Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861–1865 by Barton A. Myers (review)

According to Barton Myers, the germ of this book can be traced to the moment when, as an undergraduate engaged in library research at the University of North Carolina, the author stumbled across a brief newspaper account of the execution by Union soldiers of a suspected Confederate guerrilla in northeastern North Carolina. A few years later, by then a master’s degree candidate in graduate school, Myers resolved to revisit the episode with the goal of understanding the community from which the alleged insurgent came. The result is a brief, well-crafted monograph that offers tantalizing insight into the nature and consequences of guerrilla violence in a divided southern community.

As is often the case with academic works, the focus of the book is captured in its subtitle, not its title. Indeed, the reference to the execution of Daniel Bright is essentially a literary device. In truth, Myers could learn little about the alleged insurgent beyond the statistical testimony left by the federal census. Bright was approximately thirty at the time of his execution in December 1863. On the eve of the war, he had owned an estimated $4,500 worth of real and personal property, including one slave. Because Bright left no personal papers behind, not even a military service record, Myers can only conjecture why Bright enrolled in the Confederate service in 1861, why he may have returned home when his original twelve-month term was up, and why he may have later reenlisted and then, possibly, deserted to become, perhaps, a Confederate guerilla in his home community. Nor is much known about Bright’s trial and execution during a counterguerrilla raid led by Union general Augustus Wild. The note that Wild pinned to Bright’s corpse labeled the deceased a guerrilla, and although Confederate authorities disputed the allegation, Myers ultimately concludes that it was “very likely” that Wild was correct (97). The verdict is plausible, yet the evidence for even this basic detail is mostly indirect and circumstantial. Myers has done the best that he can with what he has to work with, but that, unfortunately, is not very much.

Myers is much more successful at explaining the context—physical and cultural—in which the trial and execution took place. Executing Daniel Bright is primarily a careful analysis of Pasquotank County, North Carolina, and the economic, social, political, and racial milieu within which local guerrillas operated. The author stresses three themes. The first involves the continuing importance of antebellum political patterns. Although moribund nationally, the two-party system was still alive and well in Pasquotank, and the free population divided during the early stages of the secession crisis along partisan lines, its large Whig majority opposing the prosecession, Democratic minority. After Fort Sumter, all but perhaps 5 percent of the white population became Confederates, but erstwhile Whigs were always primarily loyal to North Carolina—rather than to the Confederacy per se—and the county as a whole never developed a robust Confederate nationalism. In contrast, whites were definitely unified in their fear of racial upheaval, the second theme that Myers identifies. Their anxiety was heightened by the sheer size of the local black population (slaves and free blacks slightly outnumbered whites) and by their proximity to the Great Dismal Swamp, an ideal haven for fugitives. Finally, Myers stresses that much of the county was a “no-man’s land” after the spring of 1862, the area perpetually subject to Union raids but effectively controlled by neither army. In this vacuum of power, guerrillas often operated with impunity.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the work is the author’s careful treatment of the impact and significance of General Wild’s raid on the county. By leading a brigade of United States Colored Troops into Pasquotank, including some former local slaves, the raid embodied...