An Uncivil War

On Sunday, June 23, 1861, a yeoman farmer named Ellsberry Ambrose attended worship services at the Concord Church in Washington County, North Carolina, about 80 miles south of Norfolk, Virginia. Afterwards, Ambrose and his friends chatted outdoors in the warm sunshine about crops, weather, livestock, and all manner of country concerns. Then the talk turned to politics and the civil war that had just begun.

One man suggested a rally and flag-raising to show loyalty to the Union. But another man cautioned his compatriots, warning them that the neighboring planters would call out the militia and shoot them all.

Ambrose brushed aside the warning. In this war, he said, “the rich people” were going to “make the poor people do all the fighting” — and in the fight on behalf of the wealthy he was determined to take no part. He told his fellow farmers that he would “never muster under a secession Flag.” According to one report, he “threatened violence” to anyone who tried to compel him to join the Confederate Army.

Had Ellsberry Ambrose spoken for himself, his remarks might have drawn little notice from local planters. But Ambrose was a substantial citizen in the community, with a farm of 206 acres. Within three days, planters had him arrested, releasing him on bond only on the condition that he “keep the peace and be of good behavior.”

From then on, Ambrose kept silent. But his words had thrown down the gauntlet to the planters of Washington County, launching a local guerrilla war which would last three years and destroy the very plantation society that secessionists had gone to war to save.

Over the next several months, Ambrose and his fellow yeoman farmers organized themselves into extra-legal militias, pledging to resist any effort to force Unionists into the Confederate army. What’s more, they formulated a vision for restructuring local society and a plan for doing so. They told planters that the community rebellion was not about states rights and Southern honor — it was about the land and labor that Washington County planters had hoarded since the Revolution. Their aim, the yeomen farmers announced, was to drive planters off their plantations and divide the land among poor men.

The yeomen even tried to form an alliance with the county’s slaves. John Phelps, who later led a Unionist cavalry in the county, went to one large plantation and said “in the presence of several negro slaves, that the object of the Yankees was to free the negroes and place them on an equality with the white men.” Perhaps as an act of good faith, Phelps spent two days “with the negroes engaged in teaching them to spell and read.”

Although the slaves could not take up the offer for fear of their masters calling upon Confederate troops, they never forgot the gesture. After the war they joined with poor whites in a local Union League which succeeded in driving Washington County’s largest planters from the area and dividing the land among poor men, both black and white.

 

Home Rule

How could this have happened? Did not the South rise as one to defend its honor and the institution of slavery? Did not Southern white men flock to the nearest train station and rush to the front to defeat the vile Yankee aggressors? Did not all whites understand themselves in racial terms, as whites against blacks, and avoid all conflict among themselves?

Certainly Civil War historians have found little but unity among Southern whites during the war. One scholar summarized the conventional wisdom this way: “The Confederate quest for home rule never became a contest over who should rule at home.” In this view, conflict among Southerners — the little that occurred — was simply incidental to the larger “War Between the States,” as Southerners came to call it in the 20th century.

Indeed, it is this struggle between two nations that has obsessed historians. They have focused on affairs of state, on the words and actions of generals and politicians; theirs are stories of legislation and massive battles, of constitutional difficulties, and of strategy and tactics.

These are important matters. But such histories frame accounts of the war in terms of the concerns articulated by national politicians and generals. They do not address issues that were raised in Washington County by Ellsberry Ambrose and other yeoman farmers and white wage laborers. Nor do they account for the struggles of slaves caught between the power of their masters and the prospect of freedom.

The story of Washington County during the Civil War is the story of ordinary people who fought over the means by which to make a living. When set alongside histories of poor people in the mountains of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas, it directs our attention to other struggles during the war — conflicts often local in form but widespread in their cultural themes.

As in Washington County, poor people in many parts of the South took the war as a chance to challenge the power of planters while their warrior sons and hired hands fought on distant battlefields. In doing so, they disputed the very legitimacy of the hierarchical Southern society and its grossly unequal distribution of wealth.

 

“Color Makes Caste”

In 1860, Washington County was home to 3,593 whites, 2,465 slaves, and 237 free blacks. Most people lived in the countryside and relied on farming to survive. A handful of planters owned most of the land and slaves, while an estimated 500 white men operated smaller farms. Somerset Place, the largest plantation, was owned by Josiah Collins, who controlled about 3,000 acres of prime black soil and 30,000 acres of cypress woodlands.

Planters like Collins had dominated the county for decades by working to contain the smoldering resentment among landless laborers and swampers. Their strategy had been twofold: make poor whites financially dependent on them, and destroy leaders among the poor — both black and white, free and slave.

Destroying the leadership among slaves was easy enough. When trouble arose at Somerset Place, for example, the black slave preacher was simply sold to a slave trader. Dealing with poor white leaders was a little trickier, however. They could not be banished — but they could be coopted.

The best opportunity arose during the first of the so-called “slave rebellions” in 1802. A great regional revival swept the area, producing a slave leadership and an increasing number of runaways who took to the nearby swamps to live as maroons. In Washington County, the supposed revolt centered around a slave preacher called Dr. Joe who had allegedly conspired with runaways “to kill the white people.” Whatever actually happened, planters seized the opportunity to mobilize poor whites with rumors of a race war. In the end, according to one planter account, white vigilantes shot “6 or 7 blacks” who were on their way to join the “insurrection.”

The threat of a race war precluded a confrontation between planters and poor whites by creating a sense of common danger. Planters solidified their support among their less-fortunate neighbors by actively seeking clients among poor whites — men who had little property or prospect of acquiring the assets that defined independence in a political system that required a man to pay property taxes in order to vote.

On the county’s larger estates, planters operated general merchandise stores and extended credit to small farmers and laborers who sought to buy cloth, household items, tools, knives, gunpowder, and other necessities. Planters also leased land to poor men who agreed to cut timber, which was sawed in the planter’s sawmill and ferried to the North on his ship.

More important, Washington County planters hired an enormous number of white laborers. Some worked temporarily as coopers, sawyers, overseers, carpenters, machinists, boat makers, gin builders, ironmongers, or millwrights. But most labored for planters at common, backbreaking physical tasks. Charles L. Pettigrew, for one, employed poor white neighbors to spay livestock, clear ground, cut and roll logs, run errands, hunt runaway slaves, and dig or clean canals and ditches.

Pettigrew attempted to make his neighbors as dependent on him as possible. In years when crops had gone bad, he often hired as many as 100 poor white men — almost 15 percent of the county’s adult white males — all of whom were grateful for the crumbs that the planter let fall from his table.

Planters like Pettigrew and Josiah Collins took care to defer to poor white men in public, ritual displays. As one eyewitness put it, Collins always treated “the poor man with the same politeness that he does the rich.” He saluted any white farmer or laborer because “not to lift your hat to a poor white man would be giving mortal offence.” Collins hoped by the gesture to enforce the idea that “colour alone makes caste here,” and that economic differences did not constitute a basis for class conflict.

 

Dawn Arrest

There was one more group that planters had to face — yeoman farmers. Unlike landless laborers, such men possessed the means to live without recourse to the wages or credit that planters offered to other poor white men. To yeoman farmers, land meant independence — but it also provided a way for planters to coopt them as well. Washington County planters offered yeoman farmers a deal: join the Whig party, which was dominated by planters, and have their land claims and civil liberties upheld in the courts.

It worked. Yeoman farmers and planters governed the county in the interests of property holders for 30 years — until the outbreak of civil war.

In the winter of 1860, planters proposed to secede from the Union and go to war if necessary to protect their “rights.” Those rights, however, also included slaves, a species of property in which most yeoman farmers had little interest Farmers balked at the talk of secession, and instead began to identify themselves with the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln, which included in its creed protection of the “free soil” rights of farmers.

In Washington County, secession produced a violent political battle never before seen in the community. The alliance between planters and yeoman farmers which had endured for three decades suddenly broke apart, paving the way for a union of poor men dedicated to securing some “free soil” for themselves — many for the first time in their lives.

Former allies turned against each other. Both sides began to compete for the support of men who earned their living by laboring for wages — the poor white workers and tenant farmers who comprised a majority of the county in 1860.

On the Confederate side, large planters formed an alliance of the very rich and the very poor. They attracted about 350 men who had been clients before the war — shinglers, tenant farmers, artisans, and small farmers who depended on plantation stores for supplies, credit and marketing. They also had the support of the wealthy merchants, lawyers, and clergymen with whom they dealt.

Unionists, on the other hand, tended to be men of middling means — yeoman farmers and their sons who owned land but seldom any slaves. Yeoman leaders found a constituency of about 350 men like themselves who farmed or hunted for a living and thus remained independent of the outside world — and planters.

With the fall of Fort Hatteras to federal troops in August 1861, Unionists began to organize themselves. By September, they began to understand the Civil War as a “property war.” As one of the Pettigrews wrote, many of those who lived “on the edge of the swamps” thought that “if the Yankees succeeded, the rich men wld be forced to divide with them & all share alike.”

In October, Ellsberry Ambrose ran for captaincy of the local militia — and won. At five o’clock on the morning of October 31, in the midst of a rainstorm, the new militia captain answered a knock on his door in his nightshirt. He was greeted by a squad of 21 Confederate cavalrymen, one of whom pointed a cocked pistol at Ambrose and told him to “put on his clothes and come instantly.”

The arrest of Ambrose had the desired effect. “There was,” one planter reported, “the greatest panic” among the Unionists. When the Confederate presidential election was held 10 days later, every man turned up at the polls for fear of being singled out as a Lincoln supporter. “Never,” exulted another planter, “did any tree bear quicker fruit.” When another of the Ambrose clan ran against a planter in the militia election in November, Josiah Collins — acting as an election official — voided the votes of Union supporters.

 

The Front Steps

Unionists needed a force strong enough to counter the power of the Confederate Army — and the coming of federal troops and gunboats to eastern North Carolina in the summer of 1862 provided it. In short order, Unionists organized their own local government outside the federal lines that encircled the county seat of Plymouth. They also formed their own cavalry unit to roam the countryside to protect Unionists, drive the remaining Confederates out of the county, and seize the personal property and lands abandoned by planters who had fled to the upcountry.

In September 1862, news of the impending Emancipation Proclamation focused the local war directly on the planters by attacking their personal property — houses, furniture, and slaves. Many fled to the upcountry, taking their slaves with them.

Ironically, though, the Proclamation also drove a wedge between yeoman farmers and their landless allies. Poor white men immediately began carving up the plantations for themselves, often coming to blows over the possession of particular parcels. At Somerset Place, hundreds of landless men raided the mansion of Josiah Collins and took $18,000 worth of goods, including all the furniture, a library of 3,000 books, and the front steps to the house.

In this competition for land lay the beginnings of the demise of the local alliance of poor men. By destroying planter claims to property without erecting a coherent system of counter-claims, the Emancipation Proclamation left every man to fend for himself. Guerrilla war in Washington County began in January 1863. The result was 18 months of bitter, bloody fighting among poor whites.

By the spring of 1864, poor whites were using the county seat of Plymouth as a staging area from which to launch pillaging expeditions into the upcountry, seeking to carry off livestock, tools, wagons and other planter property. In doing so, they forced planters to retreat further inland with their slaves and deprived them of the use of their plantations.

That spring, slaveholders in the eastern third of the state could plant no crops. The Confederate Army was unable to get at the region’s surplus of corn from the previous year, or at the green pastures needed desperately to graze rebel cavalry horses. The result was a shortage of grazing land and corn for the Army of Virginia and, increasingly, distress and political dissension among planters from eastern North Carolina. Those planters soon threatened to join the state’s burgeoning peace movement.

 

Land and Labor

A solution for local secessionists and for the Confederate government lay in the destruction of Plymouth. In the spring of 1864, Jefferson Davis himself ordered the temporary withdrawal of about 10,000 Confederate troops from the defense of Richmond. The soldiers marched on Plymouth and attacked the fort there which was garrisoned by 2,500 Union soldiers, many of them local blacks.

In the end, the fort fell. The Confederates massacred nearly 500 black soldiers on the spot and shipped the rest of the prisoners to Andersonville, where more than half died within a year.

The Confederate victory worked as planned. It terrorized poor white men and blacks, all of whom abandoned Washington County for the duration of the war. And it persuaded planters to return to eastern North Carolina.

But the victory at Plymouth did not restore slavery to Washington County. A few planters returned to survey the damage, but none brought their slaves home or commenced planting. Planters realized at last that the society which they had gone to war to preserve had been destroyed. They could return to Washington County, but the alliance of property holders would never be renewed. Instead, the conflict over land and labor would be continued by political means.

The local war in Washington County was as much as part of the Civil War as Gettysburg or Shiloh. Indeed, there were two separate wars fought between 1861 and 1865 — one between two national governments and their armies, and the other over land and labor in the South.

The broader war involved mutually respected rules that sacrificed the bodies of men to preserve all manner of possessions — land, slaves, personal property, women and children. By contrast, the war for land and labor fought in Washington County and other parts of the South soon became an attack on property itself and on the people who controlled it. Many poor white men sought not to protect property concentrated in the hands of a few, but rather to acquire by force possessions which could be distributed equitably among themselves.

In Washington County, planters justifiably feared their Unionist opponents and called them “levellers” and “agrarians.” The war at home had destroyed plantation society, but it did not establish the basis for a new community. Questions about the social meanings of freedom would continue both to perplex and inspire local residents through Reconstruction and beyond. A struggle for a just society, borne in the crucible of war, had only commenced.