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In 1838, the federal government forcibly removed 15,000 Cherokees from North Carolina and surrounding states to reservations west of the Mississippi river. In this forced march, known as the Trail of Tears, approximately 4,000 to 5,000 Indians died.…

Slavery expanded in North Carolina during the antebellum era. The enslaved population grew from 100,000 in 1790, about 25 percent of the total population, to 331,000 in 1860, approximately 30 percent. The slave population was not evenly distributed…

I understand the people of Wilkes are baldy whipped and willing for our patriotic old State to return to the pretended Union, and claim Abraham Lincoln as their chief magistrate. I have also been told that the country was full of deserters and no…

If early enthusiasm for the Confederate cause had been remarkably widespread in the western counties of North Carolina, it proved to be thin indeed after a few months of real fighting. There were individual desertions early on, of course; some young…

That message may indeed have served as a deterrent for at least some North Carolina soldiers. John W. Reese, a poor Buncombe County farmer who was not among those who abandoned the 60th Regiment, for example, told his wife, who was urging him to come…