Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina

Introduction

1 Introduction As soon as the Civil War ended in the spring of 1865, northern journalist Sidney Andrews embarked on a tour of the recently defeated southern states. As he made his way through the coastal towns of Beaufort and New Bern, North Carolina, that summer Andrews was struck by the Janus-faced loyalty of local whites, many of whom had lived quietly under Union occupation for the previous three years. He described a puzzling irony in the region: “The North Carolinian calls himself a Unionist, but he makes no special pretence of love for the Union.” Andrews already detected a streak of southern nationalism in the Beaufort–New Bern region only weeks after the southern nation had been laid to rest. He sensed that white professions of Unionism were fragile at best.The journalist employed an apt metaphor to describe the waning strength of national allegiance in the region and state, proclaiming that the North Carolinian “wears his mask of nationality so lightly there is no difficulty in removing it.”1 Indeed, many North Carolinians, but especially whites in the Beaufort– New Bern region, had been wearing masks and changing one for another for the previous fiveyears. Local whites had professed themselves Unionists before thewar.Though New Bern residents began calling for secession soon after Abraham Lincoln’s election, their Beaufort neighbors maintained a steady conditional Unionism until Lincoln summoned troops on April 15, 1861.Then residents of both towns removed their Union masks and eagerly put on Confederate ones. Only a year later, when the Union army arrived to occupy the region, many of those same residents, on being promised enhanced economic benefits coupled with the social status quo antebellum, quietly put their Confederate masks into storage and donned the old, familiar Union masks once again. However, by the time Andrews visited in 1865, he sensed that many of those same residents had already taken their Confederate masks down from the attic and dusted them off. If the new postwar Union included emancipation, enfranchisement, and education for 2 Introduction blacks, as well as the threat of social equality, then whites would strip off their Union masks and show their true allegiance—identifying with the ideals, especially white supremacy, of the defunct Confederacy. Union forces marched into New Bern on March 14, 1862, and Beaufort on the twenty-fifth, marking the beginning of a military occupation that would last the rest of the war. With Union occupation came thousands of Federal soldiers, government officials, and northern missionaries and teachers . For the next three years, residents of Beaufort and New Bern would question their own loyalties and negotiate with their occupiers and each other in an effort to carve out social, cultural, and political identities. African Americans utilized the northern agents to change the circumstances of their lives despite passionatewhite resistance. A study like this invites many questions: How did the lives of these whites and blacks change? How did they adapt to new stresses? How did they negotiate with their occupiers to create theirown space? Howdid the occupiers react to the local population, whose values were so foreign to their own? This book focuses the lens on one place to better understand the longterm impact of the Civil War on local civilians, while analyzing the effects of war on society and the nature of civil-military relations, as well as offering a social analysis of both military and civilian participants. Thus, this work employs a bottom-up approach to top-down books on military occupation policy, and it supplements the broad strokes painted by more comprehensive works on Union occupation throughout the South by offering a concentrated point of perspective in order to see how occupation played out on the local level.2 It also holds Federal soldiers, northern benevolent society members, and the residents themselves—white and black, men and women—accountable for their actions; it does not view them simply as pawns in a larger power struggle or as passive victims of impersonal historical forces.This work not only explores why white residents, slaves, missionaries , and soldiers took the actions they did; it also analyzes how their actions affected the economic, social, political, and cultural dynamics of the region. Especially important to this story is the experience of the black population . Much has been written about African American life during wartime and military occupation; however, most scholarly works have been concerned with how Union agents proscribed black freedom and autonomy. Instead of examining how events affected blacks...