Browse Items (76 total)

TEXAS AND WAR WITH MEXICO

Throughout the 1820s, Americans settled in the vast territory of Texas, often with land grants from the Mexican government. However, their numbers soon alarmed the authorities, who prohibited further immigration in 1830.…

She was a slave in the South and a fugitive in the South and in the North. She was an abolitionist, the author of a published slave narrative. She was a relief worker during the Civil War, and after Reconstruction, she was an entrepreneur. Although…

While Vance was willing to aid the Confederate government by enrolling conscripts and returning deserters, he was insistent, nevertheless, that the Richmond authorities should exert their war power with due regard for the rights of North Carolina…

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…

For both vessels and supplies, the South looked to Great Britian and, once the British realized the immense profits that could be made by running cargoes through the blockade, a large and enthusiastic trade soon opened up between Bermuda, Nassau,…

In North Carolina after the bloodiest war in our nation’s history, the hardest task laid ahead. That task would be reconstructing a country that had been ripped apart by war. One of the key components during the reconstruction era was the…

North Carolina rapidly responded to the needs of its Confederate amputees. The General Assembly passed a resolution of January 23, 1866, asking Gov. Jonathan Worth "to make a contract with some manufacturer of artificial limbs to supply the need of…

A detailed history of the anti-Lincoln and anti-war northern Democrats commonly known then as the "Copperheads." Weber details some of the plots and other schemes the Copperheads were involved in while trying to end the Civil War, which included…

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…

Slavery in the American South could not have existed without the authority of law defining slaves as the property of their masters. But the fact that slaves were also human beings placed limits on this harsh reality. When the rigor of the law and the…