Dusty Bookshelf: The Secession Movement in North Carolina, by J. Carlyle Sitterson

Joseph Carlyle Sitterson, The Secession Movement in North Carolina. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1939. 285 pages.

Professor Sitterson taught history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He would later become the Chancellor (top administrator) at the Chapel Hill campus, where he dealt with the conflict over North Carolina’s Speaker Ban Law.

Sitterson’s sources for his 1939 study of Tar Heel secession included the state newspapers of the period, as well as archives containing letters of those involved in the secession controversy.

The secession debate was a fight for the hearts and minds of the voters – who after 1835 were uniformly white. Black North Carolinians, whether enslaved or free, were not part of the “political nation” in North Carolina before the war. The prewar public debate over secession addressed the voters in terms of specific shared assumptions: that slavery needed to be defended against the North, and that the only dispute was as to the degree to which slavery was endangered and needed to be defended by secession. This consensus is curious, because even among the whites, there was potential for dissent from the proslavery consensus. The views of antislavery whites, whether those views were based on religion or on the self-interest of the nonslaveholding small farmers, only seem to have made their appearance in the context of censorship and repression – antislavery views were outlawed, not dialogued with, and the anti-secessionist leaders conducted their side of the secession debate based on the underlying assumption of the need to defend slavery.

As for these slavery-supporting skeptics of secession: their anti-secession views stemmed from loyalty to the United States, support for political and economic ties between North and South, fear of war, and minimizing the danger which slavery faced within the Union.

Sitterson connects the voters’ degree of enthusiasm for secession to where they lived in North Carolina. Sympathy for secession was strongest in the non-mercantile parts of the East, and weakest in the mountain districts. The eastern part of the state had large plantations worked by enslaved people, leading to a strong proslavery interest, except where that interest was outweighed by mercantile interests in places like New Bern (stomping grounds of unionist Edward Stanly). The central Piedmont had a greater proportion of small farms and antislavery Quakers, and though hardly industrialized by the standards of the Northern states, the area was nonetheless seeing the beginnings of industry. The mountain west was even less characterized by a plantation economy, being inhabited by large numbers of small white farmers.

Unlike the strong secessionists, who put forth secession as a necessary defense against antislavery Northern forces, the opponents of the strong secessionists either minimized the danger to slavery from the North, or held that secession would be counterproductive in protecting slavery. If North Carolina were to join a slave republic dominated by the cotton states, said some secession foes, the Deep South might revive the African slave trade, reducing the resale values of North Carolina’s enslaved population. Also, with the North turned into a separate country, it would no longer be possible to recapture enslaved people who fled from North Carolina to the North.

At the same time, however, both the strong secessionists and many of their opponents agreed that a failure to enforce the federal Fugitive Slave Act would be a ground for secession. That is, if the Northern states used their “states rights” to protect fugitives from being recaptured by Union authorities, the Southern states, including North Carolina, should use their states rights to withdraw from the Union.

The opponents of secession often focused on the alleged fanaticism and bad motives of the strong secessionists. Secession propaganda was portrayed as a plot by ambitious demagogues to stir up trouble and endanger the Union. Since strong secessionists were often Democrats, and skeptics of secession tended to be Whigs, the secession argument was linked to bitter partisan strife. (One of the state’s top Democrats, editor William Holden, was a strong secessionist before the war but would shift to the Whig, secession-skeptical side, after Lincoln’s election in 1860.)

Secessionist agitation had become a fixture of North Carolina political debate by the time of the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in November 1860. This event prompted the strong secessionists to insist that the time for withdrawing from the Union had arrived. Between the Presidential election and the firing on Sumter, there was fierce strife between the strong secessionists and their opponents. The latter said that Lincoln’s election by itself wasn’t a proper cause for secession, and that Tar Heels should not join the seven Deep South states which left the Union in response to Lincoln’s election.

At the urging of the secession skeptics, the majority of North Carolina’s voters rejected secession until the very last minute. After Sumter, the vocal opponents of secession decided that now that they had to take sides in the war, they would support the Confederacy and support North Carolina’s secession. North Carolina’s government switched the state de facto from the Union to the Confederacy after Sumter, but secession was not officially achieved until a state Convention formally voted the state out of the Union. This vote had the support of those who had long been pushing for secession, as well as from “conditional unionists” who had previously tried to keep the United States together but now accepted secession as forced on the state by the war.

Though Sitterson’s narrative ends with North Carolina’s secession, we should note that prewar bitterness over the secession issue persisted into the war, leading to important divisions in the state. To a great extent, strong prewar secessionist sentiment translated into support for the Deep South and the Jefferson Davis administration in Richmond, while those who felt they had been dragged into secession tried to keep an arms-length relationship with the Richmond government even while claiming to support that government’s war effort. The war also gave those whites who disliked secession (and who in some cases didn’t like slavery either) an opportunity to stand up for the Union by supporting the North.