Carried Into War
A Soldier's Life
Realities of War
The Home Front
Facing the Grim Reaper
Breaking the Blockade
The Last Campaigns
An Uncertain Future
Acknowledgments
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Who Were the People?
The Crisis of Secession
The Initial Response
On the eve of the American Civil War, North Carolina was a rural state with a total population of 992,622. Most citizens had been born in North Carolina and farmed for a living. Foreign-born people made up less than 1 percent of the state's population in 1860, and 72 percent of white families owned no slaves. Evan so, African Americans accounted for approximately one-third of the total population, and the majority were slaves. Few urban commercial centers existed, and the largest town, Wilmington in New Hanover County, had fewer than 10,000 residents.
Population of North Carolina in 1860
| 992,622 |
24,554 |
2.5 |
968,068 |
30,463 |
331,059 |
Yeoman Farmers
Cloudy, warm, and windy. Plowed. Planted the balance of our potatoes.
—Basil Armstrong Thomasson, Iredell County farmer, March 26, 1861
The majority of North Carolinians in 1860 came from white yeoman families who worked small farms, fifty to one hundred acres in size, and owned no slaves. They had more concern about rainfall, crops, and seasonal changes for planting and harvesting than about national politics. They produced much of what they consumed and relied on the sale of surplus crops for money to buy what they could not grow or make by hand on their farms. Men from these families would constitute the majority of North Carolina's Confederate soldiers in the coming war.
Planters
My wheat sold in New York for $1.30 & I suppose I have about 1000 bushels more for sail.
—Ebenezer Pettigrew, Tyrrell County planter, July 19, 1842
Individuals who owned twenty or more slaves were considered planters. Of the 34,658 families who owned slaves in North Carolina, only 4,065 owned twenty or more and qualified as planters. Although they made up a minority, these individuals exercised political influence far greater than their actual numbers would suggest, when compared to families with few or no slaves. Planters frequently served as elected members of the state assembly, and the laws they passed often protected their own interests. Many planters became active proponents or opponents of secession, and some became prominent military leaders.
African Americans
On one of these sale days, I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction-block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all. The children were sold to a slave-trader, and their mother was bought by a man in her own town. Before night her children were all far away.
—Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, 1861
African Americans made up approximately one-third of North Carolina's population in 1860. Although a large number of African Americans worked as unskilled laborers, many were skilled artisans with highly valued talents. Of the 361,522 blacks in North Carolina on the eve of the war, 30,463 were free. Among the Southern states, only Virginia had more free blacks. Enslaved or free, all African Americans lived in a society tightly controlled by strict social and legal codes. But regardless of their legal status, North Carolina's African Americans would play an active role in the coming war.
North Carolina and the Civil War deals primarily with the Civil War years, 1861-1865. You will read the stories of many people, see their personal belongings and photographs, and learn about their wartime experiences. But you will find even more information about the individuals highlighted here, and about their lives before and after the war. Look for each of these people once more within the exhibit, and again at the end. You can also explore each person's complete story in the They Were There section.
Walker Brothers
Brothers Henry J. and Levi Jasper Walker rushed to volunteer for the Confederate States Army on the very day that North Carolina seceded from the Union-May 20, 1861. They joined Company B (Ranaleburg Riflemen), Thirteenth Regiment North Carolina Troops (Third Regiment North Carolina Volunteers). In 1861 twenty-four-year-old Henry and nineteen-year-old Levi lived with their parents, Thomas Jefferson and Jane Walker, and three younger siblings, Rufus, Thomas, and Frances Walker. The Walkers were Presbyterians who resided in the Steele Creek area of northern Mecklenburg County. Before the war, Henry, Levi, and their father worked in a local woolen mill.
John Wesley Armsworthy
John Wesley Armsworthy was thirty-one years old when the war broke out in 1861. He and his wife, Edna, aged twenty-six, had three children under five years old-Branch, Ella, and Matthew. Armsworthy owned a 270-acre farm in Yadkin County, where he and his young family lived. He raised all the food the family needed, including wheat, corn, oats, and potatoes. He had two cows to provide milk and butter, and fifteen hogs for meat. Armsworthy had one mule to help him work the fields but did not raise any cash crops, such as tobacco or cotton, nor did he own any slaves. He and his family were Methodists. Armsworthy was a Democrat, although, like most North Carolinians, he probably did not favor secession before the war. But ultimately he supported the state's decision to leave the Union and join the Confederacy.
Alfred May
Alfred May, one of nine children of John and Elizabeth Tyson May, was born in Pitt County on March 24, 1843, in a home built by his father and the family slaves. The May land had been in family hands since before the American Revolution, and John had achieved success as a prosperous landholder. To work the land, he used both family and slave labor. The 1860 census indicated that John May owned twenty-eight slaves who ranged in age from four to fifty years. The census also listed Alfred, the youngest male in the family, as a student. No doubt John and Elizabeth May followed the secession crisis with close attention and concern, since they had sons of military age. John May died on May 25, 1861, just five days after North Carolina left the Union. Perhaps because of their father's death, the sons felt obligated to stay at home and care for their mother and sisters. However, in 1862 the war took the boys from the farm into Confederate service. First Robert enlisted on April 7, then Benjamin on May 6, and finally Alfred on August 25.
Abraham H. Galloway
Abraham H. Galloway was born into slavery on February 13, 1837, in Smithville (later renamed Southport), Brunswick County. His mother was a seventeen-year-old slave, and his white father, John Wesley Galloway, was the son of a wealthy Brunswick County planter. Marsden Milton Hankins, a railroad mechanic (skilled artisan) and prosperous citizen of Wilmington, owned Abraham Galloway from infancy. Galloway received training as a brick mason and was allowed to work independently, as long as he earned enough to give his owner fifteen dollars each month. Craving freedom, Galloway escaped from Wilmington on a ship going north and arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in June 1857. From there he journeyed to the safety of Ontario, Canada, and became a spokesman for abolition. He maintained close contacts with abolitionists in Massachusetts and probably helped other fugitive slaves reach the safety of Canada. After the outbreak of war, Galloway returned to North Carolina to work for the liberation of African Americans.
Peter
Peter was one of 158 slaves owned by Charles L. Pettigrew of Tyrrell County in 1860. As a slave, Peter did not have a last name. He was a mulatto, a person of mixed race, with a wife and at least six children. Peter and his family lived on the Pettigrew plantation Bonarva, located on the northeastern shore of Lake Scuppernong (later renamed Lake Phelps). The Pettigrews had owned Bonarva since the 1780s. They had also held slaves since that time, so it is possible that Peter's family had been Pettigrew property for several generations. In 1860 Bonarva had a value of $58,000, with an additional $120,240 invested in personal property, including the slaves. After 1858, however, Charles Pettigrew fell deeply into debt because of a business failure. This debt and the coming war left the Pettigrews anxious about future. When the war began, Peter's life changed in ways that he could have never have anticipated.
John Thomas Jones
John Thomas Jones was a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of North Carolina when the secession crisis came in 1861. He grew up in a Caldwell County slaveholding family that got its wealth by growing wheat and corn as cash crops on a 2,720-acre plantation. Jones, an Episcopalian, was known in the community as Knock because of the way he often settled disputes. John's father, Edmund W. Jones, was a pro-Union delegate to the state secession convention. John sent letters home from the university trying to convince his father to support North Carolina's secession movement and the formation of the Confederacy. Before the state seceded, John joined the Orange Light Infantry Company as a private on April 6, 1861. His company was assigned to the First Regiment North Carolina Volunteers and in June fought at the Battle of Bethel in Virginia.
Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston
In 1860 Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston and her husband, Patrick Muir Edmondston, lived in Halifax County on Looking Glass plantation and operated a smaller plantation, Hascosea, nearby. The Edmondstons owned eighty-eight slaves. Their total estate comprised 1,894 acres and had a value of $19,600. Both Catherine and Patrick were staunch secessionists. Catherine filled her diary, which she began keeping consistently in 1860 at the age of thirty-six, with praise for the Southern cause and Southerners in general, as well as scathing references to the "Yankees," whom she despised. The March 4, 1861, entry clearly expressed her opinion of the new Republican president: "Today was inaugurated that wretch Abraham Lincoln President of the US. We are told not to speak evil of Dignities, but it is hard to realize he is a Dignity. Ah! would that Jefferson Davis was our President. He is a man to whom a gentleman could look at without mortification as cheif of his nation."
Sophia Partridge
Sophia Partridge operated the Select School for Young Ladies at her home on East Hargett Street in Raleigh, Wake County, from 1846 until 1851 and again after 1858. Partridge offered academic subjects, including French and Latin, but was perhaps best known for her artistic talents. Her classes in drawing, watercolor and oil painting, and music were quite popular. Partridge, born May 15, 1817, in Vienna, New York, originally came to North Carolina to help nurse an ill sister. She adopted the state as her home and lived here for the remainder of her life. She became an ardent Confederate and actively supported the war, creating a painted flag for Company I (Cedar Fork Rifles), Sixth Regiment North Carolina State Troops and serving in the local aid society.
Jesse Virgil Dobbins
Jesse Virgil Dobbins was a thirty-one-year-old farmer in Yadkin County in 1861. He owned a 225-acre farm, where he lived with his wife, Sarah, aged twenty-one, and his one-year-old son, Daniel. Dobbins raised all his family needed to eat, including wheat, corn, oats, and potatoes, and had three cows for milk and butter, as well as two pigs. Dobbins also produced molasses and honey on his farm. He grew hay as food for the animals and flax to make linen for clothing. He did not raise the cash crops cotton and tobacco. His farm size and property ranked Dobbins as a typical farmer in his county. A member of the Society of Friends (Quakers), he opposed slavery and probably was a Whig before the war. Dobbins, a unionist, strongly opposed secession, which put him at odds with many North Carolina citizens, including members of his own family and community.
Bartlett Yancy Clark
The 1860 census listed Bartlett Yancy Clark as a twenty-seven-year-old mechanic living in Guilford County with his wife, Emily Stephenson Clark. The couple, who married on April 19, 1853, had two young sons, Greenville S. and Jonathan A. Clark. The Clarks were members of the Society of Friends, a religious group that believed in pacifism and opposed slavery. Presumably Clark, as a Quaker, did not support the war, which might explain why he did not volunteer for military service. However, service records indicate that his brothers Christopher (or Cristerfer) and John may have enlisted in the Confederate army as early as May 23, 1861.
Parker D. Robbins
In 1860 Parker D. Robbins was one of more than 30,000 free African Americans living in North Carolina. He was born in Bertie County in 1834, the son of John A. Robbins and a woman whose name is not known. Apparently Parker was a mulatto with Chowan Indian ancestors. Even though antebellum North Carolina law forbade the education of blacks, Parker was a literate man. He owned a 102-acre farm and supported himself as a successful carpenter and mechanic. Despite having his freedom and holding property, Robbins faced rigid social and legal restrictions as an African American. But events would soon present the opportunity for him to use his knowledge and talents in both war and peace.
John Newland Maffitt
Future Confederate naval commander John Newland Maffitt was, rather aptly, born at sea as his parents emigrated from Ireland to America in 1819. His uncle, Dr. William Maffitt, adopted him at age five, and John moved to Ellerslie, outside Fayetteville, Cumberland County. By the time he was thirteen, Maffitt had a commission as midshipman in the United States Navy. He held various positions, including the command of several ships. In 1842 the navy assigned him to the United States Coast Survey. The superintendent of the survey said that, as a surveying officer, Maffitt had "not been excelled by any one with whom I have come in contact." Maffitt spent fourteen years mapping and charting coastal areas, plotting depths, locating shoals and sandbars, and determining the velocity of currents-learning many skills that would serve him well in his future career commanding blockade-runners for the Confederacy.
William Holland Thomas
William Holland Thomas was born to Temperance Calvert Thomas on February 5, 1805, in rural Haywood County. He entered the world an orphan, as his father had drowned in the fall of 1804. An extremely intelligent boy, William worked in a trading store in the Cherokee territory of western North Carolina. There he learned the Cherokee language and was adopted into the clan of the chief Yonaguska. Thomas acquired property and became a respected businessman. A self-taught attorney, he represented the North Carolina Cherokee on many occasions and helped them secure the right to remain on their land during the Cherokee removal in 1838. In April 1839, the dying Yonaguska made William Holland Thomas the new Cherokee chief. Ambitious and successful, Thomas entered politics and served in the state senate from 1849 to 1861. A strong supporter of states' rights, he voted for secession at the May 1861 state convention and publicly denounced President Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant.
Stephen Dodson Ramseur
Stephen Dodson Ramseur graduated from West Point at age twenty-three in June 1860. He came from a slaveholding family in Lincoln County and was a devout Presbyterian and staunch Democrat. By 1860 Ramseur believed that secession was inevitable and justified. He resigned from the United States Army in April 1861, after seven southern states had seceded, and offered his services to the Confederacy. He returned to North Carolina to take command of the Ellis Light Artillery. On May 20, 1861, Ramseur's artillery was posted on the State Capitol grounds during North Carolina's secession debate. When the convention approved secession, Ramseur's battery announced the historic moment by firing its cannons.
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