Browse Items (916 total)

For four years, Fort Fisher was the Achilles' heel of the Union blockade. As long as it stood, Wilmington would remain open. The odds were overwhelmingly in favor of the blockade-runners that came and went virtually on schedule, openly defying the…

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…

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…

"October 31, 1863.
Our citizens were startled today by the sudden appearance in town of James W. Bryan Esq., who lately came to New Bern from the Confederate lines under a flag of truce, and was called on business tot he Provost Marshall's office in…

Perhaps the best represented, and most well documented secessionist under the occupation of eastern North Carolina, James Rumley, a Carteret country court clerk. Rumley was a diarist that kept intensive notes about life under Union control from the…

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.…

At the Beginning of the Civil War, the Confederate States of America could hardly have foreseen the enormous problem that desertion in its army would have become. Amid the initial enthusiasm following the outbreak of the conflict, the rush of…

That the Confederate soldier has no superior in the annals of war is an article of the American Creed. His accomplishments against overwhelming odds, through four years of heroic suffering, are his monument. Magnificent in his forbearance and his…

William E. Mongomery's fine study of the African American church in the postbellum South informs readers that nineteenth-century whites often condescendingly described black worship as "long on religion and short on Christianity." Such a statement…