Browse Items (76 total)

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…

Louis Brown's The Salisbury Prison: A Case Study of Confederate Military Prisons, 1861-1865 provides an all inclusive look into the Confederate Prison located in Salisbury, North Carolina. The book goes into detail about how the prisoners were…

Discussions between governor Zeb Vance, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis on the impact that desertion made on the Confederate effort during the Civil War. This article points out that popular support for the Confederacy was never "robust" in the…

Democratic elites were able to make and regain power in the 1870s because they had established mechanisms for doing so, mechanisms that fit well with the vertical patterns of social relations of North Carolina’s society and tapped…

This article provides the best account of John Brown and how North Carolina reacted to the news of his raid on Harpers Ferry.

"In place of open mutiny, [powerless groups] prefer desertion...They make use of implicit understandings and informal networks...When such stratagems are abandoned in favor of more quixotic action, it is usually a sign of great desperation." Scott…

Union forces marched into New Bern on March 14, 1862, and Beaufort on the twenty-fifth, marking the beginning of a military occupation that would last the rest of the war. With Union occupation came thousands of Federal soldiers, government…

On May 1, the legislature met ins special secession. Governor Eillis, in his message, Reviewed the theory on which the government of the United States was founded and discussed fully the Constitutional aspects of coercion. Assuming that the state…

Ever since Sherman and his army embarked upon their march to the coast of Georgia and, later, through the Carolinas, the two campaigns earned the dubious distinction as the most controversial of the Civil War and possibly in American military…

All the conditions of small farms, simple habits and democratic ideals which have been ascribed to this general region were emphatically attributable to that part of it which lay in North Carolina. The western part of this State, until the…