Vance had his fill of roaming Confederate cavalry

“North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance grew so exasperated with the indiscipline of Confederate cavalry wandering through the state that he cried out in 1863:

” ‘If God Almighty had yet in store another plague worse than all others which he intended to have let loose on the Egyptians in case the Pharoah still hardened his heart, I am sure it must have been a regiment or so of half-armed, half-disciplined Confederate cavalry.’ ”

— From “Fateful Lightning: A New History of the the Civil War and Reconstruction” by Allen C. Guelzo (2012)

 

View from train, 1861: Pull the curtains — please!

“For ‘the first time in the States,’ wrote English correspondent William Howard Russell as his train crossed into North Carolina in 1861, ‘I noticed barefooted people’ and ‘poor broken-down shanties or loghuts’ filled with ‘paleface… tawdry and ragged’ women and ‘yellow, seedy-looking’ men.”

— From “Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction” by Allen C. Guelzo (2012)

Nor does the view seem to have improved much by 1865. 

At least Frederick Law Olmsted, in his 1856 classic “A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States,”  had blamed the “ignorance and torpidity” of North Carolinians on poor soil and inadequate roads and schools, rather than on “any innate quality of the popular mind.”

 

Civil War soldiers emboldened by canteens of courage

“Many of the Civil War’s legendary charges in the face of the enemy were made by soldiers who had been drugged into near insensibility by the liberal dispensing of hard liquor….

“The 16th North Carolina went into action at Seven Pines [Henrico County, Virginia] after the company commissary ‘hobbled down with several canteens of “fire water” and gave each of the men a dram. He knew we needed it, and the  good angels only smiled.’ ”

— From “Fateful Lightning: A New History of the the Civil War and Reconstruction” by Allen C. Guelzo (2012)

 

View from Union blockade: ‘Adventure! Bah!’

“One sailor stationed off Wilmington, North Carolina, explained in his diary how adventurous blockade duty really was:

” ‘I told her [his mother] she could get a fair idea of our ‘adventures’ if she would go on the roof of the house, on a hot summer day, and talk to half a dozen hotel hallboys, who are generally far more intelligent and agreeable than the average “acting officer.” Then descend to the attic and drink some tepid water, full of iron rust. Then go on the roof  again and repeat the “adventurous process” at intervals, until she is tired out and go bed, with every thing shut down tight, so as not to show a light.

” ‘Adventure! Bah! The blockade is the wrong place for it.’ ”

— From “Fateful Lightning: A New History of the the Civil War and Reconstruction” by Allen C. Guelzo (2012)

 

Senator saw federal money as precursor to emancipation

“Slavery became the lens through which Southerners looked at every question, the red dye that tainted every American conflict….

“North Carolina senator Nathaniel Macon suspected, as early as 1818, that ‘the passage of a bill granting money for internal improvements’ would also make ‘possible a bill for the emancipation of the negroes,’ and he ‘desired to put North Carolinians on their guard, and not simply North Carolinians, but all Southerners.'”

— From “Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction” by Allen C. Guelzo (2012)