfilm no. 653, roll no. 925. The names for the Confederate community sample (tables 1–4) were compiled from various sources found in archives in Raleigh and Chapel

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Hill, North Carolina; College Park, Maryland; and Washington, D.C. The first substantial list of Confederate citizens for whom I could positively identify loyalty was derived from those men listed in the town minutes of Elizabeth City in January 1862, who were then in regular Confederate military service. These men were released from the poll tax by this local meeting. This list of Confederate citizens included thirty-seven names, of which twenty-one could be positively identified in the census. See Minutes of the Town of Elizabeth City, 4 January 1862, North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina. In addition to the poll tax list, I used unionist George W. Brooks’s list to Captain William L. Kent of the Twenty-third Massachusetts Infantry, which contained seventeen additional Confederates living in Pasquotank; thirteen of these men could be identified. See appendix to William L. Kent Report, 17 October 1863, in War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Official Records), ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 1, 478–479. This appendix can be found only in the manuscript edition of the Official Records in the National Archives (Washington, D.C.), RG 109 (not in the printed Official Records). An additional nine Confederate names were added from miscellaneous sources. These Confederates include Banister B. Balance, George W. Poiner, George W. Bell, W. H. Clark, William F. Martin, James Green Martin, Edmund Perkins, Richard B. Creecy, and Lucien D. Starke. Of this group only James Green Martin could not be found in the 1860 census. The names from these sources total sixty-two Confederates. I was able to identify a total of forty-two of these men in the 1860 census. The loyalties of Banister B. Balance, George W. Poiner, George W. Bell, and W. H. Clark are avowed or mentioned in the Southern Claims Commission Case Files, 1877–1883, Records of the Government Accounting Office, Records of the Third Auditor’s Office, RG 217, National Archives, College Park, Maryland, and Claims Disallowed by the Commissioner of Claims (Southern Claims Commission), Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1867–1881, RG 233, National Archives, Washington, D.C. See Josiah Simmons (no. 9,560), Southern Claims; George W. Poiner (no. 10,937), Southern Claims Disallowed; George W. Bell (no. 12,048), Southern Claims Disallowed; and Henry Culpepper (no. 7,479), Southern Claims Disallowed. W. H. Clark’s loyalty is also found in Elizabeth City Economist, 31 August 1900. The loy-

statistics for pasquotank citizens and guerrillas in 1860  /  137

alties of Richard B. Creecy and Edmund Perkins are evident throughout the Creecy Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (SHC). William F. Martin and James Green Martin’s loyalties are found in the William F. Martin Papers, SHC. Lucien D. Starke’s loyalty is confirmed both in his prewar pro-slavery stance as editor of the Democratic Pioneer newspaper and his service in the Seventeenth North Carolina (Second Organization) during the war. See William A. Griffin, Antebellum Elizabeth City: The History of a Canal Town (Elizabeth City, NC: Roanoke Press, 1970), 132; Democratic Pioneer, 22 April 1859; and Weymouth T. Jordan Jr., ed., North Carolina Troops, 1861–1865: A Roster, vol. 6, Infantry (Raleigh, NC: Division of Archives and History, 1977), 204. James W. Hinton, who is listed among the men in regular Confederate service, later organized the companies of guerrillas from the surrounding region into a regiment. Hinton is listed only in the Confederate citizen sample. The names of two men, B. F. White and H. B. Coleman, appear on both the Confederate list and the guerrilla list; they are left in both statistical samples. These men signify the shifting attitudes about methods of resistance from regular to irregular warfare in the community. Isaiah Fearing is the only citizen listed on both the Confederate list in 1862 and General Edward Wild’s unionist list in 1863. Fearing’s presence on both of these lists signifies the mutability of loyalty and service under duress in Confederate forces. My two primary sources for determining the names of unionists (tables 1–4) were collected by two Union officers during their trips through Pasquotank. In addition to his list of Confederates, unionist George W. Brooks gave Captain William L. Kent of the Twenty-third Massachusetts Infantry a list of unionists in Pasquotank. See appendix to William L. Kent Report, 17 October 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 1, 478–479. Like the Confederate list from Brooks, this appendix can be found only in the manuscript edition of the Official Records in the National Archives (Washington, D.C.), RG 109 (not in the printed Official Records). Kent’s list includes eleven names. All but three of them overlap with the list General Edward Wild compiled during his raid. These three names were unidentified in the census. The records of the Southern Claims Commission also allowed me to verify the names for many of the men on the Kent and Wild lists.

138  /  appendix

In December 1863, General Edward Wild compiled a list of fifty-three unionists in Pasquotank County; forty-one of these men can be positively identified in the 1860 census. See Edward Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Edward Augustus Wild Papers, SHC. The fifty-three men on Wild’s list would have been about 10 percent of the 523 men who signed the petition for the removal of the guerrillas in December 1863. The fifty-three also would have been roughly 2 percent of the 2,207 white men listed on the 1860 census for Pasquotank. If the fifty-three unionist identified by Wild are added to the forty-two unionist Buffaloes recruited for the First North Carolina (Union), the percentage is increased to roughly 5 percent. See Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington: GPO, 1864). These percentages for unionists living in Pasquotank are conservative estimates. By the time of Wild’s raid, many staunch Union sympathizers had fled the region, fearing guerrilla attacks. Of the fifty-three unionists on Wild’s list, he recorded that sixteen lived in Elizabeth City proper, three on the road from Elizabeth City to Nixonton, and five on the Elizabeth City road to the River Bridge. Therefore, twenty-four out of fifty-three lived close to the county seat or in it. The remainder lived either in Nixonton proper, on the road between Nixonton and Woodville, or in the lower part of the county. The list of Confederate guerrillas from Pasquotank (tables 5–8) was verified using several sources, including Captured Muster Rolls of “N.C. Defenders” in the Wild Papers, SHC, and Weymouth T. Jordan Jr., ed., North Carolina Troops, 1861–1865: A Roster, vol. 15, Infantry (Raleigh, NC: Division of Archives and History, 2003). Wild captured several partial lists of guerrillas during his raid, but many of the men listed were from Camden County. Nevertheless, the roster for John T. Elliott’s Pasquotank band was listed as a company in the Sixty-eighth North Carolina State Troops in Jordan’s excellent roster collection. John T. Elliott’s company consisted of ninety-one men who served at various points throughout the war; the overwhelming majority had served before Elliott mustered with the Sixtyeighth in January 1864. Forty-one of those men were positively identified in the 1860 population census of Pasquotank County; this group of forty-one constitutes my sample of guerrillas.

statistics for pasquotank citizens and guerrillas in 1860  /  139

My list of unionist Buffaloes (tables 5–8) includes the forty-two men identified as born in Pasquotank on the muster roll of Company D, First North Carolina Union Volunteer Infantry. Twenty-nine of these soldiers could be identified in the 1860 census. These twenty-nine men constitute the sample for my socioeconomic tables on the Buffaloes. See Compiled Service Records of Company D, First North Carolina Union Volunteers, Compiled Military Service Records of Union Soldiers of North Carolina, RG 94, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Gerald Thomas, transcriber, Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers Who Served during the Civil War from the State of North Carolina, RG 94, M401, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Table 1. Pasquotank Citizens’ Real Estate Value in 1860 Dollar Amount

Unionist

Confederate

0–99

10 (24.3%)

22 (52.4%)

7 (17.0%)

1 (2.4%)

100–499

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

1,000–2,499

500–999

9 (21.9%)

2 (4.8%)

2,500–4,999

6 (14.6%)

5 (11.9%)

5,000–9,999

3 (7.3%)

5 (11.9%)

Over 10,000

6 (14.6%)

6 (14.3%)

  Total property value

$165,305

$191,007

  Average per citizen

$4,032 (no. in sample: 41)

$4,547 (no. in sample: 42)

Note: In all the tables, percentages are rounded and are out of the sample, not the total population of the county. For example, in this table, the ten unionists who owned less than 99 dollars were 24.3% of the unionist population.

Table 2. Pasquotank Citizens’ Personal Property Value in 1860 Dollar Amount 0–99 100–499

Unionist

Confederate

3 (7.3%)

13 (31.0%)

7 (17.0%)

5 (11.9%)

500–999

5 (12.2%)

4 (9.5%)

1,000–2,499

9 (22.0%)

2 (4.8%)

2,500–4,999

6 (14.6%)

4 (9.5%)

5,000–9,999

6 (14.6%)

7 (16.7%)

Over 10,000

5 (12.2%)

7 (16.7%)

  Total property value

$183,971

$220,570

  Average per citizen

$4,487 (no. in sample: 41)

$5,251 (no. in sample: 42)

Table 3. Pasquotank Citizens’ Slave Ownership in 1860 Number of Slaves

Unionist

Confederate

1–4

10 (41.7%)

2 (11.8%)

5–9

9 (37.5%)

6 (35.3%)

10–14

0 (0.0%)

3 (17.7%)

15–19

1 (4.2%)

1 (5.9%)

20–24

2 (8.3%)

1 (5.9%)

25–29

1 (4.2%)

1 (5.9%)

30–34

0 (0.0%)

1 (5.9%)

35–39

1 (4.2%)

1 (5.9%)

40–44

0 (0.0%)

1 (5.9%)

45–49

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

Over 50

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

  Total number of slaveholders   Total number of slaves

24

17

195 (no. in sample: 41)

220 (no. in sample: 42)

Note: The largest slaveholder in Pasquotank was James C. Johnston, who is not listed in either the unionist or the Confederate sample, since he was an absentee holder who lived in Chowan County. Johnston owned 181 slaves in 1860.

Table 4. Occupations of Pasquotank Citizens in 1860 Occupation

Unionist

Confederate

Attorney at law

0 (0.0%)

5 (11.9%)

Clerk

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

Artist

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

Sailmaker

0 (0.0%)

2 (4.8%)

Constable

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

Barkeeper

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

Teacher

0 (0.0%)

3 (7.1%)

Stage or mail driver

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

24 (61.5%)

9 (21.4%)

Mariner

1 (2.6%)

5 (11.9%)

Painter

0 (0.0%)

2 (4.8%)

Farmer

Farmhand or overseer

1 (2.6%)

2 (4.8%)

Carpenter

1 (2.6%)

0 (0.0%)

Hotel keeper

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

Horse trader

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

Jeweler

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

7 (17.9%)

5 (11.9%)

Doctor

1 (2.6%)

3 (7.1%)

Speculator or collecting agent

1 (2.6%)

1 (2.4%)

Merchant (includes   grocers and gunsmiths)

Blacksmith or machinist

1 (2.6%)

1 (2.4%)

Baker

1 (2.6%)

0 (0.0%)

Cabinetmaker or wheelwright

1 (2.6%)

0 (0.0%)

Under age 17 and no   occupation listed

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

39 (occupation of 2 not known)

42

  Total in sample

Note: Unionist George W. Brooks is listed in the census as both a farmer and a lawyer. I have listed him in the farmer category in this table.

Table 5. Pasquotank Buffaloes’ and Guerrillas’ Real Estate Value in 1860 Dollar Amount

Unionist Buffalo

Confederate Guerrilla

0–99

26 (89.6%)

29 (70.7%)

100–499

1 (3.4%)

3 (7.3%)

500–999

1 (3.4%)

3 (7.3%)

1,000–2,499

0 (0.0%)

3 (7.3%)

2,500–4,999

1 (3.4%)

2 (4.9%)

5,000–9,999

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

Over 10,000

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

  Total property value

$3,760

$18,175

  Average per citizen

$130 (no. in sample: 29)

$433 (no. in sample: 41)

Table 6. Pasquotank Buffaloes’ and Guerrillas’ Personal Property Value in 1860 Dollar Amount

Unionist Buffalo

Confederate Guerrilla

0–99

21 (72.4%)

28 (68.3%)

100–499

7 (24.1%)

4 (9.8%)

500–999

0 (0.0%)

2 (4.9%)

1,000–2,499

1 (3.4%)

5 (12.2%)

2,500–4,999

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

5,000–9,999

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

Over 10,000

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

  Total property value

$2,835

$22,477

  Average per citizen

$98 (no. in sample: 29)

$535 (no. in sample: 41)

Table 7. Pasquotank Buffaloes’ and Guerrillas’ Slave Ownership in 1860 Number of slaves

Unionist Buffalo

Confederate Guerrilla

1–4

0 (0.0%)

3 (60.0%)

5–9

0 (0.0%)

2 (40.0%)

10–14

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

15–19

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

20–24

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

25–29

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

30–34

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

35–39

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

40–44

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

45–49

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

Over 50

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

  Total number of slaveholders   Total number of slaves

0

5

0 (no. in sample: 29)

17 (no. in sample: 41)

Table 8. Pasquotank Buffaloes’ and Guerrillas’ Occupations in 1860 occupation

Unionist Buffalo

Confederate Guerrilla

Attorney at law

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

Clerk

0 (0.0%)

3 (7.0%)

Artist

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

Sailmaker

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

Constable

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

Barkeeper

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

Teacher

1 (3.4%)

0 (0.0%)

Stage or mail driver

1 (3.4%)

1 (2.4%) (continued)

Table 8. (continued) occupation

Unionist Buffalo

Confederate Guerrilla

Farmer

6 (20.6%)

13 (32.0%)

Mariner

1 (3.4%)

5 (12.2%)

Painter

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

Farmhand

16 (55.2%)

7 (17.0%)

Carpenter

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

Hotel keeper

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

Horse trader

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

Jeweler

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

Merchant

0 (0.0%)

1 (2.4%)

Doctor

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

Speculator or   collecting agent

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

Blacksmith or machinist

1 (3.4%)

0 (0.0%)

Baker

0 (0.0%)

0 (0.0%)

Wheelwright or   cabinetmaker

1 (3.4%)

0 (0.0%)

Under age 17 and no   occupation listed   Total

2 (6.8%) (7 under age of 17 in sample, but 5 reported working in 1860)

7 (17.0%) (11 under age of 17 in sample, but 4 reported working in 1860)

29

41

Notes

Introduction 1. Correspondent “Tewksbury,” New York Times, 9 January 1864; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County, North Carolina, National Archives publication, microfilm no. 653, reel no. 909. Daniel Bright was twenty-eight years old in 1860. 2. Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864; Southern Recorder (Milledgeville, GA), 19 January 1864. 3. Clark, Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina, 3:713–728. Some accounts of the raid confuse the Sixty-sixth North Carolina State Troops and the Sixty-eighth North Carolina State Troops, since Hinton’s unit was initially designated the Sixty-sixth. Hinton’s regiment entered service as the Sixty-eighth State Troops in January 1864, having been superseded in organization by two other units. The northeastern North Carolina guerrilla companies of Captains John T. Elliott, Willis Sanderlin, Cyrus W. Grandy, Richard Keogh, and Caleb B. Walston all became part of James W. Hinton’s Sixty-eighth North Carolina State Troops. 4. W. N. H. Smith Report, 10–17 February 1864, U.S. War Department, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, ser. 2, vol. 6, 1127-1130 (hereafter cited as Official Records). A section of Smith’s full report was reprinted as Smith, Report of the Special Committee to Inquire into Certain Outrages of the Enemy. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Edward Augustus Wild Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter cited as Wild Papers). 5. Joel R. Griffin to General George Pickett, 19 December 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, 883. Griffin’s command was made up of seven companies of Georgians and three companies of local North Carolinians. For background on the Sixty-second Georgia, see Henderson, Roster of the Confederate Soldiers of Georgia, vol. 6; Crute, Units of the Confederate States Army, 115–116; Pearce and Daniels, Diary of Captain Henry A. Chambers, 159. 6. Richard Barfield Papers, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia, Athens. Barfield discusses the Sixty-second Georgia’s discovery of Bright’s body in his correspondence to his wife. 7. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers.

146  /  notes to pages 2–3 8. Barrett, Civil War in North Carolina, 177–181; Gordon, General George E. Pickett, 126–127; Nolan, Benjamin Franklin Butler, 242–243; Kirby, Poquosin, 182–194; Trudeau, Like Men of War, 117; Wills, War Hits Home, 202–207; Garrison, Civil War Hostages, chap. 9; Longacre, Army of Amateurs, 13–18; Trotter, Ironclads and Columbiads; Meekins, Elizabeth City, North Carolina and the Civil War. Wild’s raid is also treated briefly in Washington, Eagles on Their Buttons, but Daniel Bright’s execution is not fully analyzed. Zebulon Vance’s most recent biographers, Gordon B. McKinney (in Zeb Vance, 197) and Joe A. Mobley (in “War Governor of the South,” 90–93), also recounted the events of Wild’s raid and Vance’s response to it. 9. Casstevens, Edward A. Wild and the African Brigade; Witt, Wild in North Carolina. 10. My use of the term community was influenced by Bender, Community and Social Change in America, 6–7, 17. Bender generally defined community as “a limited number of people in a somewhat restricted social space or network held together by shared understandings and a sense of obligation.” Throughout this work, the term community is used to describe the specific geographic location, Pasquotank County, but also to refer to the experience of human relationships forged by close interaction on a daily basis and rooted in the race, class, gender, or political loyalty of the county’s inhabitants (i.e., slave or free black community, white community, unionist community, Confederate community). Individuals through their position in these constantly interacting social networks created the unique local dynamic that was the Pasquotank County “community.” Commitment to social stability, trade, and the institution of slavery bonded the majority of white Pasquotank citizens together in the antebellum period, and these people were bound in an organic yet oppressive social order to slaves and free blacks who worked closely for and alongside them. By the end of the war, elite desire to maintain social stability (not political loyalty to one cause or another) is the major thread holding the remaining members of the Pasquotank community together. This latter use of the term closely mirrors the gemeinschaft community forwarded by Bender and German scholar Ferdinand Tonnies, which included “intimate, private, and exclusive living together.” Bender juxtaposed gemeinschaft community with the anonymous city living of the gesellschaft community. Bender summarizes both these definitions by stating that “community is where community happens.” Also see Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War?” and Rutman, “Community Study.” 11. The historiography on violence as a part of southern identity is vast and growing. The presence of the Dismal Swamp in and around Pasquotank County created a frontierlike atmosphere for many farmers living in the northern regions of the county, whereas citizens who lived closer to the Albemarle Sound and Pasquotank River had easy access to trade in a national market economy by the late antebellum period. Several historians have argued that environments like the one in northern Pasquotank contributed to the feeling of militant individualism among many southern white men. While it is clear that not every white southern man was predisposed to violence, it was a dominant trait in the minds of many. My understanding of violence and individualism as a part in this particular local guerrilla conflict is informed by Cash, Mind of the South, 31, 43–44, and Franklin, Militant South, 21, 33–34. Cash asserts that “the dominant trait” of the white male southern “mind was an intense individualism . . . perhaps the most intense individualism the world has seen since the Italian Renaissance and its men of ‘terrible fury.’” The frontier life of southerners during the eighteenth century coupled with a smaller regional population spread over a wide area relaxed the system of laws and created an atmosphere in which where independence flourished. According to Cash, “in this world of ineffective social control, the tradition of vigilante action, which

notes to pages 3–4  /  147 normally lives and dies with the frontier, not only survived but grew” up until the era of Civil War. Furthermore, he believes that “Southern individualism . . . reached its ultimate incarnation in the Confederate soldier,” since “this soldier could not be disciplined.” John Hope Franklin expanded upon this notion of individualism in his provocative chapter entitled “Personal Warfare,” Franklin demonstrates how southern men validated ideas about their own military strengths through individual achievement. Summing up southern militant identity in one concise sentence, he writes, “In the South, it was impractical to rely on the rather feeble protective arm of the government; and the Southerner was too self-sufficient and too realistic to do so. Thus, he tended either to evolve some loosely organized, temporary protective machinery or to prepare to do battle alone for the protection of himself and his family.” Franklin emphasizes, “It was most frequently left to the individual . . . to adopt a policy that would safeguard the lives and interests of those for whom he was responsible.” In an atmosphere in which self- and community defense was omnipresent, white southern men found it necessary to prepare themselves personally to defend their homes, freedom, and beliefs. This preparation would supply impetus for guerrilla struggle later. Like Cash, Franklin believes that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century frontier life created a characteristic repugnance among white southern men for any type of discipline or control. The frontier atmosphere necessitated a person who was both intensely independent and prepared to use violence as an essential part of daily life. Franklin contends that white male southerners had “contempt for control” and desired that “[h]onor . . . regulat[e] the conduct of the individual.” The remoteness and isolation of the southern frontier forced white men into a position in which they “might be called upon to defend [their] life against some beast of the forest or some intractable human being.” Bertram Wyatt-Brown (Honor and Violence in the Old South, 151) connected this individualism and violence to the pressures of a patriarchal society and desire for social advancement. Wyatt-Brown asserts that “a patriarchal order that left young men desperate for purpose in life was bound to create a scheme whereby self-vindication could be achieved in killing one another.” 12. Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much,” 133, 141; Also see Brown, “Microhistory and the Post-Modern Challenge,” on the importance of community study and microhistory to historical analysis. 13. Historian Daniel E. Sutherland in “Sideshow No Longer” credits Phillip Shaw Paludan with being the first Civil War historian to investigate the “social effect” of irregular conflicts in the Confederacy. 14. The fine regional and local studies of unrest, social disorder, and irregular conflict on the Confederate home front include Paludan, Victims; Auman, “Neighbor against Neighbor: The Inner Civil War in the Central Counties of Confederate North Carolina” (Ph.D. diss.); Auman, “Neighbor against Neighbor: The Inner Civil War in the Randolph County Area of North Carolina,” 59–92; Durrill, War of Another Kind, which focuses on Washington County, North Carolina, another community on the eastern shore; Escott and Crow, “Social Order and Violent Disorder”; Fellman, Inside War; Fisher, War at Every Door; Noe, “Who Were the Bushwhackers?; Sarris, Separate Civil War; McKnight, Contested Borderlands; and Storey, Loyalty and Loss. Few scholars have devoted the time and analytical skill to the study of Civil War southern dissent the way David Williams has. See Williams, Rich Man’s War; Williams, Williams, and Carlson, Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War; Williams, People’s History of the Civil War; and Williams, Bitterly Divided. The intersection of dissent, unionism, and guerrilla warfare is also examined in Freehling, South vs. the South,

148  /  notes to pages 4–7 and Sutherland, Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front, which provides a nice region-by-region introduction to the local guerrilla wars of the Confederacy. For another perceptive analysis that frames the guerrilla war across the Confederacy, see Sutherland, “Guerrilla Warfare, Democracy, and the Fate of the Confederacy.” An insightful recent overview of the historiography is Ramage, “Recent Historiography of Guerrilla Warfare in the Civil War.” 15. Although Wild’s African American soldiers constituted one of the first black units in the eastern theater to be used as counterguerrilla soldiers in a raid, they were not the first blacks during the war to see combat against guerrillas. Several companies from Wild’s Fifth United States Colored Troops participated in a smaller counterguerrilla expedition in November 1863 in Princess Anne County, Virginia; see Washington, Eagles on Their Buttons, 33. The Second North Carolina Colored Volunteers (NCCV) also embarked on a counterguerrilla operation in southeastern Virginia in late November 1863. See Alonzo Draper, 27 and 30 November 1863, file 5063, RG 393, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands 1821–1920, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter cited as NARA), Washington, D.C. Both groups of soldiers were eventually part of Wild’s December 1863 raid. Black soldiers west of the Appalachian Mountains engaged guerrillas long before December 1863, especially along the Kansas-Missouri border. One such engagement occurred at Island Mound, Missouri, on 29 October 1862; see Trudeau, Like Men of War, 3–7. 16. Phillips, “Central Theme of Southern History”; Grimsley, “Race in the Civil War,” 37. Also see Grimsley, “Very Long Shadow,” 231–244. 17. Beringer et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War, 436–438; Bynum, Free State of Jones, for another scholar who has focused on the dynamics of race and guerrilla conflict. 18. Works that view the Civil War’s military conflict through the lens of race include Cornish, Sable Arm; McPherson, Negro’s Civil War; Glatthaar, Forged in Battle; Urwin, Black Flag over Dixie; and Smith, Black Soldiers in Blue. 19. Fellman, Inside War, 65–73; Sutherland, “Guerrilla Warfare, Democracy, and the Fate of the Confederacy,” 281. Both Fellman and Sutherland address the question of slavery’s role in hindering the Confederate government’s use of guerrilla war as a strategy. Fellman found evidence that slavery limited guerrilla activity in Missouri, and Sutherland claims that more work needs to be done to prove that slavery was a major obstacle to guerrilla war. 20. For other works on southern unionism and dissent, see Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy; Inscoe and Kenzer, Enemies of the Country; Degler, Other South; Crofts, Reluctant Confederates; Clinton, Southern Families at War; Dyer, Secret Yankees; and McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels. For an analysis of the effect of occupation on loyalties in the Carteret region of eastern North Carolina, see Browning, “Removing the Mask of Nationality,” and his “Wearing the Mask of Nationality Lightly.” 21. For a discussion of the no-man’s-land concept as it applies to the entire occupied South, see Ash, When the Yankees Came, 99–105. 22. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 47, 49. Although Foucault subsequently argued that the public execution’s reign of terror ended in France with the birth of the prison in the early nineteenth century, I have found parallels between the reasoning for execution then and the justification of execution during the guerrilla war of rural northeastern North Carolina. By borrowing some of Foucault’s framework on violence and execution as a conversation with the community, my work explores the underlying purposes of public execution in Pasquotank’s guerrilla war. Foucault argued that early forms of punishment served a dual purpose: to purify and educate the community

notes to pages 8–11  /  149 about power and law while punishing the individual who committed the crime. Furthermore, he believed public violence was a “political ritual,” a reassertion of state power over the community. 23. On the role of the body and execution as a cultural message, see Nudelman, John Brown’s Body, 1–13. 24. For work on the internal guerrilla conflict in central and western North Carolina, see Auman, “Neighbor against Neighbor: The Inner Civil War in the Central Counties of Confederate North Carolina” (Ph.D. diss.); Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia; Trotter, Bushwhackers; and O’Brien, Mountain Partisans. 25. While the popular mythology of the North Carolina irregular conflict has largely ignored the eastern third of the state, several historians have analyzed the local guerrilla violence and violence against unionists in this part of the state. See, for example, Durrill, War of Another Kind; Gordon, “In Time of War”; Collins, “War Crime or Justice?”; Thomas, Divided Allegiances; Barrett, Civil War in North Carolina, 171–212; and Browning, “Little Souled Mercenaries.”

1. The Roots of Civil War Loyalty 1. Powell, North Carolina through Four Centuries, 53; Powell, Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 26–27. 2. For an excellent contemporary map of the region, see U.S. War Department, Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, plate 138. 3. Carlton, “Revolution from Above,” argues that the interior of North Carolina was largely sealed off to national market integration during the antebellum years because of the weak internal transportation system, but he found exception to this in the coastal regions where the naval stores industry dominated and local export trade to the major cities of the North flourished. My research demonstrates that while naval stores were key to the export trade, other agricultural products like corn and grain were also being traded in a national market by the late 1850s from this region. Northeastern North Carolina was clearly part of a market revolution evident by the late 1850s in the coastal South. For an excellent examination of the naval stores industry and its emergence in North Carolina, see Outland, Tapping the Pines. Thompson, Bertie at War, 17, has asserted that unionism in Bertie County (also in the Albemarle region) was a product of antebellum northern trade. 4. Royster, Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Land Company. Although shingle flats could navigate the canal in 1805, the canal was not opened to larger shipping vessels until 1814. The first one of these more substantial ships, a twenty-ton vessel, passed through the canal during that year. By 1828, the canal was widened and enlarged by slave labor. Royster notes the use of companyowned slaves, but he does not discuss the use of any free blacks in the actual construction of the canal. On the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal, see Watson, Internal Improvements in Antebellum North Carolina, 90–91, and Brown, Juniper Waterway. 5. Kirby, Poquosin, 11–12, 17, 26–27. 6. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Agriculture of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, 108–115, 210–236 (hereafter cited as Bureau of the Census, Agriculture of the United States in 1860). Pasquotank had a total of 53,674 acres of improved land and 40,258 unimproved acres in the final year before the war. The county totaled 481 farms of 3 acres or more. The overall cash value of all improved farms was estimated at $1,927,149. In 1860, Pasquotank produced 70,388 bushels of wheat, 39,400 bushels of rye, 10,210 pounds of flax (no. 5 of 86 counties),

150  /  notes to pages 11–16 58 pounds of silk cocoons (no. 1 of 86), 6,478 pounds of honey, and 574,689 bushels of Indian corn (no. 7 of 86). It produced no rice, cotton, or tobacco in 1860. 7. Agricultural and Manufacturing Census Records for Fifteen Southern States for the Years 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880. 8. Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864. 9. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County; 7 February 1860 and 15 October 1860, Major Bell Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. 10. Bureau of the Census, Agriculture of the United States in 1860, 235–236. 11. Secretary of the Interior, Population of the United States in 1860, 348–363; for the total white male voting population in the 1860 presidential election, see Connor, Manual of North Carolina, 986. 12. Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina, 74–75, 132–135; Kirby, Poquosin, 19, 26. 13. Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina, 74–75, 132–135. For an example of a free black registration certificate, see ibid., 75. 14. Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy; Late a Slave in the United States of America (London: C. Gilpin, 5, Bishops Gate-Street, 1843), reprinted in Andrews, North Carolina Slave Narratives, 159. All citations to Grandy’s Narrative are from the reprint in the Andrews volume. 15. Ibid., 160. For an in-depth analysis of slave hiring in the South, see Martin, Divided Mastery. 16. Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, 159–161; Democratic Pioneer (Elizabeth City, NC), 18 October 1859. 17. Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, 165, 173, 183. 18. Stowe, Dred. 19. Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina, 23–26, 200, 204. 20. DeBow, The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850. An Appendix; Secretary of the Interior, Statistics of the United States (including Mortality, Property, &c.) in 1860. 21. Elizabeth City Economist, 29 June 1900. 22. For an excellent discussion of the role of the Quakers and the American Colonization Society in the formation of the free black community of Pasquotank, see Clegg, Price of Liberty, 199. 23. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, chaps. 8 and 9. 24. 1802 Slave Insurrection, Pasquotank County, Records of Slaves and Free Persons of Color, 1733–1892, North Carolina Division of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina (hereafter cited as NCDAH). Also see Griffin, Antebellum Elizabeth City, 123–124, and Norfolk Herald, 25 May 1802. Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South, 159, 179–186, argues that the insurrectionary scares in tidewater Virginia and eastern North Carolina during 1802 were partially brought on by increased economic anxieties following the downturn in trade as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. Fears of recent revolts in the Caribbean, especially Santo Domingo, were also common among whites. Wyatt-Brown argues persuasively that some insurrectionary scares were drummed up by whites with little evidence. Yet he clearly believes there were some genuine threats in the greater Virginia and North Carolina area during this year. Given the limited primary source material remaining from Pasquotank, however, it is nearly impossible to determine whether the scare in the county was a genuine rebellion. Since the slave who reported the insurrection, Mingo, was found guilty of perjury and six slaves accused of plotting were acquitted, it seems unlikely. Nevertheless, other records show that several slaves were whipped and imprisoned for involvement in the alleged plot.

notes to pages 16–21  /  151 25. Request for arms, J. M. Gregory to Governor Montford Stokes, 17 September 1831, Montford Stokes Papers, Governors’ Papers, State Series, LXII, NCDAH. Also see Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina, 70–73, 204. 26. Elizabeth City Economist, 9 February 1900. 27. Griffin, Antebellum Elizabeth City, 136–137. 28. Herald of the Times, 5 September 1835; Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina, 70. 29. Ashworth, Agrarians and Aristocrats, 11. 30. Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina, 111–113. 31. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Slave Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County, North Carolina, National Archives publication, microfilm no. 653, reel no. 925. Johnson was actually a resident of nearby Chowan County, but he owned property in several counties of eastern North Carolina, including Poplar Plains, Body, and Salem plantations. For more on James C. Johnson, see Johnston Series, Hayes Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter cited as Johnston Series). 32. Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina, 204, 209, 239. 33. Cecelski, Waterman’s Song, 238. Twenty-four of the 1,507 free blacks were mariners according to Cecelski. 34. Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina, 229, 231. 35. Old North State (Elizabeth City, NC), 27 March 1852. 36. Town Minutes of Elizabeth City, 1853–1863, 1865–1867, 1 vol., Pasquotank County Records, NCDAH (hereafter cited as Town Minutes of Elizabeth City); Democratic Pioneer (Elizabeth City, NC), 17 November 1857. Hinton owned five slaves in 1860. 37. Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina, 17–18, 231; Secretary of the Interior, Population of the United States in 1860, 348–363. 38. Slave patrols, Pasquotank County, Records of Slaves and Free Persons of Color, 1815–1861, NCDAH. In the slave patrol records, the farmer is listed as “Daniel Brite,” but he is listed as “Daniel Bright” in the 1860 census. Interestingly, R. B. Creecy and George D. Pool, men on opposite sides politically during the war, served together on a committee to appoint a slave patrol in March 1861. For another reference to Daniel Bright serving in a slave patrol, see 5 June 1859, Pasquotank County, County Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions, 1737–1868, NCDAH. For a discussion of antebellum slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas, see Hadden, Slave Patrols, and Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 617–619. 39. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County. The name of the only “Daniel Brite” listed in the 1860 census of Pasquotank County is spelled “Bright,” not “Brite.” 40. Griffin, Antebellum Elizabeth City, 132–133. 41. Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics, 379. 42. Griffin, Antebellum Elizabeth City, 132–133. 43. For more on the Locofoco Party, see Sellers, Market Revolution, 352; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 420–422; and Byrdsall, History of the Loco-Foco or Equal Rights Party, 178–182. 44. Griffin, Antebellum Elizabeth City, 131–133. For more on Stephen D. Pool after he left Pasquotank County and moved to Carteret County, see Browning, “Removing the Mask of Nationality,” 597–598, 618–619.

152  /  notes to pages 21–29 45. Franklin, Militant South, 33, 55–58. 46. For a full discussion of party politics in 1850s North Carolina, see Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics, 245–280. 47. Ashworth, Agrarians and Aristocrats, 11; Sellers, “Who Were the Southern Whigs?” Sellers argues that the most important dimension of this ideology in the initial formation of the Whig Party was its opposition to Andrew Jackson’s antibank policy. My thinking on the persistence of Whig loyalty in Pasquotank was also influenced by Kohl, Politics of Individualism. 48. Ashworth, Agrarians and Aristocrats, 52–84. 49. Democratic Pioneer (Elizabeth City, NC), 6 March 1855. 50. Naturalization Records, Miscellaneous Records of Pasquotank County, NCDAH. 51. Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics, 250. 52. Ibid., 274, 262–263. 53. Democratic Pioneer (Elizabeth City, NC), 28 June 1859. 54. Ibid., 3 May 1859. 55. Ibid., 24 May 1859. 56. Ibid., 14 June 1859. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 19 July 1859. 59. Ibid., 26 July 1859. 60. Ibid., 16 August 1859. 61. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 190–193, 196–197; Escott, Many Excellent People, 29. 62. Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics, 269. 63. John Pool owned seven slaves in 1860. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Slave Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County. 64. Albemarle Southron and Union Advocate (Murfeesboro, NC), 5 April 1860. 65. Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics, 275. 66. Butts, “Irrepressible Conflict,” 66, 56. 67. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Slave Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County. 68. Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics, 276. 69. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 196. 70. Butts, “Irrepressible Conflict,” 44. 71. Albemarle Southron and Union Advocate (Murfeesboro, NC), 17 May 1860. 72. Ibid., 26 July 1860. 73. Albemarle Southron and Union Advocate (Elizabeth City, NC), 19 October 1860. 74. Connor, Manual of North Carolina, 986. 75. Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics, 301–302. 76. Raleigh Standard, 20 December 1860. During this tense period in neighboring Currituck County, a small slave insurrection scare caused the local superior court to hold two days of hearings in January 1861 with Peter, Miles, and Jesse, who were slaves of local George Wallace; all three slaves were eventually found not guilty. See Currituck County Superior Court Minutes, 1851–1871, January 1861, NCDAH.

notes to pages 30–35  /  153 77. Connor, Manual of North Carolina, 1013–1015. 78. Ibid. The statewide vote was 46,672 for the convention and 47,333 against the convention.

2. “The Work of Evil Minded Citizens” 1. Town Minutes of Elizabeth City, 15 May 1861; Griffin, Antebellum Elizabeth City, 132. 2. Numerous Confederate and Union sources support the analysis that there was a Confederate majority in Pasquotank after 20 May 1861, when North Carolina seceded. See James A. Seddon to Zebulon B. Vance, 3 November 1863, in Mobley, Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 327 (unless otherwise noted, all references to this edited collection are from vol. 2); Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers; Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864; Josiah Simmons (no. 9560), Southern Claims Commission Case Files, 1877–1883, Records of the Government Accounting Office, Records of the Third Auditor’s Office, RG 217, NARA, College Park, Maryland (hereafter cited as Southern Claims). 3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County. This figure of 5 percent is a conservative estimate. It would have been 10 percent of the white male population remaining in the county by 1863. See the Appendix for a discussion of how allegiances were discerned and tabulated. Pasquotank’s middle class and merchants were far more ambivalent about slavery during the war than the wider southern white population was, especially after the war threatened to ruin their local economy and slaves started fleeing the region. The fact that some middle-class slaveholders began paying wages to their slaves following the Emancipation Proclamation to keep them working is evidence of their ambivalence about slavery and its future. Edward Wild’s December 1863 raid, not the Emancipation Proclamation, dealt the final death blow to the slave labor system in northeastern North Carolina. Byrne, Becoming Bourgeois, argues that merchants as a class were far more ambivalent about the institution of slavery and its future in the South. Byrne, however, sees merchants South-wide as no more unionist than other occupational groups. Clearly merchants as part of a larger middle class were more unionist in Pasquotank. 4. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County. 5. Ibid. Also see U.S. Bureau of the Census, Slave Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County; Agricultural and Manufacturing Census Records for Fifteen Southern States for the Years 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880. 6. Berry, All That Makes a Man, 171–172. 7. Town Minutes of Elizabeth City, 6 May 1861; Barrett, Civil War in North Carolina, chap. 4. 8. Town Minutes of Elizabeth City, 2 January 1861. 9. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County. For enlistment figures by county in North Carolina as of November 1861, see Western Democrat (Charlotte, NC), 18 March 1862. 10. For a discussion of the origins of unionism in the mountain counties of North Carolina, see Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 228–249. 11. The designation First Organization is important because there were two Seventeenth North Carolina Infantry regiments during the war. The organization was initially called the Seventh North

154  /  notes to pages 35–40 Carolina but was redesignated when it entered Confederate service in August 1861. Other men from the county joined three local companies: Captain G. G. Luke’s Independent Company, Captain W. A. Duke’s Home Defense Company, and the militia of the Corporation of Elizabeth City, none of which have left behind substantial extant material for study. For more on men serving in these local companies, see Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, vol. 6, Infantry (1977), 118–127, 191–199; Town Minutes of Elizabeth City, 11 January 1862. 12. Clark, Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina, 2:1–3. 13. Carbone, Civil War in Coastal North Carolina, 5–16; Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 6:118–119. 14. James S. Whitehead Diary, NCDAH. 15. Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 6:118–121. The First Organization here is important because there were two Company Bs for this unit during the war. 16. Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, vol. 9, Infantry (1983), 18. 17. Barrett, Civil War in North Carolina, chap. 5. 18. Judah P. Benjamin to Henry T. Clark, 23 September 1861, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 4, 655. 19. James Green Martin Correspondence, 22 October 1861 and 4 January 1862, William Francis Martin Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 20. Carbone, Civil War in Coastal North Carolina, 37; Buel and Johnson, Battles and Leaders, 1:632–640. 21. Carbone, Civil War in Coastal North Carolina, 39–42; James W. Hinton to George W. Randolph, 11 April 1862, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 3, 841; Buel and Johnson, Battles and Leaders, 1:645;. Putnam, Story of Company A, 88; Derby, Bearing Arms in the Twenty-Seventh Massachusetts Regiments, 75. 22. Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, vol. 4, Infantry (1973), 515. 23. Miles Morgan (no. 3,342), Claims Disallowed by the Commissioner of Claims (Southern Claims Commission), Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1867–1881, RG 233, NARA, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as Southern Claims Disallowed). 24. Eleanor Leigh (no. 7131), Southern Claims. 25. Five of the six Confederate ships engaged in the battle were either captured or destroyed by the Union fleet; the other ship escaped. The Confederate ships destroyed or captured were CSS Black Warrior (burned), CSS Fanny (burned), CSS Ellis (captured), CSS Forrest (burned), and CSS Seabird (sunk). U.S. War Department, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, ser. 2, vol. 1, 249–253 (hereafter cited as Official Records, Navies); Buel and Johnson, Battles and Leaders, 1:645; Barrett, Civil War in North Carolina, 85–87; Parramore, “Burning of Winton in 1862,” focuses on military operations nearby in Hertford County during this period. 26. Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 6:119. Also see Buel and Johnson, Battles and Leaders, 1:645–646, and Witt, South Mills, April 19, 1862. 27. Moore, Rebellion Record, 4:122–123. 28. W. N. H. Smith to George W. Randolph, 11 April 1862, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 3, 841–842; During the February 1861 secession convention vote, the people of Currituck supported a secessionist delegate and a secession convention by the largest margin in the six northeastern counties. In Currituck only 86 men opposed the convention, while 447 favored it. They selected a seces-

notes to pages 40–44  /  155 sion delegate to represent the community. For a discussion of locals fleeing in every direction, see Creecy Family to Elizabeth Creecy, 5 April 1862, Creecy Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter cited as Creecy Family Papers); Elizabeth City Economist, 10 August 1900; for additional evidence that Confederates fired on homes and the town, see Richmond (VA) Dispatch, 12 February 1862; Colonel. C. F. Henningsen Report, 12 February 1862, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 9, 191–194; Pasquotank Historical Society Yearbook, vol. 1 (1954–1955), 78–81; testimony of George D. Pool, Diary of Zebulon Baird Vance, Zebulon Baird Vance Papers, NCDAH; and George W. Bell (no. 12,048), Southern Claims Disallowed. Bell, the Elizabeth City gunsmith, fled during the fall of Elizabeth City and did not return until 1864. The Union navy seized fifty weapons from his business in May 1862. 29. Elizabeth City Economist, 10 August 1900. 30. Nancy L. Lister (no. 12,046), Southern Claims. 31. Colonel C. F. Henningsen Report, 12 February 1862, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 9, 191–194. 32. Stephen Rowan Letter, 11 February 1862, Gilder Lehrman Collection, New-York Historical Society, New York. 33. Creecy Family Papers, 1 October 1861. 34. Josiah Simmons (no. 9560), Southern Claims. 35. Ash, When the Yankees Came, 99–105. 36. Rush C. Hawkins Report, 11 April 1862, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 9, 296–297. 37. Ambrose E. Burnside Report, 17 April 1862, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 9, 377–379. 38. Zebulon B. Vance, 4 February 1863, in Mobley, Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 46–47. 39. Buel and Johnson, Battles and Leaders, 1:654–659; Richmond (VA) Dispatch, 21 April 1862. 40. Escott, “Southern Yeomen and the Confederacy,” and Escott, After Secession, chaps. 3 and 4; Kruman, “Dissent in the Confederacy.” On resistance to conscription outside North Carolina, see Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy; Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy, 3–23; Wiley, The Plain People of the Confederacy, 36–69; and Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, 118–121. Hahn discusses the resistance to Confederate conscription by yeomen in two counties of middle Georgia but concludes that local politics mitigated much of the class antagonism. 41. General Orders No. 30, 28 April 1862, Official Records, ser. 4, vol. 1, 1094–1095, 1098. 42. Crute, Units of the Confederate States Army, 217, 219, 243. 43. For a discussion of individualism and violent behavior as a major component of southern identity, see Cash, Mind of the South, 31, 43–44; Franklin, Militant South, 33–62; Hackney, “Southern Violence”; and Bruce, Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South. 44. For a careful analysis of guerrilla warfare as both a concept and a method, see Laqueur, Guerrilla, viii–ix. 45. Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, 112–113. In this study, Partisan Ranger is used only in reference to the specific group of soldiers sanctioned under the April 1862 through February 1864 Confederate congressional policy or by the state of North Carolina under its own state-level Partisan Ranger initiative. The term guerrilla or irregular is used throughout this study to refer to the Confederate soldiers in Pasquotank and the northeastern region of the state who formed self-constituted companies for home-front defense. Although these men initially formed their companies with the intent to join a state-sanctioned Partisan Ranger unit, they never formally mustered into service as a North Carolina Partisan Ranger unit and subsequently operated independently outside the Confederate command structure.

156  /  notes to pages 45–49 46. Mackey, UnCivil War, 3–23. Mackey also makes a distinction between “counter-guerrilla warfare,” or passive measures (like blockhouses), and “anti-guerrilla warfare,” or active measures (like search and destroy missions). In Pasquotank, the Union army units often used both methods concurrently. The term counterguerrilla warfare is therefore used here to encompass both. 47. James W. Hinton to Benjamin F. Butler, 15 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, 847. 48. Creecy Family Papers, 3 March 1862. 49. The use of local militia from the region during the battle of South Mills and at other points in 1862 is discussed in Buel and Johnson, Battles and Leaders, 1:654–659; Collins, Eastern North Carolinians in the Union Army; Rush C. Hawkins Report, 11 April 1862, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 9, 296–297. 50. James W. Hinton to George W. Randolph, 11 April 1862, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 3, 841. 51. C. W. Flusser, 13 May 1862, Papers of Charles Williamson Flusser, ZB File, Early Records Collection, Operational Archives, Navy Historical Center, Washington Navy Yard, Washington, D.C., cited in Hinds, Invasion and Conquest of North Carolina, 247. 52. C. W. Flusser Report, 18 May 1862, Official Records, Navies, ser. 1, vol. 7, 385. 53. Stephen Rowan, 19 May 1862, Official Records, Navies, ser. 1, vol. 7, 439–441. 54. Ambrose E. Burnside Report, 5 July 1862, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 9, 408–409. 55. C. W. Flusser Report, 19 May 1862, and S. C. Rowan Report, 12 June 1862, Official Records, Navies, ser. 1, vol. 7, 391, 476. 56. For more on Edward Stanly’s administration of North Carolina, see Brown, Edward Stanly; Brown, “Union Election in Civil War North Carolina.” The counties in the First Congressional District included Bertie, Camden, Currituck, Chowan, Gates, Halifax, Hertford, Martin, Northampton, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Tyrrell, and Washington. The Second Congressional District included Beaufort, Carteret, Craven, Edgecombe, Greene, Hyde, Jones, Lenoir, Onslow, Pitt, and Wayne. Earlier in the war unionists Charles Henry Foster, a former newspaper editor who lived in Murfeesboro, North Carolina, and the Reverend Marble Nash Taylor had attempted to establish a restored Union government on Hatteras Island. After the fall of the island to Union forces, they held two congressional elections on the island in November 1861 and January 1862 that Foster won, but the U.S. Congress never seated him as a representative of either the first or second district. For more on Foster, see Delaney, “Charles Henry Foster and the unionists of Eastern North Carolina.” 57. Collins, Eastern North Carolinians in the Union Army. 58. Enos C. Sanders, 18 August 1862, Compiled Service Records of Company D, First North Carolina Union Volunteers, Compiled Military Service Records of Union Soldiers of North Carolina, RG 94, NARA, Washington D.C. (hereafter cited as Compiled Service Records of Company D); Enos C. Sanders Report, 18 September 1862, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 18, 14–15. The guerrilla group that attacked Shiloh was largely made up of men from Company L, Seventeenth North Carolina, which had been paroled to the home front in February 1862 and formally exchanged in August 1862. These men were almost certainly under the command of John T. Elliott or Willis B. Sanderlin; see Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 6:192–195. 59. Enos C. Sanders Report, 21 September 1862, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 18, 14–15. 60. Enos C. Sanders, 24 September 1862, Compiled Service Records of Company D. 61. New Bern (NC) Daily Progress, 6 October 1862. 62. Throughout this work, when I employ the term Buffalo, I am referring specifically to the Pasquotank men who joined the U.S. company of Enos Sanders; for a discussion of eastern Carolina Buffaloes and the etymology of the term, see Browning, “Little Souled Mercenaries,” 337–339,

notes to pages 49–54  /  157 342–343. Browning points out that the Wingfield Buffaloes serving in Chowan County operated essentially as irregulars during much of their service despite being a formally recognized company in the First North Carolina (Union), but while stationed at Elizabeth City, Pasquotank County’s company operated as regular infantry. Browning argues that 15 percent of the men in the First and Second North Carolina (Union) were “turncoats” who had “volunteered” to serve in the Confederate army early in the war. In Pasquotank, some of the unionist citizens were physically threatened and coerced by local Confederate sympathizers prior to volunteering. See, for example, Miles Morgan (no. 3,342), Southern Claims Disallowed, and Eleanor Leigh (no. 7131), Southern Claims. 63. Eleanor Leigh (no. 7131), Southern Claims. 64. Honey, “War within the Confederacy.” All but twelve counties in North Carolina out of eighty-six contributed troops to the Union army, for a total of 3,200 white and 5,035 black soldiers statewide; Nathaniel Sanders, 31 October 1862, file 3238, RG 393, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands 1821–1920, NARA, Washington, D.C. On the arming of local blacks during the late fall of 1862, see C. W. Hollowell to James C. Johnston, 8 February 1863, Johnston Series; and J. W. Wallis, April 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 18, 674–675. 65. Town Minutes of Elizabeth City, 20 November 1862 and 1 December 1862. 66. Enos C. Sanders, 28 November 1863, Compiled Service Records of Company D. 67. Enos C. Sanders, 15 December 1862, Compiled Service Records of Company D. 68. Enos C. Sanders Report, 16 February 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 18, 538–539. 69. Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, vol. 15, Infantry (2003), 509–526. 70. Ibid., 528–529. While the earliest reference to John T. Elliott’s command of a guerrilla group is in April 1863, it is almost certain that he and many men from Company L, Seventeenth North Carolina (First Organization), were the same men who had operated as irregulars in the region since the fall of Elizabeth City. John Elliott’s group mustered as Company E, Sixty-sixth North Carolina Partisan Rangers, in April 1863, but like the other companies of this unit, it was never formally accepted as part of a regiment into the North Carolina state service. It did not officially enter North Carolina service as part of a regiment until the Sixty-eighth North Carolina State Troops was accepted in January 1864. 71. Benjamin B. Tatum (no. 7138), Southern Claims. Also see Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 6:192–195. 72. Noe, “Who Were the Bushwhackers?” 5–26; Fellman, Inside War, 132–148. These findings fit with what historian Michael Fellman has found among young, idealistic Missouri guerrillas as opposed to the older and more economically stable irregulars studied by Kenneth Noe in western Virginia and Appalachia. 73. Elizabeth City Economist, 14 September 1900. 74. Ibid. Also see Richard B. Creecy, “A Dread Time,” in Pasquotank Historical Society Yearbook, 1:79–80; Collins, Eastern North Carolinians in the Union Army; Enos C. Sanders, 6 January 1863, Compiled Service Records of Company D. 75. Enos C. Sanders, 6 January 1863, Compiled Service Records of Company D. 76. Enos C. Sanders Report, 24 April 1863, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 5, 518–519; Raleigh Standard, 4 February 1863; Wilmington Journal, 22 January 1863. For a discussion of John Foster’s military administration in North Carolina as well as his influence on local dynamics in the northeastern region of the state, see Meekins, Elizabeth City, North Carolina and the Civil War; on Federal operations in eastern North Carolina, see Humphreys, “Federal Army in Eastern North Carolina.”

158  /  notes to pages 54–59 77. Benjamin F. Keaton (no. 3,589), Southern Claims Disallowed. 78. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County; Thaddeus Cox, Compiled Service Records of Company D. 79. Enos C. Sanders Report, 16 February 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 18, 538–539, and George Pearson Pool, “Neighbor against Neighbor,” in Pasquotank Historical Society Yearbook, vol. 2 (1956– 1957), edited by John Elliot Wood, 113–114. 80. Crabtree and Patton, “Journal of a Secesh Lady,” 500; Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 36, found that soldiers who lost a close friend or relative in the fighting often moved toward increased brutality and lack of restraint in their use of violence toward their enemies. 81. John G. Foster Report, 5 May 1863, Official Records, ser. 3, vol. 3, 192. For the higher estimate of blacks recruited, see Raleigh Standard, 4 February 1863. 82. On Union James C. Johnston paying slaves wages in 1863, see Account Books, Hollowell Family Papers, East Carolina Manuscript Collection, Special Collections Department, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, and James C. Johnston to C. W. Hollowell, 1 March 1863, 13 March 1863, and 18 March 1863, Johnston Series; C. W. Hollowell, who also was a unionist, ran Johnston’s Pasquotank plantations. For a different reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation by unionists and Confederate civilians living in occupied Carteret and Craven counties on the eastern North Carolina coast, see Browning, “Removing the Mask of Nationality,” 590–591, 619. Browning has found a different dynamic at work in occupied New Bern and Beaufort, where the Union troops permanently garrisoned the town. Whereas the no-man’s-land experience of Pasquotank (specifically the guerrilla threat) forced unionists to accept the decree grudgingly, Browning demonstrates that anger over the Emancipation Proclamation and power abuses caused less committed unionists and conditional Confederates in the relatively stable military environment of the Carteret region to turn on the Union army and become “confirmed Confederates.” 83. Josiah Simmons (no. 9560), Southern Claims. 84. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. Wild noted that some unionists had begun to pay wages to slaves in Elizabeth City during his December 1863 expedition to the county. 85. Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists, 66–67. 86. Edward Stanly, 20 January 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 18, 525–526. 87. James W. Hinton to Zebulon B. Vance, 10 February 1863, McKinney and McMurry, Papers of Zebulon Vance, reel 16. 88. James Johnston Pettigrew to Zebulon B. Vance, 5 February 1863, in Mobley, Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 47–49. 89. Pasquotank Historical Society Yearbook, 1:79. For reference to slave ownership and vacationing on Nags Head, see Creecy Family Papers, 31 August 1861, 9 October 1861, 6 May 1862, and 14 April 1863. Creecy’s papers discuss slaves on his property, but he is absent from the 1860 slave census. It is possible that he was vacationing at Nags Head during the summer months (as his family normally did) when the census enumerator recorded the slaveholdings. It is more likely that all the slaves on Creecy’s property were not owned by him but by his wife’s father, Edmund H. Perkins. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Slave Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County. 90. Creecy Family Papers, 6 May 1862.

notes to pages 59–65  /  159 91. Ibid., 17 March 1864(?). Also see ibid., 25 February or March 1863. One of these regular visits came in either February or March 1863, when ten black soldiers visited the property. About this visit R. B. Creecy’s wife stated: “We have had very bad times ever since Cox was killed. Great many armed negroes have been passing our home every two or three days and last Wednesday 25th 10 armed negroes came here without any white man and took Louisea [probably a horse] and an ax and some other things. They did not come in the house but . . . I think would have come in but your Pa and some other gentlemen were standing on the steps and [wou]ld not get away. O I am so thankful you were not home, but General Palmer came up Thursday and took all arms from the negroes and carried away about fifty . . . hope to have a better order of things. If you wish to return home Eddie [her brother] must bring you.” After penning this letter, Creecy’s wife wrote at the bottom of it: “[B]urn this up.” 92. John G. Foster Report, 5 May 1863, Official Records, ser. 3, vol. 3, 192. Foster’s comment about raiding is not clear on whether the men were actually used in combat. If they were, it may well have been one of the earliest uses of black soldiers in combat in the eastern theater of the war. 93. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, 35. 94. I. N. Palmer to J. W. Wallis, 27 February 1863; I. N. Palmer, 4 March 1863; J. W. Wallis, 5 March 1863, file 3238, RG 393, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands 1821–1920, NARA, Washington, D.C. 95. Enos C. Sanders Report, 24 April 1863, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 5, 518–519. In May 1863, all of these men except for one were released from Castle Thunder, the Confederate prison in Richmond. 96. E. C. Sanders Report, 1 May 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 18, 259–260. 97. J. W. Wallis Report, April 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 18, 674–675; Enos C. Sanders, Compiled Service Records of Company D. 98. I. N. Palmer, 4 March 1863, file 3238, RG 393, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands 1821–1920, NARA, Washington, D.C.; Enos C. Sanders, Compiled Service Records of Company D. 99. Percival D. Sikes (no. 21,050), Southern Claims. 100. Isaac Griffin (no. 20,625), Southern Claims. 101. Durrill, War of Another Kind, 173–174. 102. John Peck Report, 20 April 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 18, 639–640. 103. Josiah Simmons (no. 9560), Southern Claims. 104. Town Minutes of Elizabeth City, 7 January 1861; Josiah Simmons (no. 9560), Southern Claims. 105. Town Minutes of Elizabeth City, 7 January 1861; Josiah Simmons (no. 9560), Southern Claims. 106. Benjamin B. Tatum (no. 7138), Southern Claims. 107. On smuggling and blockade running in the Albemarle during 1863, see C. W. Flusser to S. P. Lee, 13 January 1863, Official Records, Navies, ser. 1, vol. 8, 453–454; S. P. Lee to C. W. Flusser, 21 January 1863, Official Records, Navies, ser. 1, vol. 8, 461; Gideon Welles to S. P. Lee, 27 January 1863, Official Records, Navies, ser. 1, vol. 8, 479. 108. Zebulon B. Vance to Matt Ransom, 16 October 1863, in Mobley, Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 301. 109. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 110. Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 15:528–534. Some of the men in the Sixty-eighth North Carolina were deserters from other units who joined the guerrilla unit on the home front. 111. For a discussion of hiding in the woods, see Josiah Simmons (no. 9560), Southern Claims, and Enos C. Sanders Report, 1 May 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 18, 259–260.

160  /  notes to pages 65–69 112. Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 15:509. 113. David Barnes to John Pool, 12 March 1863, in Mobley, Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 87–88. 114. John Pool to David Barnes, 28 March 1863, in Mobley, Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 101–102. 115. Ibid. 116. John Pool’s loyalty throughout the war appears to be that of a pragmatic cooperationist. In 1862, Pool wrote letters that can easily be judged as loyal to North Carolina or as a cooperationist with Confederacy. Nevertheless, his chief concerns were local matters at the county level, principally alleviating the suffering of those poorer residents that suffered from the flight of planters to the upcountry. Above all, Pool seemed committed to preserving local stability, including the system of slavery. After the war, Pool became a Republican and was elected to the U.S. Senate. Unfortunately, there are few extant papers remaining from Pool’s political career that can shed light on his wartime loyalty. For two letters by Pool that demonstrate his cooperationist stance, see John Pool, 18 September 1862, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 18, 745–748, and John Pool to Zebulon Vance, 11 January 1863, McKinney and McMurry, Papers of Zebulon Vance, reel 15. Nevertheless, because of Pool’s antebellum Whig politics and late-war peace advocacy, he has been described as a unionist throughout the conflict by some scholars. See McKinney, Zeb Vance, 273, and Mobley, Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 88. Mobley describes Pool as a “wartime Unionist.” But for a nuanced assessment of Pool’s loyalty, see Trelease, “Pool, John.” 117. Enos C. Sanders Report, 1 May 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 18, 259–260. 118. For a discussion of other guerrilla companies in the region, see Captured Muster Rolls of “N.C. Defenders” and Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 119. W. Dewees Roberts, 17 May 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 18, 356. 120. B. F. Onderdonk Report, 20 August 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 1, 70–71; John Peck Report, 12 October 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, 301. Also see Benjamin B. Tatum (no. 7138), Southern Claims. 121. For a complete discussion of the events surrounding the June 1863 escape, see Witt, Escape from the Maple Leaf; Michael Corcoran Report, 18 June 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 27, pt. 3, 207; and John Peck Report, 8 June 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 27, pt. 2, 786. 122. Union surgeon “Bradney,” account of pursuit of eighty escaped Confederate officers, 28 June 1863, Virginia State Library, Richmond, Virginia, cited in Kirby, Poqousin, 186–187. 123. Town Minutes of Elizabeth City, 11 July 1863. 124. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County; Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 15:527; and Pasquotank Historical Society Yearbook, 1:70–71. 125. Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 15:509. 126. Benjamin F. Onderdonk Report, 20 August 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 9, pt. 1, 70–71; Franklin A. Stratton, 20 August 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 1, 71–72. 127. Mrs. Lucius Johnson Letter, 22 August 1863, John Lancaster Bailey Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter cited as Bailey Papers). 128. Volunteer Chas. F. W. Behm, 2 September 1863, Official Records, Navies, ser. 1, vol. 9, 189; Henry Culpepper (no. 7,479), Southern Claims Disallowed. 129. Moore, Rebellion Record, 7:57.

notes to pages 70–72  /  161 130. William L. Kent Report, 17 October 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 1, 478–479; John J. Peck to John G. Foster, 17 October 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 1, 477–478. 131. Henry Walton Wessells, 7 October 1863, file 5063, RG 393, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands 1821–1920, NARA, Washington, D.C.; James W. Hinton, 2 October 1863, Compiled Service Records, Civil War Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of North Carolina, RG 109, NARA, Washington D. C. 132. James W. Hinton to Zebulon B. Vance, 24 October 1863, Official Records, ser. 4, vol. 2, 906– 907. For a discussion of the number of blacks in the region as of December 1863, see Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. Hinton’s assessment of the labor situation in the region was probably somewhat exaggerated. Doubtless many “able-bodied” blacks had freed themselves by mid-1863. General Edward Wild estimated that 2,500 blacks were freed during his mission in December 1863. 133. James W. Hinton to Zebulon B. Vance, 24 October 1863, Official Records, ser. 4, vol. 2, 906– 907. The unit Governor Vance approved and Hinton was selected to lead was slated as the Sixtysixth Regiment of North Carolina State Troops (redesignated in July 1863 from a state Partisan Ranger unit to an infantry regiment), but it was not formally commissioned into Confederate service until January 1864 under the designation Sixty-eighth North Carolina State Troops. Two other units finished organization before the Sixty-eighth met all requirements for state commission. Some sources identify them as the Sixty-sixth. The unit that officially mustered into Confederate service as the Sixty-sixth North Carolina Infantry enrolled at Kinston and served in the region around Lenoir County. See Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 15:509–526. 134. John T. Elliott, 31 October 1863, Compiled Service Records, Civil War Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of North Carolina, RG 109, NARA, Washington, D.C. 135. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Slave Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County. 136. For another look at draft evasion on a regional level, see Carlson, “Loanly Runagee.” 137. Zebulon Vance to James Seddon, 26 October 1863, Official Records, ser. 4, vol. 2, 906. 138. James Seddon to Zebulon B. Vance, 3 November 1863, in Mobley, Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 327. 139. P. A. R. C. Cohoon was an antebellum delegate to the 1859 Democratic Convention in Edenton that Richard Creecy, Edmund H. Perkins, William F. Martin, and other future secessionist attended. See Democratic Pioneer (Elizabeth City, NC), 22 April 1859. 140. Letter of 17 November 1863, in McKinney and McMurry, The Papers of Zebulon Vance, reel 20. 141. Zebulon B. Vance to James W. Hinton, 24 November 1863, in Mobley, Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 326–327. Also see H. Hays to Edward Clements Yellowley, 28 November 1863, and Conscript Office to Edward Clements Yellowley, 28 November 1863, Edward Clements Yellowley Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Yellowley, who was Hinton’s second in command, was in charge of enforcing conscription and confiscation in Pasquotank. These letters from late November are from the North Carolina authorities complaining about the lax enforcement of the draft law in Pasquotank and the northeastern counties. The letter from the conscript office lists fifty-nine men from the First Congressional District (including Pasquotank and the northeastern counties) who had deserted their units

162  /  notes to pages 72–77 by November 1863. For more extensive discussion of desertion, see Lonn, Desertion during the Civil War. 142. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. In his official report, Wild mentions by name of the commander seven different companies of guerrillas that he faced. Wild mentions Hughes, Ethridge, and Coffey as other commanders of companies in the region. This brings the grand total of guerrilla companies to eight east of the Chowan River. Of these units mentioned by Wild, only the five that responded to Hinton’s call for volunteers mustered into service in the Sixty-eighth North Carolina under Hinton’s command in January 1864. 143. George Stezel, 7 December 1863, file 5063, RG 393, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands 1821–1920, NARA, Washington, D.C. 144. William N. H. Smith Report, 10–17 February 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, pt. 1, 1127– 1129. Confederates later claimed that Bright had been attempting to form a new unit for home-front defense. 145. Agricultural and Manufacturing Census Records for Fifteen Southern States for the Years 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880. 146. J. R. Winslow to John G. Foster, 4 November 1863, file 5063, RG 393, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands 1821–1920, NARA, Washington, D.C. 147. Ibid. 148. For discussion of the need to remain silent among unionists, see Josiah Simmons (no. 9560), Southern Claims. Also see Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 149. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers.

3. “An Elysium and an Asylum to the Buffaloes and Union Men” 1. For biographical background on Edward Wild, see Kingman, Memoir of Gen. Edward Augustus Wild; Longacre, “Brave Radical Wild”; Barrett, Civil War in North Carolina, 177–181; Casstevens, Edward A. Wild and the African Brigade, 1–35; Trudeau, Like Men of War, 112–118; Reid, “General Edward A. Wild and Civil War Discrimination”; and Witt, Wild in North Carolina. 2. Reid, “Raising the African Brigade.” 3. Click, Time Full of Trial, 45–46. General Wild recruited the first company of black volunteers from Roanoke Island in mid-June 1863. For a discussion of the return of these black soldiers to Pasquotank and other coastal counties after the war, see Reid, “USCT Veterans in Post–Civil War North Carolina,” 391–421. 4. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. Although some of the slaves whom Wild escorted from the county probably came from Currituck and Camden counties, the blacks remaining in Pasquotank constituted the bulk of the group secured by General Wild, since he spent the majority of his three-week expedition in this county. Out of a prewar population of roughly 4,500 (slave and free blacks) in Pasquotank, this number would have meant that roughly half remained in the county when Wild came through. Wild mentioned a large number of fields planted in the county, which also suggests the continued presence of a large laboring black population. It is unlikely, however, that Wild was familiar enough with the history of the county to realize that many in his group of “2500 Negroes released and migrated” may have already been legally free but had not left the community. Some of the 2,500 therefore were likely freed people, how many it is

notes to pages 77–80  /  163 impossible to ascertain. Regardless, it is unlikely that all of the blacks had fled the region by the time of Hinton’s October 1863 letter, as he suggested. 5. The smaller operations by Captain Enos C. Sander’s black recruits were predominantly resupply missions, not counterguerrilla operations. They also involved only a few dozen black soldiers at any one time. According to Washington, Eagles on Their Buttons, 33, two companies of the Fifth U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) (part of Wild’s Brigade during the December expedition) were involved in a smaller expedition that freed 500 slaves and killed 8 guerrillas in Princess Anne County, Virginia, in late November 1863. This operation gathered important intelligence information used by General Wild in the region, especially regarding irregulars in Currituck County. In another operation lasting nine days and crossing 250 miles of territory in southeastern Virginia, Colonel Alonzo Draper’s Second NCCV secured 475 blacks and gathered valuable intelligence on guerrilla forces in the region. See Alonzo Draper, 27 and 30 November 1863, file 5063, RG 393, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands 1821–1920, NARA, Washington, D.C.; Reid, Freedom for Themselves, 114–115. 6. Benjamin F. Butler to John J. Peck, 19 December 1863, in Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler during the Civil War, ed. Jessie Ames Marshall 3:231–232. Marshall’s collection reprinted many of Butler’s official papers that are also available in the Official Records. For the sake of standardization, I have cited Butler’s papers from the Official Records version after checking first to ensure that the Official Records version of the document is the fullest one available. When a fuller version is available, the citation is to that source. 7. On the free blacks working in the Great Dismal Swamp region, see Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina, 74–75, 132–135; for an examination of the prewar economy and society of the greater Dismal Swamp region, see Kirby, Poquosin; another community study of the Civil War in the greater Albemarle region is Durrill, War of Another Kind, on Washington County. 8. Unit histories include Horstman, “African American’s Civil War,” and Washington, Eagles on Their Buttons. Also see Reid, “USCT Veterans in Post–Civil War North Carolina,” 391–421; Bryant, “Model Black Regiment”; and Hutchins, “Just Learning to Be Men.” A superb treatment of North Carolina’s black Union soldiers is Reid, Freedom for Themselves. 9. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 10. For more on the formation and history of these black units, see Regimental Descriptive Books, Thirty-fifth, Thirty-sixth, and Thirty-seventh United States Colored Troops, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, RG 94, NARA, Washington, D.C. The First and Second North Carolina Colored Volunteers became the Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth United States Colored Troops in 1864; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County. 11. Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864. 12. Ibid. 13. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 14. Ibid. 15. For obituaries of members of the Pool family in Pasquotank, see John Pool Scrapbook, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 16. Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864. 17. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 18. Ibid.

164  /  notes to pages 80–83 19. Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864. 20. Ibid. 21. For an excellent analysis of the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony and General Wild’s involvement in it, see Click, Time Full of Trial, 48–49, 218–223. The appendixes of this work refer to some freedmen who were from Elizabeth City and moved to the island during the period before Wild’s northeastern North Carolina raid. Wild recruited some of his black soldiers among these Elizabeth City free blacks who had fled to Roanoke Island. The presence of these free blacks in his force likely made Wild’s task of determining loyalty easier during the December expedition. 22. William J. Munden, 10 February 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, 1129–1130. This particular point is clear in William J. Munden’s testimony before the Confederate Congressional Committee investigating the raid. 23. For an explanation of the May 1863 Confederate congressional policy on black soldiers and their white officers, see Cornish, Sable Arm, 161–162; for examples of other hostage takings as response to guerrilla activity, see Ash, When the Yankees Came, 66. 24. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. The women were taken on 12 and 13 December 1864, respectively; Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864. 25. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 26. W. N. H. Smith Report, 10–17 February 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, 1127-1130. W. J. Munden, an irregular and the husband of hostage Phoebe Munden, reported these two homes and barn destroyed in his official deposition to the Confederate committee investigating the Wild raid. The fact that Munden singled out Jennings’s barn suggests that it may have been a place where local irregulars resupplied. 27. Ibid; Elizabeth City Economist, 24 August 1900. 28. For an excellent analysis of General Pickett’s racial beliefs, see Gordon, General George E. Pickett, 124-127. 29. James W. Hinton Report, 14 December 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, 877. 30. Joel R. Griffin to George E. Pickett, 15 December 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, 872–873. The Sixty-second Georgia Cavalry was also known as the Second Georgia Partisan Rangers and consisted of ten companies in 1863. Three of those companies were from North Carolina and seven from Georgia. In December 1863, it had 408 effectives. Throughout 1863 this unit was assigned to the Department of North Carolina commanded by General George Pickett. Normally Partisan Ranger units did not operate outside the region from which they were recruited, but the Sixty-second Georgia spent much of its career beyond the Georgia boundaries. Since three companies of this unit are recruited later in North Carolina, it is probable that the unit left Georgia for northeastern North Carolina on a recruitment expedition. For more on the Sixty-second Georgia, see Crute, Units of the Confederate States Army, 115–116, and Sifakis, Compendium of the Confederate Armies, 151, 164–165. 31. George Pickett to Samuel Cooper, 15 December 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, 873. Pickett’s comment here about the continued presence of African Americans contradicts the October 1863 correspondence of James W. Hinton, who had claimed that the Confederates of this region had already lost most of their slaves. For a study of another hanging General Pickett ordered, at Kinston, North Carolina, in February 1864, see Gordon, “In Time of War,” 45–58. 32. George Pickett to Joel R. Griffin, 15 December 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, 872–873. Also see Gordon, General George E. Pickett, 126–127.

notes to pages 83–90  /  165 33. Edward A. Wild to John T. Elliott, 17 December 1863, Wild Papers. 34. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers; Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864. 35. Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864. According to Tewksbury, General Wild sent eight men to Norfolk as prisoners. Wild stated later that he “took a number of prisoners, including six Confederate soldiers, provided with furloughs, some with a printed clause stipulating that they should provide themselves with horses before returning.” These six were apparently among the eight sent to Norfolk. 36. Daniel Bright Case Testimony, 17 December 1863, Littlejohn Collection, Sandor Teszler Library, Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina. 37. Confederate accounts refer to the site of Daniel Bright’s execution as Hinton’s Crossroads; see Charleston Mercury, 5 and 20 January 1864. Contemporary maps and the Tewksbury account refer to the site as Hintonsville. Tewksbury describes this place as having “a church and a single dwelling-house.” Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864. 38. For Confederate accounts of the Wild raid, see Republican Vindicator (Staunton, VA), 29 January 1864; Southern Recorder (Milledgeville, GA), 19 January 1864; Charleston Mercury, 5 and 20 January 1864. 39. Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864. 40. W. N. H. Smith Report, 10–17 February 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, pt.1, 1127–1130. 41. Ibid. 42. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 43. Ibid. Nancy White, like Phoebe Munden and Elizabeth Weeks, would be detained and taken to Norfolk. White was released in mid-January 1864, but Munden and Weeks were still being held in late January while Butler reviewed the situation and negotiated with the Confederate government. See Benjamin F. Butler to W. J. Munden and Pender Weeks, 26 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, pt. 1, 877; Raleigh Standard, 1 and 22 January 1864. Captain Coffey’s first name cannot be positively identified. 44. Captured Muster Rolls of “N.C. Defenders” and 28 December 1863 Report, Wild Papers. Also see Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864. Tewksbury asserts that Gregory was taken at his own home for supporting guerrillas. Major D. Gregory was his proper name; the “Major” was not a military rank. His name is found on the captured list of “N.C. Defenders.” 45. Deposition of William J. Munden, 10 February 1864, Official Records, ser.2, vol. 6, pt. 1, 1129– 1130. 46. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 47. Ibid. 48. Benjamin Butler to Henry Halleck, 17 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, 847. See Subenclosure from General Wild to Captain Elliott, dated 17 December 1863. 49. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 50. Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. Slave patrols, Pasquotank County, Records of Slaves and Free Persons of Color, 1815– 1861, NCDAH. 53. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 54. Enclosures A, B, and C, ibid.

166  /  notes to pages 90–92 55. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Historians who have examined Union military policy toward southern civilians on a Southwide scale have tended toward broader interpretations as opposed to local analysis. These scholars include Ash, When the Yankees Came, who argues that the war policy of the North turned to a harsher warfare by late 1862. Royster, in Destructive War, believes the war is essentially destructive from the commencement of hostilities. Grimsley, in Hard Hand of War, 3–6, 118–119, outlines three periods of Union military policy: a conciliatory phase, a pragmatic period, and a hard-war phase. Although Mark Grimsley’s work allows for a period of pragmatism or judicious discernment (treatment on the basis of loyalty), he does not leave room for localized evolution in policy and does not seem to allow for rapid changes in policy over the course of one operation. Grimsley argues that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation destroyed the policy of conciliation toward southern civilians in existence before July 1862. But he argues that the proclamation itself did not inaugurate hard war, since it was not forced upon southerners at the point of the bayonet in the eastern theater until early 1864. Grimsley believes that the proclamation alone without enforcement did little to harm the southern economy and therefore did not inaugurate hard war. When I attempted initially to apply Grimsley’s terminology to Wild’s raid, I discovered that as a counterguerrilla raid it would fall into Grimsley’s “pragmatic” phase but as a raid aimed at ending slavery (i.e., economic warfare aimed at the entire population of the region) it would also fall into the category of “hard war.” Over the course of his three-week December 1863 raid, General Wild enforced the Emancipation Proclamation, but in respect to other types of property, he evolved from practical discernment (confiscation and destruction based on loyalty) to a harsher confiscation policy not based on loyalty. Clearly, applying just one term, “hard war” or “pragmatism,” to an operation will not work in every case. Since these terms do not effectively describe Wild’s three-week operation given the specific definitions Grimsley employs, I avoid using his terminology in favor of Wild’s own descriptive terminology. It is clear, however, that by the end of the operation Wild had reached the point Grimsley defines as “hard war,” and the account of this raid modifies his timeline for the beginning of that policy by roughly one month. For another view of Wild’s raid with respect to Union military policy, see Wills, The War Hits Home, 203. Wills employed Mark Grimsley’s “hard war” concept to describe Wild’s incursion, arguing that the entire operation from beginning to end represented this policy. 59. Casstevens, Edward A. Wild and the African Brigade, 126. 60. For evidence that unionists were not targeted for food and livestock confiscation during the Pasquotank phase of the raid, see the Records for Allowed Claims, Southern Claims. Despite the large number of allowed claims made by unionists from Pasquotank County after the war, only one of these claims issued from the period of Wild’s raid. This claim was made by a man named Phillip C. Fletcher. Fletcher, who was only fifteen in 1863, kept his horse at his grandfather’s home in Camden County. During the December 1863 expedition, Wild and his men seized this horse at his grandfather’s property. His grandfather’s name was Major D. Gregory. Although the government awarded him money for his horse, it is unlikely that even this claim was valid given his grandfather’s wartime sympathies with the guerrillas. Phillip C. Fletcher (no. 21,340), Southern Claims. Also see Benjamin Butler Report, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, 596–597. General Butler received members of the community afterward who attested to the black soldiers’ discretion. 61. Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864.

notes to pages 93–95  /  167 62. See Charleston Mercury, 22 January 1864, and the Raleigh Standard, 22 January 1864. Both papers reprinted this story from a New York Daily News article posted at Norfolk on 28 December 1863. Also see William J. Morrisett (no. 21,049), Southern Claims. Morrisett’s claim netted him $1,918, a sizable sum for the commission to approve. 63. John Bottoms (no. 9,680), Southern Claims Disallowed. This claim was disallowed because Bottoms was forced into the Confederate militia for one month during the early period of the war. Nevertheless, short Confederate service under duress was relatively common among unionists in the northeastern region; R. R. Guirkin (no. 19,919), Southern Claims Disallowed. 64. Edmond Simmons (nos. 13,240 and 21,723), Southern Claims Disallowed. Simmons’s claim was ultimately denied because his wife stated “they were opposed to the war at first, but after it began their sympathies were with their own people and they went with the state, but never did anything actively for the Confederacy.” 65. Pugh, Three Hundred Years along the Pasquotank, 160–166. Pugh documents at least forty-four unionist families in Camden County during the war. Although a similar list is not extant for Currituck County, we do have the allowed claims list of unionists from the Southern Claims Commission. Currituck had thirty-seven claims by unionists approved by the commission after the war. 66. For scholars who have focused on changes of policy toward civilians at the local level, see Noe, “Exterminating Savages,” 104–130. Noe asserts that the war in West Virginia made a full transition to what he calls “localized total war.” Harrison, “Atop an Anvil.” Harrison’s analysis that the Union military adopted a harder style of waging war in northern Virginia in 1861 is convincing. Smith, “Chambersburg.” Smith looks at Confederate military policy toward Union civilians during John McCausland’s Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, raid. He asserts that the raid represented total war because of the large number of homes destroyed. In general, all the scholars who have focused on transitions in policy at the local level have described changes over months, usually with the changes of officers in a region (e.g., Noe compares McClellan’s conciliation to Fremont’s notion of a war of “annihilation”). None of these historians has focused his attention on one officer undergoing such a rapid change from discernment to a harsh policy over the course of one operation as General Wild did in the Albemarle. Furthermore, none has studied areas where black soldiers were used against guerrillas to see the new policy dynamics this use produced in a politically divided southern community. 67. On the question of whether the war ever became total, my views in this chapter closely parallel the thinking of Neely, “Was the Civil War a Total War?” Neely’s article asserts that the idea of total war is both a twentieth-century construct and phenomenon. Wars must include systematic and indiscriminate killing of enemy civilians in order to truly embody total war; the line between combatant and noncombatant must completely disappear. Wild’s raid in its final stage was an example of harsher policy toward Confederate civilians but not total war. 68. Franklin, Free Negro in North Carolina, 74–75, 132–135. Even though Wild noted that some of the unionists had begun to pay wages to blacks in the region, he did not protect their right to own human chattel. It is difficult to assess who these blacks were whom white unionists paid, given the large number of free blacks working in local swamps and maritime trade before the war, who were paid for their work. 69. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 70. Casstevens, Edward A. Wild and the African Brigade, 125–126. Also see General Orders No. 100, 24 April 1863, Official Records, ser. 3, vol. 3, pt. 1, 154. For a complete analysis of “Lieber’s Code,” see Hartigan, Lieber’s Code and the Law of War.

168  /  notes to pages 95–101 71. William N. H. Smith Report, 10–17 February 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, pt. 1, 1127– 1129. 72. Joel R. Griffin to George E. Pickett, 19 December 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, 883. 73. Henderson, Roster of the Confederate Soldiers of Georgia, vol. 6. Henderson found no record of a Company L, Sixty-second Georgia Cavalry, for her compilation of Georgia soldiers. Neither Frances H. Casstevens nor I have been able to locate a compiled service record for Daniel Bright. See Compiled Service Records, Civil War Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Georgia, RG 109, NARA, Washington, D.C. Also see Georgia, State Division of Confederate Pensions and Records, Alphabetical Card File, reel 8, University of Georgia, Athens. The only record on Daniel Bright listed in the Georgia archives is the hanging notice issued by General Wild. For a discussion of Wild’s biographer’s futile search for a compiled service record, see Casstevens, Edward A. Wild and the African Brigade, 125, 290. 74. Tewksbury, New York Times, 9 January 1864. 75. Benjamin Butler to James W. Hinton, 27 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, 883–884. 76. General Orders No. 100, 24 April 1863, Official Records, ser. 3, vol. 3, pt. 1, 154. 77. For an excellent evaluation of the legal issues relating to guerrilla war, see Paludan, Victims, 87–88. Daniel Bright Case Testimony, 17 December 1863, Littlejohn Collection, Sandor Teszler Library, Wofford College, Spartanburg, North Carolina. 78. Reid, “Test Case for ‘Crying Evil.’” For more on high rates of desertion among North Carolina troops, see Bardolph, “Inconstant Rebels.” 79. See Articles 54–55, General Orders No. 100, 24 April 1863, Official Records, ser. 3, vol. 3, pt. 1, 157; for further discussion of other hostage takings as a result of guerrilla violence, see Ash, When the Yankees Came, 62–66, and Neely, “Was the Civil War a Total War?” 5–28. 80. General Orders No. 100, 24 April 1863, Official Records, ser. 3, vol. 3, pt. 1, 157. 81. Benjamin Butler to Edward M. Stanton, 31 December 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, 596. Another positive endorsement of the black troops is “Tewksbury,” New York Times, 9 January 1864. “A Wild General” in the Democratic organ the New York World is a disparaging account of the raid, but most northern accounts were supportive of the expedition and its objectives. Nonetheless, southern papers were highly critical in the months after Wild’s expedition.

4. “Without Aid or Protection from Any Source” 1. Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 129; Auman, “Neighbor against Neighbor: The Inner Civil War in the Central Counties of Confederate North Carolina” (Ph.D. diss.), chap. 4. 2. For lists of freed people from the northeastern region of North Carolina who lived in the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony, see Click, Time Full of Trial, 218–223, 225–226. 3. Elizabeth City Economist, 31 August 1900. According to one Confederate account, Wild ordered the gathering while he was in Elizabeth City, but the meeting did not occur until Wild had left the county. Since Wild was no longer in the county and Confederate guerrillas, who could easily threaten a meeting, were still omnipresent, it is clear that both unionists and Confederates were operating under serious duress at the meeting. Regardless of whether Wild ordered the meeting or not, he was not there to enforce or monitor the gathering, and the community had more than enough reasons to convene an assembly of local citizens.

notes to pages 101–108  /  169 4. Slave patrols, Pasquotank County, Records of Slaves and Free Persons of Color, 1815–1861, NCDAH. Richard Benbury Creecy sat on a committee to appoint the slave patrol that called Daniel Bright to serve in the late 1850s; Creecy probably knew the men he appointed to the patrol. 5. Elizabeth City Economist, 31 August 1900. 6. Ibid. In his postwar account, Creecy used the term “Buffaloes” to describe all unionists at the meeting. He wanted to show that he was coerced by armed men. Nevertheless, most of the militant unionist Buffaloes had already left the region by this point in 1863; these men had fled with Captain Enos C. Sanders in April 1863. 7. Ibid. Also see Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 15:528–534. Thomas H. Tamplin, who had served in the Fifty-sixth North Carolina Infantry for a period during the early years of the war, was appointed second lieutenant of John T. Elliott’s band of guerrillas in August 1863. He was not a “captain,” as Creecy claimed in his account. 8. Elizabeth City Economist, 31 August 1900. 9. Ibid. For background on Kenneth Rayner’s political career as both a Whig and and American Party leader, see Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics, 110, 246, and Gregg Cantrell, Kenneth and John B. Rayner and the Limits of Southern Dissent. 10. Benjamin Butler Report, 31 December 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, 596–597. The other two men sent to Raleigh were Pasquotank Confederates William H. Clark and Dr. J. J. Shannonhouse. 11. Elizabeth City Economist, 31 August 1900. 12. Ibid. Background data on unionist leaders compiled from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Schedule of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Pasquotank County and Perquimans County. 13. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 14. Elizabeth City Economist, 31 August 1900. Creecy described the vote cast reluctantly: “The resolutions were adopted unanimously. They didn’t trap us. A negative vote would have meant death at a yard arm. To our surprise and the gratification the chairman, a buffalo proposed that the resolution should be put: ‘Those in favor of the resolution shall go to the right side of the room.’ The chairman very graciously so put it. We all paddled over to the right side, they didn’t trap us then.” 15. Benjamin Butler Report, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, 596–597. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. For a list of the signatories of the petition, see Witt, Wild in North Carolina, 83–93. 18. Benjamin Butler Report, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, 596–597. 19. Ibid. 20. Western Democrat (Charlotte, NC), 18 March 1862. 21. Escott, After Secession, 99–104; Escott, Many Excellent People, 45–46; for historians who have emphasized class conflict in North Carolina, see Escott, Many Excellent People; Durrill, War of Another Kind; Bynum, Unruly Women, 111–150; and Beringer et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War, 434. 22. Only one other detailed record from another county’s meeting in the northeastern region has been preserved. It is a questionnaire from the Chowan County meeting in which the community members inquired about whether the oath of allegiance would be applied to them and whether trade with Norfolk would continue. Citizens of Chowan County to Benjamin F. Butler, 10 February 1864, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 33, 548–549. A copy of this questionnaire can also be found in Dillard, Civil War in Chowan County.

170  /  notes to pages 109–14 23. Benjamin Butler Report, 31 December 1863, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 2, 596–597. The assessment of the average vote is an accurate one compared with the voting records of the county. In the presidential election of 1860, 771 men voted in Pasquotank County. The 1860 gubernatorial election saw a slightly higher vote tally of 921 votes cast. Connor, Manual of North Carolina, 986. 24. An article in the Democratic organ the New York Daily World, 5 March 1864, was titled “A Wild General.” A handwritten copy of this article is also found in the Wild Papers. 25. Benjamin Butler to Elizabeth W. Upshur, 10 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 28, pt. 1, 371. 26. Benjamin Butler Report, 16 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 33, 550. 27. Scarborough, Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 285–286. 28. Ibid., 300. 29. Ibid., 301. 30. Crabtree and Patton, “Journal of a Secesh Lady,” 517. 31. Charleston Mercury, 5 January 1864. 32. Elizabeth City Economist, 31 August 1900. 33. Charleston Mercury, 20 January 1864. According to the Mercury, 403 of 576 names listed on the petition from Pasquotank that they reviewed were conscripts. The discrepancy between the 523 and 576 found in the Mercury and Butler’s report probably comes from an increased number of signatures furnished after Butler received his copy. The Mercury assessment that exactly 403 names were conscripts, however, is not surprising given Governor Vance’s attempt to force the men from this county into the service throughout most of 1863. 34. Zebulon B. Vance to Robert Ould, 29 December 1863, in Mobley, Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 357. 35. James W. Hinton to Zebulon B. Vance, 24 November 1863, in Mobley, Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 326–327. 36. Charleston Mercury, 9 and 15 January 1864. W. N. H. Smith’s committee to investigate the incidents of the Wild raid was also supported by William Porcher Miles, the powerful chairman of the Joint House and Senate Committee on Military Affairs. Miles was a strong proponent of the 1862 Partisan Ranger Act when it was initially adopted and even shepherded several applications for irregular units to the Confederate War Department. Surprisingly, Miles did not oppose the repeal of the act in 1864. He did, however, support Smith’s efforts to investigate the guerrilla war in Pasquotank County. Perhaps his knowledge of what guerrilla violence did to the community of Pasquotank during the Wild raid convinced him that the 1862 policy was a failure. 37. W. N. H. Smith Report, 10–17 February 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, pt. 1, 1128–1130. W. N. H. Smith had been reelected to the First Congressional seat as a Confederate congressman in 1861. For an advertisement from that 1861 election, see Yearns and Barrett, North Carolina Civil War Documentary, 310. 38. James Forbes et al. to General George W. Getty (Enclosure A), 13 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, 846. For further discussion of General Pickett’s involvement, see Gordon, General George E. Pickett, 126–127. 39. Charleston Mercury, 20 January 1864. 40. William J. Munden in W. N. H. Smith Report, 10–17 February 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, pt. 1, 1128–1130; Benjamin F. Butler to Henry W. Halleck, 20 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, 858. For more on the Fifth U.S. Colored Troops, see Washington, Eagles on Their Buttons.

notes to pages 114–21  /  171 41. Charleston Mercury, 20 January 1864; Benjamin F. Butler Report, 17 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, 845–847. 42. Milton M. Holland, 19 January 1864, in Redkey, Grand Army of Black Men, 94. 43. Smith, Black Judas, 26–28. 44. Isaac Griffin (no. 20,625), Southern Claims. It is clear from the Southern Claims Commission records that a few free blacks remained in Pasquotank after Wild’s raid. 45. James Forbes et al. to George W. Getty, 13 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, 846. 46. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 47. Charleston Mercury, 20 January 1864. 48. W. N. H. Smith, 10–17 February 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, pt. 1, 1129. Willis B. Sanderlin’s company was recruited in Camden County. Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 15: 528–534. 49. W. N. H. Smith, 10–17 February 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, pt. 1, 1128–1130. 50. James W. Hinton to Benjamin F. Butler, 15 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, 847. 51. Griffin to Wild published in the Vindicator (Staunton, VA), 29 January 1864; Fellman, “Women and Guerrilla Warfare,” 150. 52. In the Vindicator (Staunton, VA), 29 January 1864. 53. Benjamin Butler to Elizabeth W. Upshur, 10 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 28, pt. 1, 371. 54. James W. Hinton to Zebulon B. Vance, 24 October 1863, Official Records, ser. 4, vol. 2, 906– 907; James W. Hinton to Zebulon B. Vance, 24 November 1863, in Mobley, Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 326–327. 55. James W. Hinton to Benjamin F. Butler, 15 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, 847. 56. W. N. H. Smith, 10–17 February 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, pt. 1, 1128–1130. 57. Ibid. One of these black soldiers apparently escaped; the other was Private Samuel Jordan of the Fifth U.S. Colored Troops. 58. Crabtree and Patton, “Journal of a Secesh Lady,” 517. Catherine Edmondston’s reaction clearly demonstrates this point. 59. W. J. Munden in W. N. H. Smith Report, 10–17 February 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, pt. 1, 1130–1131. 60. Organizational Order, 20 January 1864, Yellowley Papers. On 11 January 1864, Edward Clements Yellowley received a letter from R. S. Skinner of Cooke’s North Carolina Brigade, Henry Heth’s Division, A. P. Hill’s Corps, Army of North Virginia, complaining of the poor effect desertion to northeastern North Carolina (and the uncooperative troops resisting conscription there) was having on the North Carolinians in R. E. Lee’s army. 61. Edward A. Wild Report, 10 January 1864, Wild Papers; Benjamin Butler to Lieutenant W. J. Munden and Private Pender Weeks, 26 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 2, vol. 6, 877–878; Casstevens, Edward A. Wild and the African Brigade, 139–141. 62. For a discussion of the controversial incidents surrounding the remainder of Wild’s military service and his 1864 court-martial, see Casstevens, Edward A. Wild and the African Brigade, 155–160, 183–193, 214. 63. Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 15:515-517. The first names of Captains Hughes, Ethridge, and Coffey cannot be positively identified.

172  /  notes to pages 122–28 64. Clark, Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina, 3:714. 65. R. E. Lee to Samuel Cooper, 1 April 1864, in Dowdey and Manarin, Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, 688–689. 66. For a full discussion of the debate over the repeal, see Confederate Congressional Minutes for 17 February 1864 in Jones et al., Southern Historical Society Papers, and Charleston Mercury, 12 and 15 January 1864. 67. James W. Hinton to Edward Clements Yellowley, 18 and 22 February 1864, Yellowley Papers. The muster was to happen on the final day of February 1864.

Epilogue 1. The northeastern North Carolina bands of Captains Coffey, Hughes, and Ethridge listed in Wild’s report remained unaccounted for and never entered Confederate service. These were likely the men who continued to harass citizens for the remainder of the war. 2. George E. Pickett to James Seddon, 12 January 1864, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 33, 1083; Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 15:517, and vol. 13, Infantry (1993), 561; New York Daily Tribune, 3 March 1864. 3. Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 15:517. 4. Laurence Simmons Baker to James W. Hinton, 21 July 1864, Yellowley Papers. 5. Adjutant Generals’ Papers, 27 July 1864, AG 52, Home Guard Letter Book, 1863–1865, NCDAH; Clark, Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina, 3:717–718. 6. John Lancaster Bailey letter, 4 July 1864, Bailey Papers. 7. The cotton and tobacco were probably from nearby Perquimans and Chowan counties but being stored at Elizabeth City for easy shipment out of the northeastern region. 8. Israel Vodges Report, 4 August 1864, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 40, pt. 1, 821. 9. Ibid. Although the Thirty-eighth USCT was stationed in the Norfolk and Portsmouth district, no record of a previous raid to Pasquotank involving them can be found. The officer incorrectly requested the Thirty-eighth when he probably meant the Thirty-fifth or Thirty-sixth USCT regiments. These were the formal USCT designations for the First and Second North Carolina Colored Infantry that had served in Wild’s unit during the December 1863 expedition. All three units were stationed in the Norfolk and Portsmouth area in early 1864. Dyer, Compendium of the War of the Rebellion, 3:1729–1730. 10. W. N. H. Smith, 31 August 1864, Official Records, ser. 4, vol. 3, 614–615. 11. Mobley, “War Governor of the South,” 18, 123-124; Escott, Many Excellent People, 48–49; Connor, Manual of North Carolina, 999–1000. Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over, 172–177, argues that Vance garnered overwhelming support from North Carolinians in the ranks in 1864 because of his use of racism and racial fear in his arguments about why soldiers should continue to support him. 12. Richard B. Creecy to Elizabeth Creecy, 1 August 1864, Creecy Family Papers. 13. Edmund Creecy, the son of Richard Creecy, had been mustered out of the Confederate service 30 April 1864 for being underage. Jordan and Manarin, North Carolina Troops, 15:530. 14. Richard B. Creecy to Elizabeth Creecy, 1 August 1864, Creecy Family Papers. The following citizens attested to confiscation of goods and horses by the Union army in late July and early August 1864: Jonathan D. Duncan (no. 12,073), Southern Claims Disallowed; James C. Brothers (no. 20,624), Southern Claims Disallowed; Miles Sawyer (no. 18,865), Southern Claims Disallowed;

notes to pages 128–32  /  173 Robertson Jackson (no. 12,072), Southern Claims Disallowed; William F. Keaton (no. 3,588), Southern Claims Barred. 15. Richard B. Creecy to Elizabeth Creecy, 1 August 1864, Creecy Family Papers; Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, 4–5. 16. Fellman, Inside War, 49–52. 17. New York Daily Tribune, 13 September 1864; Earl English Report, 15 September 1864, Official Records, Navies, ser. 1, vol. 10, 457 Unfortunately, Lieutenant Commander English did not mention in the report the names of the citizens or what happened to them. 18. Earl English Report, 12 September 1864, Official Records, Navies, ser. 1, vol. 10, 459; Barrett, Civil War in North Carolina, 227–231. 19. Parramore, “Bartons of Bartonsville,” 35–37; Stephen Barton Jr. to Benjamin F. Butler, November 19, 1864, Clara Barton Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, as cited ibid., 35; Proclamation of the President of the United States, 19 November 1864, Official Records, Navies, ser. 1, vol. 11, 109. 20. Crute, Units of the Confederate States Army, 243–244. The Sixty-sixth North Carolina States Troops (a different unit than the defunct Sixty-sixth Partisan Rangers or Hinton’s Sixty-eighth State Troops) were then serving in Virginia. Therefore, it is doubtful that these men were part of that organization. 21. H. G. O. Weymouth, 10 December 1864, Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 1, 962–963. 22. H. H. Foster Report, 9 January 1865, Official Records, Navies, ser. 1, vol. 11, 419. 23. Edward A. Wild Report, 28 December 1863, Wild Papers. 24. Elizabeth City Economist, 14 December 1900. Creecy described the removal of his antebellum housekeeper Mammy Ellen to Roanoke Island, where she died, never returning to the county after Wild’s raid. Also see Elizabeth City Economist, 26 October 1900. Creecy details the story of one former slave, “Little Peter,” whom he bribed a local Freedmen’s Bureau official in Elizabeth City to keep at his home. Little Peter had returned from Roanoke Island after the war in 1865. 25. Freehling, South vs. the South, 47–64; Fisher, War at Every Door, 179–183; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 228–249; and Inscoe, “Moving through Deserter Country,” 158–186; Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, 118–121; Auman, “Neighbor against Neighbor: The Inner Civil War in the Central Counties of Confederate North Carolina” (Ph.D. diss.), 16–18; Sarris, “Shot for Being Bushwhackers,” 31–44; Fellman, Inside War, 184–192. 26. McCaslin, Tainted Breeze, examines one of the most extreme instances of extralegal violence committed in a Civil War community, the execution of forty-four suspected unionists in central Texas’s Cooke County; for other examples, see Bynum, Free State of Jones, chap. 5; Weaver, Civil War in Buchanan and Wise Counties, 179–183; and Fellman, Inside War, 23–29. 27. On “survival lies,” see Fellman, Inside War, 49–52.

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Index

Ad valorem, 27–28 African Brigade, 77–78, 80 Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal, 11, 48, 128 Albemarle Sound, 10, 34, 37, 42, 47, 64, 75, 77, 129 Albemarle Southron and Union Advocate, 28–29 American Colonization Society, 30–31 American Party, 22. See also Know-Nothing Party Ash, Stephen V., 7 Ashby, Turner, 44

Bottoms, John, 93 Breckenridge, John C., 29 Bright, Daniel, ix, xi, 2–3, 5–9, 11, 19, 28, 33–34, 36–37, 45, 73, 81–82, 84–85, 90, 93–97, 100, 101, 110–111, 114, 117–118, 120, 130–131, 133 Brooks, George W., 70–71, 103–104, 136–137, 141 Buffaloes, 49, 52–54, 56, 65, 66, 82, 102–103, 106, 108, 123, 128, 135, 138–139, 142–144 Butler, Benjamin F., 35, 77–78, 83, 88, 90, 94, 96–98, 104–105, 108–112, 117–118, 120–121, 125, 129

Bailey, John Lancaster, 124 Balance, Banister B., 63 Banks, James, 54 Barfield, Richard, 2 Barton, Clara, 129 Barton, Stephen, Jr., 129 Battle of South Mills, 43 Bell, John, 28–29, 105 Bell, Major, 11, 24, 70 Bertie County, N.C., 50, 65, 72, 109 Black soldiers, 2–5, 7, 15, 57–59, 61, 69, 77, 79–80, 83, 86–87, 89, 100, 106, 109, 111–114, 116, 118, 120–121, 131–132 Blalock, Keith, 44 Blalock, Malinda, 44 Blockade running, 35, 64, 72, 77, 105, 123, 129–130 Borough, Henry, 84

Camden County, N.C., 2, 8, 13, 26, 30, 39, 42, 48, 50, 61, 67–68, 72, 78–79, 85–87, 92–94, 98, 104, 108–109, 117, 122 Charleston Mercury, ix, 116 Chowan County, N.C., 10, 16, 26, 30, 56, 67–69, 71–72, 91, 104, 108–109, 122, 125, 129, 140 Chowan River, 4, 10, 30, 50, 65, 67, 71–72, 90, 109, 112, 122, 124 Clark, William H., 104, 130 Clarke, Henry T., 37 Clausewitz, Karl von, 44 Clay, Henry, 20 Clopton, William H., 121 Cobb, George W., 63 Cobb’s Point, N.C., 41 Cohoon, J. T. P. C., 24 Cohoon, P. A. R. C., 24, 72 Cold Mountain (Frazier), 8

190  /  index Compromise of 1850, 20–21 Confederate Congress, 8, 43–44, 97, 113–114, 118–119, 121–122 Confederate Conscription Act, 65, 75 Conscription, 4–5, 28, 43, 45, 52, 62, 64–65, 68, 70–72, 75, 132 Constitutional Union Party, 26, 28–29, 105 Counterguerrilla operations, 4, 6, 49, 68, 77, 87, 100 Cox, Thaddeus, 54–55 Creecy, Edmund Perkins, 102 Creecy, Richard Benbury, 24, 40, 45, 53, 58–59, 82, 101–105, 112, 127–128, 133, 136–137 Crimean War, 76 CSS Albemarle, 128–129 Currituck County, N.C., 2, 8, 10–11, 23, 26, 30, 38, 40, 67, 72, 78, 85–86, 91–94, 98, 104, 108, 121–122 Democratic Party, 17, 20–21, 23–25, 27, 32, 35 Democratic Pioneer, 20, 23–24, 35, 137 Department of Virginia and North Carolina, 77 Desertion, 84, 96–97, 132 Dismal Swamp Canal, 11–12, 39, 42, 48 Dismal Swamp Land Company, 12 Douglas, Stephen A., 29 Draft evaders, 75, 124 Draper, Alonzo, 86, 120 Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (Stowe), 15 Edenton, N.C., 10, 18, 24, 68–69 Edmondston, Catherine, 111 Eighth North Carolina Infantry, 38, 58 Eleventh Pennsylvania Cavalry, 62, 67–68, 73, 79 Elizabeth City, N.C., 1, 4, 10–11, 13, 16–21, 23, 30–31, 33–34, 36–42, 45–47, 49–50, 53–71, 74, 79–81, 84–85, 90, 100–103, 109, 120, 124–125, 128–130, 135–138 Elliott, John T., 1, 51–52, 59, 65, 67–68, 70–73, 81–83, 89, 102, 114, 117, 120–121, 123–124, 127, 130, 135, 138

Ellis, John, 27–28 Emancipation Proclamation, 6, 53, 56–58, 106, 111, 116 English, Earl, 128 Eringhaus, J. C., 14 Fearing, Isaiah, 103–105, 137 Ferguson, Champ, 44 Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry, 79 Fifth U.S. Colored Troops, 78, 81, 114–115 Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 78 Fifty-ninth Virginia Infantry, 39–40 First Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 76 First New York Mounted Rifles, 68, 73 First North Carolina Artillery, 35 First North Carolina Colored Volunteer Infantry, 78 First North Carolina Congressional District, 23, 25, 47, 114 First North Carolina (Union) Volunteer Infantry, 48, 50, 52–55, 59–60, 135, 138–139 First Rhode Island Artillery, 69 First U.S. Colored Troops, 68–69, 78 Flusser, C. W., 46–47 Forbes, E. M., 40, Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 44 Fort Columbus, 36 Fort Monroe, 35–36 Fort Warren, 36 Foster, H. H., 130 Foster, John G., 54, 57, 73 Foucault, Michel, 7 Free blacks, 5, 12–14, 16–19, 29, 56, 78–79, 87, 100 Freedman’s Colony, 61, 81, 100 Fugitive Slave Law, 20–21, 31 Gates County, N.C., 10, 30, 91, 104 General Orders No. 100, 95–97, 118 Glover, William, 40 Godwin, J. B., 24–25 Grandy, Abner, xii Grandy, Cyrus W., 72, 86, 122, 124 Grandy, James, 13 Grandy, John J., 104

index  /  191 Grandy, Moses, 13–15 Grandy, Wiley, 40 Great Dismal Swamp, x, 2, 10–11, 13–16, 52, 75, 85 Gregory, Major D., 86–87, 110 Griffin, Isaac, 62 Griffin, Joel R., 2, 83, 95–96, 117–118 Grimsley, Mark, 5 Guerrilla violence, ix, 3–5, 7–8, 21, 44, 48, 55, 62, 65, 97–99, 117–118, 120, 122, 131, 133 Guerrilla warfare, 5, 44, 46, 74, 118, 122 Guirkin, R. R., 93 Halifax County, N.C., 111 Halleck, Henry, 95 Hanging, 1–3, 8, 24, 32, 83, 85, 111, 114–116, 120 Hatteras Island, N.C., 34–38, 60, 73 Henningsen, C. F., 40 Hertford, N.C., 69, 81, 84 Hertford County, N.C., 23, 50, 124, 129 Hill, D. H., 62 Hinton, James W., 1, 18–19, 38–39, 45–46, 57–58, 66, 68, 70–72, 81–83, 117–118, 120–122, 124, 137 Hintonsville (or Hinton’s Crossroads), N.C., 2, 85, 114–115 Holden, William, 66, 126 Holland, Milton M., 114 Hollowell, Christopher Wilson, 72 Hostage situations, 1, 3, 5, 40, 74, 81, 83, 85–88, 91, 94, 97, 100, 110, 113, 119–120, 128, 131 Huger, Benjamin, 38 Internal improvements, 22, 24 Irregular warfare, 43–45, 88, 132, 137. See also Guerrilla violence; Guerrilla warfare James, Henry, 84 James Norcum, 62 Jennings, Ed, 82 Johnson, Lucius, 68 Johnston, James C., 17, 56, 69, 158 Jomini, Antoine Henri de, 44 Jordan, Samuel, 7, 81, 87, 114–116, 118, 120, 131

Keaton, B. F., 54 Kent, William L., 69, 136–137 Keogh, Richard, 72, 122, 124 Knott’s Island, N.C., 86, 120 Know-Nothing Party, 22–25. See also American Party Lee, Robert E., 37, 82, 122 Leigh, William, 39 Lenoir County, N.C., 124 Lepore, Jill, 3 Lieber, Francis, 95–97, 118 Lincoln, Abraham, 31, 37, 40, 47, 49, 56–58, 106, 116, 129 Lister, John, 40, Lynch, William F., 39 Madison County, N.C., 4 Maple Leaf, 67 Markham, John D., 103 Martin, James Green, 37, 39, 136–137 Martin, William F., 24, 35, 37, 136–137 McCabe, Joseph, 53–54 Micheau, John, 14 Mingo (slave), 16 Missouri Compromise (1820), 20 Mix, Simon H., 69–70 Morehead City, N.C., 69 Morgan, John Hunt, 44–45 Morgan, Miles, 39 Morrisett, William J., 93 Moss, Thomas, 61 Munden, Phoebe, 1–2, 81, 84, 112, 119–121 Munden, Thomas G., 93 “N.C. Defenders,” 87, 92 Neutrality, 5–6, 8, 60, 93, 105, 107–108, 112, 122–123, 126, 131–133 New Bern, N.C., 35, 38, 41, 47, 54, 77 New Bern Daily Progress, 49 New York Daily News, 119 New York Times, 79, 89 Newbold, William, 72 Ninth New York Volunteer Infantry, 42

192  /  index No-man’s-land, 7, 9, 41, 43, 63–64, 67, 78, 98, 104, 118, 123, 127, 132 Norfolk, Va., 10–11, 16, 36, 43, 69, 77–78, 84, 87, 93, 96, 104, 106, 109–110, 112, 120, 125, 129, 131 Northampton County, N.C., 50, 124

Potter, E. C., 50 Proctor, F. S., 47

Old North State, 20–21 Opposition Party, 22–28. See also Whig Party Ould, Robert, 113 Overman, R. F., 34, 63

Raleigh Standard, 126 Randolph, George Wythe, 46 Ransom, Matt, 123–124 Raper, D. D., 72 Rayner, Kenneth, 103 Republican Party, 19, 27–28 Richmond Dispatch, 42 Roanoke Island, N.C., 37–39, 51, 61, 63, 77, 78, 81, 87, 100, 105, 131 Rowan, Stephen, 41 Ruffin, Edmund, 110–111 Runaway slave(s), 10, 13, 15, 56, 77, 89 Russell, William, 84

Pailin, John, 63 Pailin, Sarah, 17 Palmer, I. N., 60–61 Paludan, Phillip Shaw, 4 Pamlico Sound, 46 Partisan Ranger Act, 43–45, 121 Partisan Rangers, 2, 43–45, 50–51, 65, 83–84, 91, 95–96, 105, 117–118, 121–122, 130 Pasquotank County, N.C., 1–2, 4, 6–7, 11–13, 15, 17, 28, 30, 32, 36, 39, 41, 45, 48–49, 54, 58, 61, 63–64, 67, 70–71, 75, 78, 81, 84–86, 90, 94, 100, 107–108, 112–113, 122, 126, 135, 138 Pasquotank River, 79 Pasquotank Southern Rights Association, 20–21 Patty Martin, 61 Perkins, Edmund H., 24, 59, 127, 136–137 Perquimans County, N.C., 10, 15, 30, 68, 73, 81, 91, 104, 109, 125, 129, 135 Perquimans River, 81, 84 Perry, Alfred, 125 Pettigrew, James Johnston, 58 Phillips, U. B., 4 Pickett, George E., 2, 82–83, 114, 123 Piggott, Jennings, 47 Plymouth, N.C., 41, 48, 77, 129 Pool, George D., 40, 72, 104 Pool, John, 21, 26–29, 31, 65–66, 72, 109, 115 Pool, Stephen D., 20–21 Pool, William G., 34, 40, 49, 63, 72, 80, 90–91, 94, 103 Poole, Joseph, 59

Quakers, 15, 18, 73 Quiet Rebellion, 108

Sanderlin, Willis B., 72, 87, 117, 122, 124 Sanders, Enos C., 48–50, 52–55, 59, 61, 131, 135 Sanders, Nathaniel, 49, 53–54 Sanders, Thomas D., 129 Sawyer, Enoch, 14 Sawyer, Jonathan, 42 Sawyer, Mark, 59 Scott, James, 70 Second North Carolina Colored Volunteer Infantry, 78 Second North Carolina Congressional District, 47 Second North Carolina (Union) Volunteer Infantry, 49 Seventeenth North Carolina Volunteer Infantry (First Organization), 35–37, 51, 103 Seventeenth North Carolina Volunteer Infantry (Second Organization), 137 Shannonhouse, J. J., 104 Shaw, Henry, 23–24, 26, 38 Shaw, James B., 72 Shelton Laurel, N.C., 4 Shiloh, N.C., xii, 48–50, 53 Sikes, Percival, 62

index  /  193 Simmons, Edmond, 93 Simmons, Josiah, 63, 136 Sixth New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry, 42 Sixty-eighth North Carolina State Troops, 117–118, 120–122, 124, 135, 138 Sixty-second Georgia Cavalry/ Partisan Rangers, 2, 83–84, 95–96, 117 Sixty-sixth North Carolina Partisan Rangers, 50–51, 65, 68, 117, 129, 130 Slave patrol, 5, 19, 45, 90, 101, 116 Slave rebellion, 16, 19 Slavery, 5–6, 8, 12–15, 19–20, 22–23, 25–29, 32, 53, 56–57, 76, 80, 100, 106, 116, 137 Smith, W. N. H., 23–24, 26, 113, 117, 126 Smuggling, 64, 123, 130 Sophia Walker, 18 South Mills, Battle of. See Battle of South Mills South Mills, N.C., 42–43, 48, 68, 70, 79, 93, 124 Speed, Rufus K., 30–31, 35 Stanly, Edward, 47, 57 Stanton, Edwin M., 97 Starke, Lucien D., 20–21, 24, 35, 136–137 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 15 Stuart, James Ewell Brown, 44 Tamplin, Tom, 102–103 Tatum, John, 64 Tenth North Carolina State Troops, 36 Tewksbury, 79–80, 85, 89, 96 Third Georgia Infantry, 39, 43 Third Massachusetts Infantry, 60 Third New York Cavalry, 69 Thirty-eighth U.S. Colored Troops, 125–126 Thirty-fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 76 Thirty-second North Carolina Infantry, 36–37 Tredegar Iron Works, 37 Turner, Nat, 16–17

Twentieth New York Cavalry, 129 Twenty-third Massachusetts Infantry, 69, 136–137 Tyrell County, N.C., 58 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 15 Unionism, 32–33, 66, 71, 107, 112, 131 Upshur, Elizabeth W., 109 USS Bombshell, 69 USS Fawn, 128 USS Shamrock, 130 Vance, Zebulon, 2, 43, 57–58, 64–66, 70–72, 88, 95, 99, 103–105, 112–113, 115, 117–118, 121, 126–127, 130 Victims (Paludan), 4 Vodges, Israel, 125 Wallis, J. W., 60–61 Walston, Caleb, 72, 122, 124 Washington County, N.C., 48 Wayne County, N.C., 62 Webster, Daniel, 20 Weeks, Elizabeth, 1, 3, 81, 83–84, 112, 119–121 Whig Party, 6, 17, 21–23, 26, 32, 34, 132. See also Opposition Party White, Addison, 55, 61 White, Nancy, 86, 120–121 White, William T., 82 Whitehead, James S., 36 Whitehurst, C. S., 42 Why the South Lost the Civil War (Beringer et al.), 5 Wild, Edward Augustus, xii, 1–8, 76–102, 104, 111–121, 130–131, 137–138 Winslow, J. R., 73–74 Wise, Henry A., 38 Yadkin County, N.C., 124