‘The misfortune of having a war within its bowels’

“In the South, intestine [internal] war continually raged inside the conventional war of strategy and maneuver being fought by the British and Continental armies. Intestine warfare was more than pitched; it fondly embraced cruelty, nighttime murders and hangings without trial….

“Or, as North Carolina Governor Abner Nash more vividly described the land that suffered it, ‘a Country exposed to the misfortune of having a War within its Bowels.’ ”

— From “With Little Less Than Savage Fury” by Thomas B. Allen in American Heritage magazine (Fall 2010)