Browse Items (916 total)

During the early winter of 1863-64, Grant completed the formulation of a new strategy, one in which the Union would give up its reliance on the persisting strategy of territorial conquest but still pursue its logistic strategy of crippling the…

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…

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…

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…

On April 16, 1862, Jefferson Davis signed America's first national compulsory military service law...The new law prevented the one-year volunteers from leaving the army for two more years and provided for the conscription of additional three-year…

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…

From Sterling Ruffin. [Brunswick, June, 1804] I have no apology to offer for not complying with the promise made in my last, of writing again, in a few days, except that I wish'd to have forwarded you a small B. Note, for fear, from some unforeseen…

During and after the Civil War, Ruffin's championed the southern constitutional position. Believing strongly that the Constitution sanctioned slaveholders' rights as property holders, Ruffin turned away from support for the Union after the failure of…

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…

Just weeks after the incident in Baltimore, a fellow North Carolinian was also attacked for his abolitionist stance. Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, born and raised near Salisbury, was dismissed from his fac ulty post at the University of North Carolina…