Browse Items (916 total)

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…

Holden, despairing of a fair trial in the civil courts, had resolved to try them by military commission. He therefore wrote Pearson a lengthy public letter on July 26, justifying his proclamations of insurrection and politely declining to surrender…

Camp Stonewall Brigade September 3, 1863 Dear Wife I received your letter of the 8 of August last from which I understood with great pleasure that you and the rest of the family were all well, but sorrow to hear that you had been sick. This…

In his book, At The Precipice: Americans North and South During the Secession Crisis, Shearer Davis Bowman seeks to answer the questionon why did the southern states decide to secede from the Union in 1861 and in response why did the northern states…

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…

THE ROLE OF THE COMMUNITY
IN CIVIL WAR DESERTION
Judith Lee Hallock
Communities, like individuals, have personalities, and their response to
crises reflect their peculiar characteristics. During the Civil War,
Northern communities played an…

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…

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…

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…

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…