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27 Chapter 2 The First Year of War Sitting in his home in Raleigh on the evening of February 13, 1861, Governor John W. Ellis closed his day by writing in his diary about the pervasive fear that had preoccupied his thoughts since South Carolina seceded from the Union nearly two months earlier. “Coercion is all the talk.Whether that will be the policy of the incoming administration &c &c,” Ellis wrote. The despised word even came out of the mouth of Ellis’s babe. “Sitting at dinner to day our little daughter Mary about 20 months old overheard this word ‘coercion’ and pronounced it quite distinctly, and of course, we thought, very sweetly,” Ellis recounted. “But alas! How ignorant of its terrible meaning .” The North Carolina governor, along with many other inhabitants of the Upper South states, adopted a watch-and-wait attitude in the days before the firing at Fort Sumter. These conditional Unionists believed that Lincoln’s election alone did not justify secession. But they did agree with the right of secession, and their pacifism would endure only as long as the Federal government did not attempt to forcibly compel the seven seceded states to rejoin the Union. As Ellis penned in his diary, the term everyone used to represent that potential use of force was “coercion.”1 The word’s terrible meaning became clear on April 15, 1861, three days after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, when President Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion. When Secretary of War Simon Cameron sent a telegram to Ellis formally requesting North Carolina’s contribution to the national levy, the governor indignantly asserted that the call to arms against the seceded southern states was “in violation of the constitution and a gross usurpation of power.” He confirmed the state’s resistance to Lincoln’s action with his unequivocal statement , “You can get no troops from North Carolina.”2 Lincoln’s proclamation also alienated other Upper South states, prompt- 28 The First Year of War ing Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas to secede along with North Carolina , and induced many conditional Unionists to throw their lot in with the secessionists. Carteret and Craven residents represented just a fraction of those southerners provoked into joining the war by this call to arms. But inhabitants of the two counties supported the Confederacy with varying degrees of enthusiasm.Craven residents rejoiced at the event and embraced the opportunity to join their brethren in arms. Carteret’s citizens showed the proper support at a surface level, though their conviction proved to be not only shallow in depth but also limited by numerous conditions. They demonstrated that they would fight, but only if theycould dictate the terms of their service in a localized way. Together, these adjoining communities would face many trials over the next year that tempered their enthusiasm and tested their loyalty to the Confederate nation.3 The news that Fort Sumter had surrendered arrived in New Bern at around 9:30 p.m., Sunday, April 14, on a special train from Goldsboro.Over one hundred residents greeted the train at the depot and shouted their excitement as a messenger read the reports aloud. Many of the white residents in town poured into the wide, tree-lined city streets to celebrate. At 10:00 p.m., seven guns were fired in honor of the seven seceded states, and the townspeople lit up the night sky with several bonfires. A group of young men hung Abraham Lincoln in effigy from the ruins of the recently burned courthouse; a sign around its neck read, “May all Abolitionists meet the same fate.” Boys pelted the effigy with rocks. John L. Pennington, as editor of the New Bern Daily Progress, announced in fiery rhetoric that the firing on Fort Sumter should cement local support for the South: “The South is now our country and our country demands our allegiance; our section, our honor, our Interests and all that we hold dear upon earth calls [us] to arms! Are there any whose craven hearts will shrink from a duty so palpable?” Pennington asked. “We will not believe it.”4 If any did still shrink from war after April 14, news the next day stiffened their backbones. At noon on April 15, another express train brought word of Lincoln’s proclamation calling for troops. In response to this report , the Daily Progress declared that “a war of coercion has been openly proclaimed.” “There is no...

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