A history lesson for Pasquotank County commissioners

“….In their reactions to last week’s call by the Pasquotank NAACP to remove a Confederate monument from the county courthouse property, several Pasquotank commissioners said the Civil War was fought more over the issue of states’ rights than slavery.

“That’s just not so, said Michael Hill, a historian with the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, who called the states’ rights justification for the South’s secession a ‘bogus argument’….

“ ‘That debate was long settled among historians,’ Hill said in a phone interview. ‘Slavery was central to the debate that preceded the war.’

“Hill said that when Southern states declared their causes for seceding from the Union, many said point-blank it was because of the North’s perceived hostility to slaveholding. Shortly after the Civil War ended in 1865, he said, many Southern leaders and writers tried to redefine, and even rename, the Civil War — one of those names was in fact the ‘War Between the States’ — but he said there’s no doubt about the ‘centrality of slavery’ in causing the war…”

— From “Historian: Slavery, not states’ rights, caused Civil War” by Jon Hawley in the Elizabeth City Daily Advance (July 4)

Of course, this misconception isn’t limited to northeastern North Carolina.

 

One generation’s graffiti, another’s history lesson

“Civil War soldiers often signed their names at mustering sites before heading off to fight. Countless signatures have been painted over. But on a plaster wall at the courthouse in Gates County, N.C., you can still see signatures dated June 12, 1861. One signer was 18-year-old John Gatling, who survived the war and returned to the courthouse in 1915, at age 72, to speak at a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the war’s conclusion.

” ‘Those signatures are a momentary record, captured in time,’ says Josh Howard, research historian with the North Carolina Office of Archives and History. ‘If you touch their names, you’re literally touching history.’ ”

— From “Erasing Signatures from History” in the Wall Street Journal (March 2) — fascinating and far-reaching.