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BartoN a. MyErS A More Rigorous Style of Warfare Wild’s Raid, Guerrilla Violence, and Negotiated Neutrality in Northeastern North Carolina During the final days of December 1863, Union brigadier general and Massachusetts abolitionist Edward Augustus Wild was a thoroughly frustrated man. By his own admission, Wild had undergone a major change in recent weeks. When he sat down on December 28 to pen the official account of his recent operation into Pasquotank, Camden, and Currituck counties, part of the Albemarle region in rural northeastern North Carolina, he tried desperately to explain (in eighteen handwritten pages and three appendices) his aggravation with waging counterguerrilla war on the southern home front.1 Wild had just led the first major Civil War operation in the eastern theater using a full brigade of African American troops in a counter-guerrilla effort against companies of Confederate irregulars, and by the general’s account, his men had done their duty well.2 Wild described to Major General Benjamin Butler, his superior at Norfolk, Virginia, how he and his soldiers had conscientiously followed the broad directives they received before the expedition: protect the loyal Union population along the coast of North Carolina, free the remaining slaves held in the northeastern counties, and destroy the menacing guerrilla force operating there.3 But Wild had “found ordinary [military] measures to little avail” in his three-week expedition. As his black soldiers entered Pasquotank at the beginning of the raid, his brigade had at first adopted a strategy of “judiciously discriminating in favor of the worst rebels.” Proceeding cautiously, Wild’s troops impressed crops and livestock and punished only the disloyal, burning three buildings that were homes for two guerrillas and the barn of a Confederate supporter.4 General Wild even drew up a list of fifty-three Unionists in Pasquotank with their addresses. After the raid, he suggested to his commander that these Unionists of Pasquotank be protected. But when Wild left Pasquotank and entered Camden and Currituck, g 38 } B a r t o N a . M y E r S where guerrilla resistance stiffened, he “adopted a more rigorous style of warfare.” After this point, his command demonstrated less and less restraint in dealing with the civilian population and moved toward a strategy of punishing the entire civilian community through increased property destruction and burning relatively large numbers of private residences for a rural area. Although his men never completely abandoned restraint toward civilians, they did adopt a scorched-earth policy that seemed to ignore the loyalty of the homeowner. In a desperate attempt to eradicate local support for the Confederate irregulars, Wild’s troops burned over a dozen houses, including every home in the four-square-mile area around Indiantown in Currituck County.5 In fact, the only military directive that Wild did not reevaluate over the course of his three-week expedition was Butler’s instruction to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation.This order Wild carried out regardless of loyalty. The historiography of the Civil War does not easily accommodate the rapid change in military policy toward southern civilians that is described in General Wild’s report. Historians who have focused on Union military policy in the occupied South have tended to develop broad national narratives for how and when military policy evolved gradually toward a harsher strategy, leaving out the many local contexts where policy moved at an uneven rate.6 While much important work has created general periodizations for when Union military policy shifted from a conciliatory “rosewater” stance to a harder strategy of increased violence and economic pressure against all civilians regardless of loyalty, it is important to ask how Union officers’ policies evolved in specific southern communities.7 Wild’s raid in northeastern North Carolina illustrates how rapidly the transition to harsher warfare against the civilian population could occur in the context of a guerrilla war, and it highlights the impact of guerrilla tactics and punitive countermeasures on the local population. The evolution of military policy from discriminating on the basis of loyalty to employing harsh measures of widespread economic destruction and confiscation could occur over only a few days’ time in the mind of an independently operating commander. In short, what Wild struggled to explain to General Butler was his own frustrating transition from a strategy of protecting Unionists and rooting out Confederate guerrillas to a less discriminating, more aggressive, and far more destructive policy aimed at crushing the guerrilla resistance in North Carolina’s Albemarle region. Harsh as Wild...

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