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JohN C. INSCoE To Do Justice to North Carolina The War’s End according to Cornelia Phillips Spencer, Zebulon B. Vance, and David L. Swain At the beginning of Patriotic Gore, his classic study of the literature of the Civil War, Edmund Wilson asked, “Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861–65 in which so many people were so articulate?” He went on to muse that “the drama has already been staged by characters who have written their own parts; and the peculiar fascination of this literature which leads one to go on and on reading it is rather like that of [Robert] Browning’s The Ring and the Book, in which the same story is told from the points of view of nine different persons.”1 Although Cornelia Phillips Spencer was not one of the authors on whom Wilson focused, her postwar narrative, The Last Ninety Days of the War in North Carolina, published in serial form in the fall of 1865 and as a book the following year, represents a prime example of varied agendas at play— her own and those of others. If she herself never emerged as one of her own “characters,” she did allow other characters to write their own parts, in effect. There is indeed a “peculiar fascination” in the story of how she came to produce this first substantive “history” of North Carolina’s role in the war and of the various factors—personal, political, and patriotic—that shaped her telling of it. Spencer would later join other North Carolinians and southerners as outspoken critics of Reconstruction and proponents of the “Lost Cause.” But in writing her history of the war so soon after the fact, she established a significant precedent for numerous other southern women in the postwar decades who in a variety of venues would come to serve as interpreters of the war, defenders of the South and the Confederacy , and hagiographers of its leadership. The legacy of the Civil War in North Carolina would have been far different had the conflict been brought to an end only a month or so earlier than it was. For it was only during the final throes of Confederate resistance that William T. Sherman’s army marched into the state from the south.2 Nearly sixty thousand Union forces crossed the border from South Carog 130 } J o h N C . I N S C o E lina between March 6 and March 8, 1865. Sherman’s first major target was Goldsboro, a key railroad juncture where he planned to join forces with General John M. Schofield, who commanded occupying forces in eastern North Carolina and would provide new resources and supply lines to Sherman’s men. En route, Sherman’s columns moved through Fayetteville, where they destroyed an armory and a substantial stash of grain and foodstuffs , along with several public buildings. Joseph E. Johnston, recently renamed as the commander of forces opposing Sherman, mounted far more military resistance than Union troops had faced since Atlanta. A skirmish at Monroe’s Cross-Roads on March 10 and a day-long clash at Averasboro on March 16 only briefly delayed the Union thrust; far more serious was the battle of Bentonville, just west of Goldsboro, where Johnston’s concentrated forces caught Federal troops off guard on March 19 and nearly crushed them. Sherman responded quickly enough to send reinforcements, who over the course of the next two days thoroughly outnumbered the Confederates and sent them into retreat.3 These upheavals, along with the constant activity of “bummers,” Union raiders who took advantage of orders to forage for food and supplies and to pillage and destroy civilian property far more wantonly than authorized, proved as traumatic and as disruptive as anything North Carolina’s civilians had faced over the course of the four-year conflict.4 Yet perhaps because of the relative brevity of Sherman’s presence in the state, there was a sense among North Carolinians at war’s end that neither their suffering nor their efforts at resistance were fully appreciated by other southerners at the time or since. The pervasive peace movement in the state, the high level of desertion by Tar Heels, and the rampant internal dissension in several sections of the state, from the mountains to the coast, all suggested that, from the war’s midpoint on, North Carolina had not pulled its weight in its support of the southern cause or in staving off...

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