Browse Items (76 total)

Eugene Genovese presents the idea that slave owners are less likely to harm a slave if they have owned them from early on in the slave's life. Because of the amount of time invested by a slave owner in a particular slave, the owner may gain a sense…

In this chapter from Social Science History, the author discusses the personal and political reasons for desertion in the Confederate Army of North Carolina. Giuffre's main thesis states that desertion was used as a form of resistance by small…

As late as 1830, southern whites still sometimes debated whether slavery should, or could, be eliminated. The state of Virginia nearly abolished slavery in 1836, after the terror of Nat Turner’s Rebellion. In North Carolina, people wondered…

It has become a commonplace that the war changed how Americans thought of their country. During the antebellum years, most people said “the United States are . . .” After the war, however, they said “The United States is . .…

George Rable's book, Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics, takes the Confederate political culture and assesses it in its "own right" instead of a Southern problematic characteristic. Rable takes an in-depth look at the underlying…

Fear created suspicion, suspicion led to torture, torture to confessions. Or, it is possible, and that is but a guess, that panic, or part of it, was maintained by people interested in the purchase of slaves at a low price. Another hypothesis was…

By integrating evidence from soldiers and civilians, black and white, at a moment when home front and battlefront merged, Sherman's March becomes a far more complex story-one that illuminated the importance of culture for determining the limits of…

Judge James A. Wynn Jr. is a former Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court and has offered insight into Thomas Ruffin's decision in State v. Mann. According to Wynn, North Carolina law had precedent that would allow Ruffin to reach a different…