Josephus Daniels: His Life and Times

1. The Loveliest Village of the Plain

1 1. The Loveliest Village of the Plain In the early eighties Wilson was strictly a cotton town. . . . People depended almost solely on cotton, though some small farmers raised their “hog and hominy,” and the large planters grew watermelons and some vegetables. But King Cotton ruled. —JOSEPHUS DANIELS Throughout his life, Josephus Daniels emphasized his humble roots in the sandy soils of North Carolina’s coastal plain. Those roots were never quite as humble as Daniels insisted, but they were humble enough. Daniels’s father, also named Josephus, was a first-­ generation American. Father and son were named for the first-­ century historian Flavius Josephus, whose eyewitness account of the Jewish Revolt and subsequent Roman sack of Jerusalem could be found in the libraries of the more literate early American families. (It was said of that time and place that “beyond the good book were very few other books,” but the works of Josephus were among those few other books.)1 The elder Josephus Daniels, later nicknamed “Jody,” was born on January 21, 1828, in the little town of Bayboro, North Carolina, near Pamlico Sound. He was one of six sons born to Clifford and Susan Carraway Daniels.2 In the early 1780s, Clifford’s widowed father, Thomas Daniels, had migrated from Northern Ireland, with Clifford and three other sons, to Roanoke Island, North Carolina.3 Thomas and his sons were fishermen. Sitting at the confluence of Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds, tucked within North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Roanoke Island proved an excellent location to practice their trade in the New World. There, and in the surrounding tidal areas, the first two American generations of Josephus Daniels’s family fished, farmed, and became shipwrights. An Ulsterman of Scottish decent, Thomas came from a clan that was rapidly claiming territory across Virginia and the Carolinas. These Scots-­ Irish (Scots who had done England’s dirty work in Ireland) established a reputation for hardscrabble frugality: “Wherever they settled, they gained a reputation for practical piety and The Loveliest Village of the Plain 2 aggressive independence. A saying among their neighbors held that the Scotch-­ Irish kept the Sabbath and anything else they could lay hands on.”4 After reaching adulthood, Clifford moved from Roanoke Island to the mainland town of Bayboro, along the Bay River inlet. There he settled and started his large family with Susan Carraway. After Susan’s early death,Clifford married Millie Jones, and with her he had six more children (four girls and two boys).5 To earn a living, Clifford fished, as his father, Thomas, had. But he also engaged in some small-­ scale farming, which seems practical if for no other reason than because of the number of mouths he had to feed, and as his boys from his first marriage matured, he developed a modest business constructing and repairing small schooners, which were employed in the local and coastal shipping trade. Several of Clifford’s eight sons, including the senior Josephus, joined the small but growing family shipbuilding business. For reasons lost to time, in his early twenties, Josephus left Bayboro and the little family shop forever. Most likely young Daniels simply left a small backwater town to seek his fortune in the wider world, as countless ambitious youngsters have done before and since. First, he ventured north across the Pamlico River to the town of Washington in Beaufort County, where there were more and larger shipyards. A few years later, around 1850, he migrated to Rhode Island, where for some time he worked in still larger yards. Putting a strictly economic spin on Daniels’s move, we can surmise that a skilled wage-­worker in the shipyards of Washington or Rhode Island could earn more than would have been possible in the small, and increasingly overcrowded, family shop in Bayboro. The general economic conditions of the late antebellum era drove the market for shipwrights in eastern North Carolina. During these years, the southern economy grew rapidly, as the Atlantic trade, in which cotton played no small part, boomed. Larger shipyards bustled with activity, and good hands could be hard to find. Little Washington, as it was known, was a thriving port compared with Bayboro. There, Josephus Daniels, with the basic skills he had picked up in his father’s shop, quickly became an employee of the Farrow shipyard.William Farrow, or Captain Farrow as he was known locally, had been a successful merchant captain who, with age, saw more profit and less risk in...