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The Order of Nature Would Be Reversed: Soldiers, Slavery, and the North Carolina Gubernatorial Election of 1864
- The University of North Carolina Press
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ChaNDra MaNNINg The Order of Nature Would Be Reversed Soldiers, Slavery, and the North Carolina Gubernatorial Election of 1864 In 1864, North Carolina governor Zebulon Baird Vance faced more than the usual number of challenges. The Civil War engulfed his nation; weather, labor shortages, and the presence of armies played havoc with harvests; and food and supply shortfalls afflicted his people. On top of it all, a peace movement swept his state, and the gubernatorial election loomed. Contesting Vance for the governor’s office was William Woods Holden, editor of a Raleigh newspaper called the Weekly Standard and organizer of the peace movement, who proposed stopping the war by negotiation. For a time, Holden seemed so sure to win that Vance made halfhearted plans to return to the army following his probable defeat.1 Among North Carolina soldiers, the popularity of Holden’s peace stance led Private George Williams to predict Holden would sweep his regiment “by a large majority.”2 Yet once the results were tallied, Vance won easily with 80 percent of the total vote, including a stunning 87.9 percent of the soldier vote.3 The timing of the election in the summer of 1864 helped, but Vance’s dramatic come-from-behind victory resulted in larger measure from a campaign speech first delivered by the governor on February 22, 1864, subsequently disseminated by newspaper distribution and by Vance’s frequent repeat performances, and from the battle of Plymouth fought in April 1864. North Carolina soldiers’ reactions to the speech and the battle reveal the importance of racial fear in managing Confederate patriotism’s inherent tensions and in keeping enlisted North Carolinians committed to the war effort in 1864. Soldiers’ late burst of enthusiasm for Vance gets at a central tension between individual interests and national needs that rested right at the heart of Confederate patriotism.4 Though the tension was often related to class division, it proved even more fundamental than class resentment because it was located within the very makeup of Confederate patriotism.5 The g 102 } C h a N D r a M a N N I N g Confederacy earned early support among the ordinary white southern men who constituted most of its army by convincing them that an independent Confederacy would promote the interests, aspirations, and well-being of white individuals and families better than the Union would.6 One main way in which it would do so was by preventing the abolition of slavery, an institution that even non-slaveholders throughout the Confederacy repeatedly insisted was vital to their liberty (by which they chiefly meant the unobstructed pursuit of material prosperity), crucial to the moral superiority of the South, central to the honor and equality of themselves and their children, necessary for the safety of their families, and integral to their ability to control and protect white women, an indispensable component of their identities as white men that would otherwise be under constant assault from black men if slavery disappeared.7 The emphasis on the direct connection between Confederate independence and the prosperity, wellbeing , and identity of white men and their loved ones proved very effective at first, but it led to problems when the demands of the Confederacy conflicted with the needs and interests of white men and their families. In 1864,GovernorVance confronted precisely that conflict; it would shape his campaign and influence soldiers’ reactions to both candidates in the race for the governor’s office. Historians have generally explained Vance’s remarkable comeback either by minimizing Holden’s initial support among soldiers or by attributing the lopsided vote tallies to coercion, and there is some justification for both interpretations. Even at the height of Holden’s popularity, North Carolina lieutenant Macon Bonner vowed that he would “walk many a ‘weary mile’ to see [Holden’s] body hanging food for birds of prey.”8 On the other hand, officers did sometimes prevent North Carolina troops from casting Holden ballots, either with threats or by tearing up Holden votes before they could be counted. Holden complained that fully two-thirds of soldiers in the field had their right to vote as they wished suppressed, and others without an obvious stake in the election’s outcome verified incidents of coercion, if not at the rate that Holden claimed.9 Union general Winfield Hancock even noted that two North Carolina men deserted to his lines “because they were not allowed to vote yesterday.”10 Yet reports from soldiers in the field...