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DISSENT IN THE CONFEDERACY: THE NORTH CAROLINA EXPERIENCE Marc W. Kruman Since 1925, when Frank L. Owsley published his seminal book, State Rights in the Confederacy, historians have been aware that white southerners during the Civil War were not a united people fighting selflessly to preserve a way of life. Owsley identified substantial opposition to the Confederate government among state rights advocates. He believed that in order for the Confederacy to mount a successful war effort, it needed to centralize decision-making. But the insistence of southern politicians that their cherished theories of state rights be implemented caused constant bickering between the Confederate and state governments and ultimately paralyzed the Confederate war effort. In the end, Owsley concluded, the Confederate States of America "died of state rights."1 Other historians have emphasized different reasons for popular hostility to the Confederate government. Albert Burton Moore, for example, pointed to the disaffection that grew out of the enactment of the conscription laws. Georgia Lee Tatum catalogued a number of causes of disloyalty in the Confederacy: persistent unionism, the conscription laws, impressment, the tax-in-kind, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and the economic suffering caused by the war. Bell I. Wiley suggested that class legislation, like the exemption from the draft of a man to oversee twenty or more slaves, generated discontent among "plain folk."2 Such interpretations dwell upon the symptoms of dissent in the Con1 Frank L. Owsley, Síare Rights in the Confederacy (1925; reprint ed., Gloucester , Mass., 1961), esp. p. 1. 2 Albert Burton Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York, 1924); Georgia Lee Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, 1934), esp. pp. 3-23; Bell I. Wiley, The Plain People of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge, 1943), esp. pp. 36-69. More recent analyses of Confederate dissent that follow these traditional lines of interpretation include: Stephen E. Ambrose, "Yeoman Discontent in the Confederacy," Civil War History 8 (1962): 259 68; Paul D. Escott, "Southern Yeomen and the Confederacy," South Atfontic Quarterly 77 (1978): 146-58; and idem, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalitni (Baton Rouge, 1978). Civil War History, Vol. XXVII, No. 4 Copyright © 1981 bv the Kent State University Press 0009-8078/81/2704-0001 $01.00/0 294CIVIL WAR HISTORY federacy but overlook the underlying causes. They virtually ignore the one cause of opposition to the Confederate government that preoccupied contemporaries. Antagonists of the Confederate government feared that it was becoming a "central military despotism," intent upon robbing the people of their liberty. One might dismiss these fears as political propaganda, but they were repeated too frequently in private correspondence to be regarded as such. It is also tempting to slight such anxieties as mere rhetorical devices designed to cover up more practical objections to individual policies of the Confederate government. To be sure, conscription aroused opposition among those men who did not want to fight, and the tax-in-kind antagonized farmers who hated heavy taxes. But those measures and others also generated deeper fears for the survival of popular liberty.3 Those fears reflected the inheritance of more than a century of English and American political belief. Eighteenth-century Americans feared that liberty, their liberty, would becrushed by power, usually the power of government. They portrayed liberty as fragile and passive, power as aggressive and unrelenting. Liberty was always under siege, always threatened. Citizens of the early republic sought the preservation of liberty in the constitutional republican governments of the states and nation. If the republic survived and remained strong, freedom would be protected. But they were also aware that past republics had been relatively short-lived. Hence, Americans remained sensitive to threats to republican government and the liberty it protected. Historians have identified the expression of those fears in the political struggles of the 1790s, in the decision to declare war in 1812, and in the nullification crisis.4 During the 1820s and 1830s, the equality of white men became inextricably linked to the concept of liberty. Men, they believed, who were not the equals of other citizens were not truly free. This ideological commitment to the preservation of republican government and white...

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