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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Catherine Edmondston worried about the vehemence of her secessionist views because of the divisions they were causing in her own family. Before Lincoln’s call for troops in April 1861, Edmondston’s parents and sister remained staunch…

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…

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…

I would rather live a soldier for life [than] see this country made a mighty sepulcher in which should be buried our institutions, our nationality, our flag, and every American that today lives, than that our Republic should be divided into little…

George Rable's book, Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics, takes the Confederate political culture and assesses it in its "own right" instead of a Southern problematic characteristic. Rable takes an in-depth look at the underlying…