Chapter 5.

North Carolina Secedes. 

        North Carolina traveled a tortuous and fractious path toward secession during the months following the election of Abraham Lincoln and the withdrawal of South Carolina and the Lower South from the Union.  It was far from inevitable that North Carolina would secede.  The majority of the residents of the Tar Heel State sought accommodation with the North.  According to historian Paul D. Escott, “the overall political climate (in North Carolina) was remarkable for its pro-Union sentiment.”[1]  The fact that the Unionists in North Carolina and in the other states of the Upper South did eventually join the Confederacy was largely due to the actions of Abraham Lincoln.

     Tar Heel Governor John Willis Ellis, a Salisbury lawyer, a large slave owner, and an ardent secessionist, conceded that he was outnumbered.  In October 1860, he accurately predicted that most of his fellow citizens would not regard Lincoln’s election “as sufficient ground for dissolving the Union of the states.”[2]  Historians W. Buck Yearns and John G. Garrett agree.  They write: “In November 1860, only a small minority of North Carolinians saw Lincoln’s election as so dire a threat to their well-being that secession was their only logical action.”[3]

John W. Ellis

     Secessionists were the majority in some sections of the North Carolina Coastal Plain and in some Piedmont counties that bordered Virginia or South Carolina, such as Caswell and Mecklenburg.  There the Democrats and their planter sympathizers had a virtual stranglehold on political power, because the local economy was based on the plantation system, either in cotton or tobacco.

     Circumstances in the Piedmont heartland and in the mountainous sections of the State were very different.  Most of the whites who resided in the North Carolina hinterland were yeoman agriculturalists or tenant farmers who lived on small and isolated farms and who cultivated almost no cash crops.[4]  Predominantly Whigs and fiercely independent, they had little compassion for the plight of the large slave owners like Governor Ellis.  Historian J. Carlyle Sitterson declares:  “It was to be expected that small landowners of the up-country, who had for generations struggled against the dominance of the coastal plain in state affairs, would view with suspicion a Southern Rights movement whose main strength lay in the plantation-slavery region.”[5]

     Many who lived in the so-called Quaker belt of the central Piedmont, in counties like Randolph, Alamance, and Guilford, were antipathetic to slavery on moral and religious grounds.[6]  John A. Gilmer, a “frank and cordial” Presbyterian lawyer who was elected in 1857 to represent the Greensboro district in the United States House of Representatives, was especially outspoken in his opposition to secession.[7]  The oldest of 12 children, he belonged to a growing band of southern Unionists who tried to keep the Upper South from emulating the secessionist actions of South Carolina and the other states of the Lower South.

John A. Gilmer

     The grandson of two men who had fought the British and Tories at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse during the American Revolutionary War, Gilmer was a staunch patriot.  In his opinion, North Carolina, unlike the states of the Lower South, would become increasingly industrialized.  Its long-term economic interests, he insisted, were therefore tied primarily to the North.  In keeping with his Whiggish proclivities, Gilmer “envisioned railroads, coal mines, manufacturing, and economic diversification” in North Carolina’s future, explains historian Daniel W. Crofts.[8] 

     The disloyalty of the Upper South was not foreordained.  Gilmer insisted that Abraham Lincoln could have eased sectional tensions if the President-elect would have reiterated his commitment to leave slavery intact where it already existed and had demonstrated greater magnanimity toward the South.  Gilmer warned the Republicans that “apprehensions of real danger and harm to them and their peculiar institution” had “seized the people” of the South.[9]

     Abraham Lincoln consistently refused to make any additional concessions on the issue of slavery, especially on the matter of its extension into some parts of the Western territories.  The President-elect persisted in turning a deaf ear to Republicans like William H. Seward who wanted to pacify the Upper South.  “Though he took pains to conceal his role from public view,” contends historian Daniel Crofts, “Abraham Lincoln worked hard to block any significant Republican concessions.”[10]

William Woods Holden

     The principal newspaper spokesman for Unionism in North Carolina was William Woods Holden, a lawyer and the owner and exuberant editor after 1845 of the North Carolina Standard, a Raleigh newspaper that had traditionally espoused the views of the Democratic Party and its planter backers.  Born the bastard son of a gristmill owner in Orange County, Holden had only three years of formal education but learned journalism by serving as a printer’s apprentice in Hillsboro, N.C.  By the mid-1850s he was known as the “most robust” newspaper editor in the Tar Heel State.[11]

     Holden was tireless in his efforts to overcome his humble origins and to make a name for himself.  “He has worked his way from poverty and obscurity to comparative wealth and distinction,” said a rival newspaper editor about Holden.[12]  The principal weapon in Holden’s struggle for status was a vitriolic pen.  The pages of the Standard dripped with political invective, directed initially against the Whigs and later against the pro-secession Democrats.  “His paper would not be among those which were glanced at each week and tossed aside,” assert Holden’s biographers.[13]  Holden “went his own way, made his own plans and pursued them to the end regardless of protest and regardless of how disagreeable his plans were to his opponents.”[14]  Edward J. Hale, editor of the Fayetteville Observer, called the Standard  “vile, unscrupulous.”[15]

     Until 1858, when he failed to win his party’s nomination as its candidate for governor, Holden was an indefatigable champion of the Democratic Party, including its defense of slavery and the rights of North Carolina to secede if such action was necessary to protect the State’s constitutional prerogatives.  Holden lost out to John Ellis at the Democratic State Convention in Charlotte in April 1858, and Ellis went on to win the governorship.  Ellis’s victory at the polls did not assuage Holden’s resentment over what had transpired in Charlotte, however.  “Holden’s supporters left Charlotte not only disappointed but angry,” explain historians Edgar E. Folk and Bynum Shaw.[16]

     Holden would later claim that Ellis had won the nomination “by resort to means which would be considered unfair even by New York politicians.”[17]  The outspoken editor who had contributed mightily to the resurgence of the Democratic Party in North Carolina felt abandoned and unappreciated.  These feelings intensified when in the fall of 1858 the Democrats refused to support Holden’s bid  for a seat in the United States Senate.  Holden’s belief that the “shame” of his illegitimate birth had played a significant part in persuading the “aristocrats” of the Democratic Party to shun him was especially hurtful.  Holden proclaimed:  “It was in my lot in life to be born in humble circumstances, and there are some who would ‘punish’ me on account of my origin.”[18]

     One can only speculate as to what role personal considerations played in prompting Holden to make an about face and come out so forcefully against secession in 1860-61.  He used the pages of the influential Standard to rebuke Governor Ellis and others who advocated that North Carolina follow the lead of South Carolina and the other states of the Lower South and withdraw from the Union.  Holden attended the Democratic Party’s national convention in Charleston in April 1860, allegedly became deeply disturbed by the secessionist speeches he heard there, and decided that the “would stand by the American Union at all hazards, and to the last extremity.”[19]  The Warrenton News noted that Holden’s “views of Southern policy have undergone a remarkable change in a very short space of time.”[20]

     Holden entered the fray against Governor Ellis and the secessionist leadership of the Democratic Party with unprecedented ferocity.  He called a pro-secession newspaper a “sewer into which all bad passions, and all hatreds against us are to be emptied.”[21]  He employed strong language on December 12, 1860, when refuting the claims of the Goldsborough Rough Notes that the great majority of North Carolinians wanted to leave the Union.  “The very reverse is true,” Holden exclaimed.  "The people of the State are in favor of the Union as it now exists, and they will ‘grind into powder’ those politicians who are for destroying it for existing causes.”[22]  Holden traveled to villages and towns throughout the Tar Heel State during the winter of 1860-1861, giving speeches at pro-Union rallies and emboldening the opponents of secession.

     On December 5, 1860, Holden wrote about the reasons he believed North Carolina should shun secession.  Fundamental to Holden’s way of thinking was the conviction that disunion would produce anarchy among several states or intervention by a foreign power and consequently rob the people of their liberty.  He advocated a “wait and see” attitude toward the Lincoln administration.  “But our honor as a people is still untarnished-our Constitutional rights, so far as the federal government is concerned are still untouched,” Holden proclaimed.[23]  “Depend upon it our people are not submissionists,” he asserted.  “But if they should not be assailed, and if we can preserve the government with safety and honor, to ourselves, in the name of all that is sacred let us do so.”[24]

     Holden was prescient in describing what withdrawal from the Union would mean for the Tar Heel State.  Secession, he warned, would bring “fraternal strife, civil and servile war, murder, arson, pillage, robbery, and fire and blood through long and cruel years.”[25]  He accused Governor Ellis of surreptitiously laboring to execute “disunion schemes” against the interests of the rank-and-file citizens of North Carolina.  Holden thundered:  “We denounce and defy the disunionists, and we all make war upon them until the people of the State, of all parties, shall rise in their might and teach them , and teach all professionals and designing politicians that their property, their fortunes, their lives, and the integrity of the federal Constitution shall not be subjected to the control of demagogues lusting for power and for new places in a Southern Union.”[26]

     Judge Matthias E. Manly of New Bern also advised against precipitous action.  “If they insist upon regarding slaves of the south as a moral taint which is their duty to eradicate, we must quit them,” Manly declared.  “If they abandon such purpose I see no reason why the union may not continue, and allow the highest destiny that had been predicted for it.”[27]

    On February 5, 1861, a resident of Baltimore, Md., wrote a Tar Heel friend.  “The Union is worth every Sacrifice,” the writer insisted.  “Oh may I ask in all Sincerity of heart for our dear Country which I did passionately love,” he continued, “that all else may be laid aside-that all may be Statesmen and Patriots only and agree Unanimously on a plan that shall give to us equal rights and equal laws and forever banish the discussion of Slavery from the Halls of Congress.”[28]

     Johnathan Worth, a lawyer and legislator from Randolph County, joined the ranks of those who labored tirelessly to keep North Carolina loyal to the Union.  His correspondence speaks with special poignancy to anyone who wishes the United States could have somehow stepped back from the abyss of horrific warfare in 1861.  “I have carefully read nearly all the debates in Congress,” Worth declared in a public address, “and I see no sufficient reason for . . . launching probably through civil war, upon the dark sea of experiment.”[29]   Worth blamed extremists on both sides for the escalation of tensions.  “I view with abhorrence both Secession and Abolition, both equally tending and aimed, without sufficient cause, at the subversion of the Government,” he exclaimed on March 16, 1861.[30]  “I have always regarded the dissolution of the Union as the greatest misfortune which could befall the nation and the whole human race,” he exclaimed on May 17^th.[31] 

     Secessionists in North Carolina were quick to strike back at the likes of Gilmer, Holden, Worth, and Manly.  The State Journal of Raleigh urged the people of North Carolina to “throw off the lethargy with which HOLDEN’S pusillanimous policy of 'Watch and wait' has seized you, and act as men who know their rights and dare maintain them.”  Otherwise, the newspaper continued, “the very stones of our Revolutionary soil will immediately cry out.”[32]

     William J. Yates, owner and editor of the Western Democrat in pro-secession Mecklenburg County, was also harsh in his criticism of Holden.  On December 4, 1860, he lambasted Holden for the Raleigh editor’s critique of a speech Governor Ellis had delivered.  According to Yates, Holden has written “in a style and spirit which manifest a total disregard of candor and fair dealing.”  Moreover, said Yates, Holden’s “vituperative tirade” against Ellis was characterized by a “state of wrath” that blinded the Standard’s editor “to his own record and often-expressed opinions.”  Yates proceeded to explain that Holden had only recently been a staunch defender of North Carolina’s right to secede.  “Mr. Holden,” said Yates, “declared less than a year ago since, that the South would ‘sunder the bonds’ of the Union in 1860 rather than submit to Black Republican rule.”[33]

     The anti-secessionists won a great victory in the Tar Heel State on February 28, 1861.  The citizens of North Carolina voted to reject the holding of a convention to consider the issue of withdrawal from the Union and elected a majority of anti-secessionist delegates to that proposed convention.  “We have never witnessed such enthusiasm in Raleigh as that exhibited on Thursday night last by the Unionists,” W. W. Holden exulted.  “Large crowds of men and boys were on the streets until past midnight, singing Union songs, hurrahing for the good cause, calling out the successful candidates, and other Union men, who replied in brief speeches which added to the general enthusiasm.”[34] 

    North Carolina’s rejection of precipitous secession notwithstanding, ominous events did begin to occur in the Tar Heel State in early 1861.  At 4 a.m. on January 9^th, Sergeant James Reilley at Fort Johnston in Smithville, now Southport, near the mouth of the Cape Fear River, was awakened by loud knocks on the door to his room.  Outside stood some twenty members of the Wilmington militia.  “They came to my door at the time above stated and demanded the keys of the magazine of me,” the Federal soldier informed his superiors later that day.[35]  Reilley at first refused to comply; but, being the only Union trooper in the fort, he ultimately had no choice but to let the intruders  have their way.  “They have taken out of the magazine at this post nearly all the musket cartridges in it,” he reported.[36] On the northern tip of nearby Oak Island stood Fort Caswell, a brick and masonry fort built beginning in 1826 to guard the southern entrance into the Cape Fear River.  The Wilmington militiamen took it too, also from a sole ordinance officer, Frederick Dardingkiller, who likewise offered no resistance.[37] 

Entrance to Fort Caswell

     Governor Ellis was quick to issue orders on January 12^th “requiring Fort Johnston and Fort Caswell to be restored to the authorities of the United States,” but he defended the “irregular manner” of the militiamen’s actions by explaining that they had been led to believe that Federal troops were being sent to strengthen these posts.[38]  “The forts in this State have long been unoccupied, and their being garrisoned at this time,” Ellis told Secretary of War Floyd, “will unquestionably be looked upon as a hostile demonstration, and will, in my opinion, be certainly resisted.”[39]  Clearly, tension was on the rise in North Carolina.

   Many North Carolinians believed that Abolitionists were sending agents into the South in hopes of fomenting slave rebellions.  Rumor and suspicion were rampant in Mecklenburg County in the Spring of 1861.  The Western Democrat reported that “several strangers” were prowling about pretending to be peddlers “but acting in such manner as to cause the belief that this was not the real object.”  The newspaper went on to state that these sneaky fellows were asking all sorts of questions about the status of people’s property.  One was even discovered “talking with Negroes at a distance from any road or path.”  The article applauded the determination of local farmers to arrest these troublemakers and turn them over to the sheriff for questioning.  “In these times of peril,” declared the Western Democrat, “it behooves every man to be on the alert, and we verily believe no class of persons needs watching more than these strolling traders.”[40]

Typical Lynching

     Some whites used lynching to maintain control over the servile population of North Carolina.  On March 26, 1861, the Western Democrat explained that a troublesome slave who lived in Salisbury, N.C. had been “using incendiary language” and had knocked down a police officer.  A mob captured him and took the slave into the woods where he was “hanged by the neck until it was thought he was dead.”  The prisoner somehow survived and escaped, setting out for Charlotte.  “He is said to be a dangerous Negro,” warned the Western Democrat, “and if he is found lurking about here we hope he will be attended to.”[41]

         The evidence suggests that North Carolina would not have seceded if the Federal government had refrained from sending reinforcements  to Fort Sumter or if the Confederates had not opened fire. One wishes that President Lincoln and President Davis had demonstrated more robust capacities for restraint.  “If time had been allowed for tempers to cool, and if the people—Northerners and Southerners alike—had been given an opportunity to express their real sentiments, some basis of reasonable settlement surely could have been found,” asserts historian William S. Powell in North Carolina Through Four Centuries.[42]

    The momentous events of April 12^th in Charleston Harbor transformed the political landscape in North Carolina.  Thereafter, Governor Ellis and his fellow secessionists were ascendant in the Tar Heel state. Even Jonathan Worth (1802-1869),  a planter, businessman, lawyer, and politician from Randolph County who had struggled valiantly to preserve the Union, came reluctantly to the decision that North Carolina now had no choice but to secede.  “With sorrow I now cooperate and unite with the majority of my State,” he wrote on May 6^th.[43] Zebulon B. Vance (1830-1894), who would become North Carolina’s governor in 1862,  also opposed secession but concluded that he had no choice but to support the Confederacy once Lincoln forced the Upper South to take sides.  “I preferred to shed Northern rather than Southern blood,” Vance declared.  “If we had to slay, I had rather slay strangers than my own kindred and neighbors.”[44]

    Like many North Carolina Unionists, Jonathan Worth believed that  President Lincoln had erred tragically when he had decided to attempt to send additional troops to Fort Sumter.  “Union men had gained strength up to the proclamation of Lincoln,” Worth maintained.  “If he had withdrawn the garrison of Fort Sumter on the principle of military necessity . . . , this State and Tenn. and the other slave States which had not passed the ordinance of Secession , would have stood up for the Union.”[45]  Worth stated that he had hoped Lincoln would be “enough of a statesman and a patriot to exert his powers to protect our rights and preserve the Union.”  Worth said instead Lincoln “could have devised no scheme more effectual than the one he has pursued to overthrow the friends of the Union here.”[46]

  When word arrived that General Beauregard had opened fire on the Federal garrison at Fort Sumter, Superintendent Daniel Harvey Hill (1821-1889) summoned the cadets of the North Carolina Military Institute to the chapel in Steward’s Hall, a somber, castle-like edifice erected in 1858-59 on the outskirts of Charlotte, N.C.  He told the young men what to expect in the weeks, months and years ahead.  His words were tragically prophetic.  J. W. Ratchford, a student who would go on to become Hill’s chief of staff during the ensuing years of bloody conflict, recalled what Superintendent Hill said:

He warned us that it would be no child’s

play, and the chances were that it would

last as long as the Revolutionary war, and

we would all get enough of it.  He mentioned

the contrast between the resources of the

North and the South, both in men and means.[47]

Called “Harvey” by his friends, D. H. Hill had no illusions about war. He knew it was messy business.  “Recruiting sergeants, with their drums and fifes, try to allure by ‘the pride, pomp, and circumstance of war;’ they never allude to the hot, weary marches, the dreary night-watches, the mangled limbs, and crushed carcasses of the battle-field,” he had proclaimed in 1858.[48]   Hill was proud of the South’s military tradition.  “The armies of the Revolution were commanded by Washington, a Southern General,” he told an audience in Wilmington, N.C. in April, 1861.[49]  But Hill anticipated that the impending struggle with the North would be long and severe, and he would come to appreciate first hand just how correct his assessments had been. According to historian Shelby Foote, D. H. Hill was to see "about as much combat as any general on either side" in the Civil War.[50] 

D. H. Hill

     Daniel Harvey Hill was born in the York District of South Carolina on July 12, 1821.[51]  The youngest of eleven children, he was reared by his mother, Nancy Hill, because his father, Solomon, died when Daniel or “Harvey” was only four years old, leaving the family deeply in debt.  It was on a small farm in this hilly region of upper South Carolina, just below the North Carolina line, that the future Confederate officer imbibed from his mother the unquestioning Calvinistic faith that molded his character and guided his actions throughout life.  “I had always a strong perception of right and wrong,” Hill remembered.[52]  Images of a young boy laboring under a blistering, relentless South Carolina sun come readily to mind.  He routinely joined his mother and his brothers and sisters to read Bible verses aloud before going into the fields to plow the thin topsoil of the Carolina Piedmont.  On Sundays, he traveled with his family to Bethel Presbyterian Church, where Nancy Hill, a stern but compassionate disciplinarian, made certain that all her children sat quietly in straight-backed pews while the preacher held sway.   Adding drama  to the scene were black slaves, compelled by their owners to attend the white man’s church, peering down from the balcony.  Hill “accepted the institution of Negro slavery” as  part of Southern civilization, states Hill’s biographer.[53]

     Outside in the Bethel Church Cemetery was the grave of  D. H. Hill’s paternal grandfather, William Hill, who had attained local fame because of his exploits as a resolute patriot during the American Revolutionary War.  Nancy Hill’s father, Thomas Cabeen, had been a scout for Thomas Sumter and had earned a reputation for extraordinary bravery during the War for American Independence.  This family tradition of resisting “tyranny” would play no small part in shaping D. H. Hill’s political attitudes towards the North when sectional antagonisms intensified in the years preceding the Civil War.  Like Governor Francis Pickens and so many other supporters of the Confederacy, Daniel Harvey Hill believed that America’s second effort in nation building, in 1861, was just as legitimate as its first effort, in 1776.  “As a boy in South Carolina he had listened to endless stories of how Grandfather Hill and other Southerners had won the Revolutionary War,” writes historian Hal Bridges.[54]

     Nancy Hill did not have enough money to send her youngest child to college. Consequently, she was gratified when “Harvey” was recommended for appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1838.  Admitted as a cadet on June 1^st,  D. H. Hill went on to graduate Number 28 in a class of 56 in 1842. Despite his average performance as a cadet,  the young South Carolinian did acquire at West Point a lasting respect for the advantages and benefits of military education.  “It  is . . . impossible to over estimate the influence of military schools upon the welfare of society,” Hill proclaimed in 1860.  “Were it possible to train all our young men in them, lawlessness would be absolutely unknown and unheard of in the next generation.”[55]

    Daniel Harvey Hill distinguished himself as a soldier in the Mexican War.  Invariably a rapacious fighter, he helped Zachary Taylor capture Monterrey and fought under Winfield Scott at Vera Cruz and Cerro Gordo, and led storming parties at Padierna and Chapultepec, for which he was singled out for special praise.  “He was one of the six officers in the whole force employed in Mexico who were twice breveted for meritorious service upon the field,” says one observer.[56]   “He believed that war meant to kill, and that the speediest way to whip your enemy was to hurt him,” commented a North Carolina newspaper editor many years after Hill’s death.[57]  When the South Carolina Legislature decided to award swords to the three bravest of its soldiers in the Mexican War, Hill was selected as one of the recipients.

Mary Anna Morrison, Hill's Sister-in-law and the wife of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson

     On November 2, 1848, Hill married Isabella Morrison, daughter of Robert Hall Morrison, the first president of Davidson College, a Presbyterian institution of higher education in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.  Mrs. Hill was a granddaughter of General Joseph Graham, who had seen extensive service in the Revolutionary War.  An intelligent woman with requisite Presbyterian piety, Isabella had met “Harvey” while he was visiting one of his married sisters, who lived near Cottage Home, the residence of the Morrisons in Lincoln County, North Carolina.

     In February, 1849, D. H. Hill resigned from the army and traveled with his young bride to Lexington, Va., where he accepted a position as a Professor of Mathematics at Washington College, now Washington and Lee University. It was here that he renewed his acquaintance with Thomas J. Jackson (1824-1863), later “Stonewall” Jackson, whom he had met during the Mexican War.  Hill played no small part in Jackson’s obtaining a teaching position at the Virginia Military Institute, also in Lexington, in 1851. Indeed, he recommended Jackson for the job.  In 1857, Jackson became Hill’s brother-in-law when he married Mary Anna Morrison, Isabella Hill’s younger sister.

      On August 10, 1853, the Board of Trustees of Davidson College voted to invite Daniel Harvey Hill to become a Professor of Mathematics at their fledgling institution of higher education.[58]  Hill accepted.  After overseeing a major reform in the curriculum and introducing military-like discipline, replete with merits and demerits, he resigned from the Davidson College faculty on July 11, 1859, to become Superintendent of the North Carolina Military Institute.[59] Classes began at the new military school in Charlotte on October 1, 1859.[60]   The institute had two departments.  A Primary Department for boys from 12 to 15 and a Scientific Department for young men from 15 to 21.  Chartered by the North Carolina Legislature to award degrees, the Scientific Department, which had 60 cadets enrolled during the first year,  patterned its curriculum after the courses taught at West Point, which meant that it emphasized such technical and scientific skills as engineering, surveying, mathematics, and chemistry, plus the art of warfare.

North Carolina Military Institute

     The tactical theories taught at the North Carolina Military Institute were in keeping with the most advanced military thinking of that day.  Based largely upon concepts initially advanced by the French military tactician Antoine Henri Jomini (1779-1869) and subsequently promoted by such preeminent American military figures as Winfield Scott, these principles of engagement posited that frontal infantry attacks, if properly executed and supported, would almost certainly overwhelm and defeat an entrenched adversary. “Many of the tactical lessons that Americans learned in the Mexican War were reinforced by tactical theory, which emphasized the offensive over the defensive and preached that vigorous assaults usually would overcome entrenchments,” exclaim Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson in their book Attack and Die.  Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage.[61]

     Just as in the Mexican War, the decisive weapon in future conflagrations, it was argued, would be the bayonet. “Tactical theoreticians before the conflict of the 1860s favored bayonet attacks and traditional close-order formations,” observe McWhiney and Jameison.[62]  Able to choose when and where to concentrate his strength, a commander taking the offensive, it was believed, would have a decisive advantage over a general who was on the defensive.  Fundamental to the efficacy  of this way of thinking were the limited capabilities of the infantryman’s main defensive implement of war until the 1850’s, the smooth-bore musket.  Notoriously inaccurate except at extremely close range, the musket could not inflict sufficient harm  to repulse  large numbers of advancing troops armed with bayonets, because the attacking army could assemble  far more soldiers at any given place on the battlefield before the defending army had sufficient time to concentrate its strength at that particular point of attack. “Celerity is the secret of success,” proclaimed West Point instructor Dennis Hart Mahan (1802-1871), the most influential American military tactician of the mid-1800’s.[63]  According to Mahan, the launching of massed, frontal infantry assaults, supported by field artillery and followed  up by  resolute cavalry charges, were the keys to success on the battlefield.  Jomini agreed.  “A general who waits for the enemy like an automaton without taking any other part than that of fighting valiantly, will always succumb when he shall be well attacked,” declared the noted French tactician.[64]

     Jomini insisted that commanders must always seek to seize the tactical offensive.  “ . . . there is only one thing to do,” the Frenchman maintained, “this is to launch one’s troops with all the vivacity possible upon the works . . . for the least hesitation is worse in such a case than the most audacious temerity.”[65] The basic concept, not unlike that used in the American Revolutionary War and the Mexican War,  was to send two long lines of infantry, arrayed “elbow to elbow,” unhesitatingly toward the enemy works and have them fire their shoulder pieces in disciplined, orchestrated volleys at close range. Field artillery would move forward in close support of the invaders and blast away at enemy strong points.  If necessary, some attackers would be deployed into columns and used like battering rams to punch through the enemy’s fortifications.  Finally, cavalry would mount a saber charge against the defenders as they dispersed.   These maneuvers, or so it was believed, would flatten the defenders and allow the attacking force to close with a bayonet charge and win the day. The most widely used manual of infantry tactics of that day was William J. Hardee’s Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics, published in 1855. It reaffirmed the commitment of military planners to this traditional concept of offensive warfare and became the standard textbook for military schools, both North and South.[66] “Schools were established in each regiment for field and staff as well as for company officers, and Hardee’s ‘Tactics’ was in the hands of everybody who could procure a copy,” reported one military instructor soon after the Civil War had begun.[67]

      These tactical principles were held in highest regard by officers like G. T. Beauregard, D. H. Hill, Robert E. Lee, and even Jefferson Davis, who had employed them with great success during the Mexican War.   “Time and again in Mexico the Americans took the tactical offensive, suffered fairly light losses, and were successful,” declare McWhiney and  Jamieson.[68] Little did Superintendent D. H. Hill and his three colleagues on the faculty of the North Carolina Military Institute realize that by imparting the doctrines of Mahan and Jomini they were teaching their students to employ tactical techniques that technology was fast making obsolete.  To instruct young men to bunch together and march shoulder-to-shoulder in frontal bayonet assaults against an entrenched enemy had become tragically misguided. The reason?  The introduction of the mass-produced rifle in the mid-1850’s had revolutionized the dynamics of the battlefield by giving a defending army a weapon which could shoot farther and with much greater accuracy than the smooth bore musket. “Offensive tactics, which had been used so successfully by Americans in the Mexican War, were much less effective in the 1860s because an improved weapon – the rifle – had vastly increased the strength of defenders,” McWhiney and Jamieson assert.[69]

      The Civil War abounds with battles that demonstrate the utter folly of sending massed formations head-on against heavily fortified troops.  One was at Malvern Hill in Virginia on July 1, 1862, the last of the Seven Days’ Battles of the Peninsular Campaign. Here D. H. Hill was ordered by Robert E. Lee to dispatch long lines of infantry up a treeless, grassy slope some 300 to 400 yards wide, at the top of which Union artillery and Union infantry were heavily dug in.  It was a ghastly, blood-spattered catastrophe for Hill’s division.  “It was heart-stirring to see how those brave men rushed forward – and sickening to see how the relentless Union guns tore each brigade to pieces  as it emerged from the woods,” writes Hal Bridges.[70]  Scattered across the battlefield the night following that engagement were about 5000 dead and wounded Confederates, of whom some 1700 belonged to Hill’s division.  The stench of death was everywhere.  “It was not war – it was murder,” D. H. Hill exclaimed.[71] Similar cataclysms befell the North at Fredericksburg, Cold Harbor, and Fort Wagner and the South at Gettysburg. 

     The citizens of Charlotte, a community called a “young Charleston” by one prominent Tar Heel  because its white residents resolutely supported secession, were only too aware that the North Carolina Military Institute had opened just outside town.[72]  They could hear Superintendent Hill and his cohorts barking out orders to the cadets who gathered every weekday on the parade ground between Steward’s Hall and the tracks of the Charlotte and South Carolina Railroad.   By showing and telling the cadets  how to form straight, tight rows and mount full-frontal attacks against a make-believe foe,  the instructors, including Charles C. Lee, who only a few weeks before had helped General Beauregard arrange artillery in Charleston Harbor during the Fort Sumter crisis, were unwittingly preparing their students to fight the last war, not the one about to erupt.

         In April and May, 1861, Governor Ellis moved quickly to do what was necessary to take North Carolina out of the Union. On April 15^th, he responded derisively to Secretary of War Cameron’s request that North Carolina raise volunteers to fight the Confederacy. “You will get no troops from North Carolina,” he declared.[73] On the same day Ellis ordered Captain M. D. Croton to take control of Fort Macon near Beaufort, N.C. and Colonel John L. Cantwell to take possession of Fort Johnston and Fort Caswell. On April 17^th,  Governor Ellis directed troops to seize the Federal arsenal at Fayetteville, including its substantial supply of weapons.

Fort Macon

     The second half of April witnessed a flurry of activity at the North Carolina Military Institute.  A particularly dramatic scene occurred when the cadets raised a secession flag, made by the ladies of Charlotte, over Steward’s Hall so the passengers on the trains moving north out of South Carolina could see it.  James H. Lane, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and  a member of  Hill’s faculty, described what happened when the next locomotive passed by the campus.  “. . . the artillery thundered its greetings to South Carolina as the train passed slowly by:  the male passengers yelled themselves hoarse; the ladies waved their handkerchiefs and threw kisses to these brave boys.”[74] Governor Ellis summoned D. H. Hill to Raleigh to organize the State’s first military instruction camp.  The cadets followed soon thereafter.  They marched as a body into Charlotte and boarded trains headed for the State capital on April 26^th.  Crowds lined the platform as the locomotive pulled away from the station.  It was Friday night.  Steward Hall was turned over to the State as a place for volunteers to rendezvous.  The halls were silent.  The classrooms were empty.  The chapel was still.

      Governor Ellis announced that a special session of the legislature would meet on May 1^st to consider authorizing the holding of an election of a convention to consider an ordinance of secession.  The election was held on May 13^th, and the convention assembled in Raleigh on May 20^th. The ordinance of secession was signed in Raleigh the next day. North Carolina had reluctantly seceded.  “I abhor the Northern Abolitionist and the Southern Secessionist, both co-operating with different objects, to break up the Union, but the whole world has become mad,”  lamented Johnathan Worth.  “The voice of reason is silenced” he continued.  “Furious passion and thirst for blood consume the air.”[75]

     North Carolina would pay a high price for its allegiance to the Confederacy.  Nearly one out of four men drafted into the Southern army, 21,348 men, would come from the Tar Heel State.  Approximately 120,000 North Carolinians would serve in the Confederate military at some time during the Civil War, of whom about 40,000 would die.  With about ten percent of the Confederacy’s white population,  the Tar Heel State would provide one-sixth of the South’s fighting men.  “North Carolina was compelled to furnish a lion’s share of the resources that stoked the furnaces of the war machine,” writes historian Paul D. Escott.[76]  There seems to be no alternative to the South, only between independence and humiliation,” said Johnathan Worth.[77]