Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina

CHAPTER 1 Antebellum Antecedents

9 Chapter 1 Antebellum Antecedents In 1524 Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian explorer in the service of the French king, became the first European to view the southern tip of the Outer Banks. He painted a romantic picture of the tall sweeping grasses and majestic evergreens of Bogue Banks, the twenty-five-mile-long sandy island that teemed with dozens of species of exotic birds and sheltered tranquil Beaufort harbor from the tempestuous Atlantic Ocean. In 1585 Sir Richard Grenville, a captain in Sir Walter Raleigh’s first English-sponsored colonization effort, became the first European to sail into Pamlico Sound and the mouth of the Neuse River, a few miles from present-day New Bern.Though Raleigh’s colonization attempt ultimately failed, just over a century later Europeans began settling and developing the coastal areas that would become Craven and Carteret counties.1 Over the course of the colonial and antebellum periods, New Bern and Beaufort and their respective counties, Craven and Carteret, developed in different ways, yet maintained certain core similarities. Beaufort became primarily a fishing society, integrally attached to the surrounding waters, while New Bern grew into an agricultural and mercantile societyconnected to both the state’s interior and the greater Atlantic world. In the 1850s both counties championed different political parties—Whigs for Carteret and Democrats for Craven. Despite a long historyof Unionist sentiment in that tumultuous decade, Craven residents began calling for secession soon after Abraham Lincoln’s election. Carteret residents maintained their Unionist leanings much longer.Though both ultimately supported secession, it took an extreme external threat to unite these two counties. Yet their residents had many fundamental similarities. They shared a powerful attachment to racial slavery and a fervent desire for commercial prosperity. Both had strong economic reasons for avoiding war, but equally strong social reasons 10 Antebellum Antecedents for acceding to secession. Though they had their differences, their social, cultural, and economic congruities ultimately shaped their experience of military occupation during the Civil War in very similar ways. From the earliest days of European settlement, New Bern was a more active, thriving port than Beaufort, though the latter possessed the best harbor in the state. With the widest mouth of any river in the continental United States, the Neuse made New Bern a gateway into the colony. Ships passed through Ocracoke Inlet and sailed through Pamlico Sound into the Neuse River to New Bern, where goods could be moved either up the river or overland on a system of roads that emanated from the port town.The town of Portsmouth was established at the northern tip of Core Banks at Ocracoke Inlet to aid New Bern’s commercial trade. In a procedure known as “lightering,” Portsmouth residents used their lower draft vessels to take half the cargo off a deep-draft vessel, which could not pass through Map of Beaufort and surrounding area based on an inset from J. H. Colton, Topographical Map of North and South Carolina, a Large Portion of Georgia, and Part of Adjoining States (New York, 1861) Antebellum Antecedents 11 relatively shallow Ocracoke Inlet while fully loaded, thus allowing thevessel to cross the bar and sail to New Bern.2 Oceangoing vessels could also opt to pass through the less dangerous Topsail Inlet farther south and sail into Beaufort’s deep harbor with less difficulty . Twelve feet deep at low tide, and deemed “very safe and Navigable for Vessels of Great Burthen” by a 1766 act, Topsail Inlet offered greater access than its northern sister, Ocracoke, which only had a depth of nine feet. However, once merchants landed their goods at Beaufort, they found furtherdistribution much more difficult.The North and Newport rivers flanking Beaufort were merely glorified creeks—five feet deep and extending less than fifteen miles into the interior. Moreover, no simple overland route existed between Beaufort and New Bern or other points in the interior. To get to New Bern, travelers from Beaufort either had to sail through the shoal-infested, shallow Core Sound (ranging from a few inches to seven feet in depth) to Pamlico Sound and the Neuse River, or travel over muddy roads that were intersected by creeks, bays, and bogs, and suffered from poor drainage. Road upkeep was nearly impossible. For all practical commercial purposes, Beaufort was cut off from North Carolina’s interior from the time the first European settlers ventured into the region in 1696 until the...