Executing Daniel Bright

Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861-1865

Barton A. Myers

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807146156
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

On December 18, 1863, just north of Elizabeth City in rural northeastern North Carolina, a large group of white Union officers and black enlisted troops under the command of Brigadier General Edward Augustus Wild executed a local citizen for his involvement in an irregular resistance to Union army incursions along the coast. Daniel Bright, by conflicting accounts either a Confederate soldier home on leave or a deserter and guerrilla fighter guilty of plundering farms and harassing local Unionists, was hanged inside an unfinished postal building. The initial fall was not mortal, and according to one Union soldier's account, Bright suffered a slow death by "strangulation, his heart not ceasing to beat for twenty minutes."
Until now, Civil War scholars considered Bright and the Union incursion that culminated in his gruesome death as only a historical footnote. In Executing Daniel Bright, Barton A. Myers uses these events as a window into the wider experience of local guerrilla conflict in North Carolina's Great Dismal Swamp region and as a representation of a larger pattern of retaliatory executions and murders meant to coerce appropriate political loyalty and military conduct on the Confederate homefront. Race, political loyalties, power, and guerrilla violence all shaped the life of Daniel Bright and the home he died defending, and Myers shows how the interplay of these four dynamics created a world where irregular military activity could thrive.
Myers opens with an analysis of antebellum slavery, race relations, slavery debates, and the role of the environment in shaping the antebellum economy of northeastern North Carolina. He then details the emergence of a rift between Unionist and Confederate factions in the area in 1861, the events in 1862 that led to the formation of local guerrilla bands, and General Wild's 1863 military operation in Pasquotank, Camden, and Currituck counties. He explores the local, state, regional, and Confederate Congress's responses to the events of the Wild raid and specifically to Daniel Bright's hanging, revealing the role of racism in shaping those responses. Finally, Myers outlines the outcome of efforts to negotiate neutrality and the state of local loyalties by mid-1864.
Revising North Carolina's popular Civil War mythology, Myers concludes that guerrilla violence such as Bright's execution occurred not only in the highlands or Piedmont region of the state's homefront; rather, local irregular wars stretched from one corner of the state to the other. He explains how violence reshaped this community and profoundly affected the ways loyalties shifted and manifested themselves during the war. Above all, Myers contends, Bright's execution provides a tangible illustration of the collapse of social order on the southern homefront that ultimately led to the downfall of the Confederacy.
Microhistory at its finest, Executing Daniel Bright adds a thought-provoking chapter to the ever-expanding history of how Americans have coped with guerrilla war.

1

THE ROOTS OF CIVIL WAR LOYALTY

Black Labor and Whig Politics in Pasquotank County

Pasquotank is one of the six counties in northeastern North Carolina east of the Chowan River, a region that also includes Gates, Perquimans, Camden, Chowan, and Currituck counties. This 1,660-square-mile region had been included in the original Albemarle County designated in the Lord’s Proprietor Charters of 1663 and 1665, which governed the first permanent European settlement in what would become North Carolina.¹ Located on the northern side of the Albemarle Sound, Pasquotank is immediately south of the Virginia state line and the Great Dismal Swamp. In the 1860s, a portion of the vast Dismal Swamp extended into the northern half of the county and crept almost to the outskirts of the county seat, Elizabeth City.² Swampy terrain was the hallmark feature of the entire region, providing a perfect haven for runaway slaves and other fugitives. And although Pasquotank was a community of small farms and large plantations, its dense cypress forests, meandering black water canals, and swamps—areas inhabited by poisonous canebrake rattlesnakes—created ideal hiding places for a renegade guerrilla.

During most of the antebellum era, Elizabeth City was an important shipping port. The northeastern Albemarle region, crisscrossed by the Perquimans, Pasquotank, and Little rivers, had water access from the Albemarle Sound to the Atlantic Ocean. The sound also connected the Roanoke River and the interior of North Carolina to commerce with Norfolk, Virginia. Because of its geography and industrious black and white population, Elizabeth City, along with Edenton in nearby Chowan County, became the center of much of the seaborne commerce in northeastern North Carolina. A maritime economy developed around the export of locally produced products: corn, grain, forestry supplies like lumber and cypress shingles, and naval stores such as turpentine.³ Diligent mariners delivered these goods to the energetic deepwater commerce port of Norfolk via the Pasquotank River and the inland Dismal Swamp Canal, which allowed limited through navigation beginning in 1805, and the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal, which opened in neighboring Currituck County in 1859.⁴ From Norfolk the commodities were then shipped on to Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. As the population of Pasquotank County grew in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth City merchants imported large quantities of finished goods from the North for their stores. The seamen of the county carried on this profitable shipping trade while also sustaining a vibrant fishing industry in the waters off their shore.⁵

Although the shipping trade produced many seafarers, the export economy of Pasquotank also required a large number of farmers. The county in 1860 was the state’s seventh-largest producer of corn and the fifth-largest producer of flax.⁶ Pasquotank’s farmers also cultivated large amounts of wheat, rye, and silk cocoons. According to the final census before the Civil War, however, it produced no cotton or tobacco. Nevertheless, the vast fields of corn in Pasquotank County clearly made this plantation society a staple-food exporter for other regions of the country. Typical of the local farmers who raised corn was Daniel Bright, who grew one thousand bushels of corn in 1860.⁷ In fact, during the Civil War one northern traveler through the county believed that, even after two and half years of home-front violence, it was still “one of the richest agricultural regions in the State.”⁸

On the eve of the war, one of Pasquotank’s plantation owners, Major Bell (his proper name), who owned fourteen slaves and $4,600 in real property, demonstrated a typical concern among the planters of the northeastern region. Bell wrote letters in 1860 inquiring about the price of corn in Charleston, South Carolina, and the production levels for the crop in Georgia. He also inquired in the North about market prices for the staple in Baltimore and New York. Clearly by the late antebellum period, Pasquotank’s white citizens, with their easy access to ports and shipping, were well acquainted with the national market and what fluctuating crop prices in other regions meant for local business and farming.⁹

Since Pasquotank’s antebellum economy was rooted in two labor-intensive practices, large-scale plantations and the procurement of lumber and naval stores, a ready supply of cheap labor was requisite for the community’s economy to function efficiently. Because the production of cypress shingles, lumber, and turpentine required laborers willing (or who could be compelled) to endure the dual menace of deadly disease and dangerous wild animals in the county’s northern swamps, few whites were willing to work there. As a result, black labor became the most attractive alternative to sustain Pasquotank’s economy. But the swampy, lowland environment and the multifaceted geography of the county made slavery a difficult system to manage.

The white community of Pasquotank County supplied labor for its farms and forest industry in a seemingly contradictory way, by sustaining a labor force of both free blacks and slaves. The final census before the Civil War recorded that 348 men in Pasquotank owned a total of 2,983 slaves.¹⁰ The free black population during the same year numbered 1,507. This meant that in the black community there was a roughly 2-to-1 ratio of slaves to free blacks. The total white male population of the county in 1860 was only 2,207. White women added another 2,243 people to the population. This made slaveholders roughly 15 percent of the white male community, a relatively thin slice of the white male population. And although the majority of the slaves in Pasquotank were held by yeomen with only one to five bondsmen, five of the wealthiest planters in the county retained more than fifty slaves each. Yet the racial demography of the community points to a very fragile social order; the 4,490 blacks, more than one-third of whom were free, slightly outnumbered 4,450 whites.¹¹

Free blacks made up a ready supply of labor for hire in the turpentine and shingle-making industry as well as in the maritime shipping trade. Although the Dismal Swamp Land Company owned several slaves during the antebellum years to help operate the Dismal Swamp Canal, even many of the black laborers in the marshes appear to have been free. Nevertheless, a few slaves were hired out by masters to do hazardous or less desirable occupations. Some free blacks and slaves managed to make substantial amounts of money as shingle getters, swamp guides, ferry boat operators, and canal diggers. Unskilled free blacks who did not work in the swamps provided a cheap labor pool for ancillary farmwork in the county, especially during harvest, when slave labor was stretched thin. Many of the unskilled free blacks and slaves found their way into either swamp labor or work in the maritime fishing economy around Elizabeth City.¹²

It is difficult to put an exact figure on the number of free blacks who worked in the swamps of Pasquotank County during the antebellum period. The overwhelming majority of free black males living in Pasquotank County listed their occupations in 1860 as farmhands, farmers, or carpenters. The number of swamp workers from the county must have been considerable, though, given that in 1847 the General Assembly of North Carolina passed legislation mandating that all free blacks working in the Great Dismal Swamp register a description with local authorities. After that year, Pasquotank and the surrounding counties began registering each free black worker in the Great Dismal Swamp as a way of controlling the activity of free blacks and preventing runaway slaves from being aided by them. But while free blacks and a small number of slaves labored in the difficult terrain of northern Pasquotank County, large-scale plantation slavery reigned as the primary system of labor on the wheat and corn plantations of Pasquotank’s lower districts.¹³

The experience of Moses Grandy, a slave who was born in neighboring Camden County but who was owned by James Grandy, a boy from Pasquotank, illustrates the variation in the black labor experience possible in northeastern North Carolina throughout the antebellum period. Moses Grandy, who was in his mid-fifties in 1843 when he published a narrative describing his work as a slave during the 1820s and 1830s, had spent most of his life up to that point living in Pasquotank and the neighboring counties. Because of his owner’s youth, Grandy was hired out every year to whatever master would pay the most for him at the local courthouse.¹⁴

Despite being a skilled sea captain, a profession he learned while working on shingle flats and running canal boats for a master during his teenage years, Moses Grandy was sometimes forced into field work in the corn plantations of lower Pasquotank. He described the yearly contract system as a precarious one for blacks. “In being hired out,” Grandy declared, “sometimes the slave gets a good home, and sometimes a bad one: when he gets a good one, he dreads to see January come; when he has a bad one, the year seems five times as long as it is.”¹⁵

The dangers of slave work in the northeastern region are evident from Grandy’s description of the beatings and other forms of mistreatment Pasquotank slaves were forced to endure by local whites and the occupational hazards the workers faced. Grandy described a wide range of treatment at the hands of white owners. He remembered that during the time he was owned by Enoch Sawyer he was used as an overseer in the Dismal Swamp. While working as an overseer, Grandy witnessed frequently severe and occasionally sadistic abuse of slaves for minor offenses such as not accomplishing the day’s work goal. Furthermore, Grandy described that Sawyer often starved him but still required him to pay back in cash more than his yearly purchase price. Grandy even recounted how he was periodically assaulted. Another master who rented him at the courthouse, John Micheau, thrashed Grandy with a shovel for falling asleep while waiting on him at a gambling table. As Grandy’s firsthand account attests, in order for the labor-intensive economy of antebellum Pasquotank to function well, the white community had developed a harsh system of slave control.

But even if some masters in Pasquotank treated their slaves well and did not beat them, the work slaves were doing could be deadly. In 1859, a brief note in the local newspaper reported the death of a young male slave owned by J. C. Eringhaus. During an accident while working in the Great Dismal Swamp’s lumbering industry, the slave was “struck with the tongue of a heavy loaded carry log. The blow took effect on the side of the head, breaking the skull, and producing death instantly.”¹⁶ Since accidents such as these were common, it is easy to understand why poorer white members of the community supported the use of slave and free black labor in the local economy. If blacks did not perform the labor, poorer white residents of the county would have to do it. But if one can appreciate why the majority of white residents living in Pasquotank supported the institution of slavery, it is also not difficult to understand the unrelenting drive of Moses Grandy to be free.

Although he was unable to read or write, Grandy successfully saved enough money to purchase his own freedom as well as the freedom of his wife and several of his children. Grandy was a skilled slave who could work in nearly every maritime profession. He knew the region’s geography well, and he had a keen business sense. Yet unscrupulous masters had forced him to pay for his own freedom twice before a friendly local man named Captain Minner purchased him and allowed Grandy to pay him back the purchase price over an extended period of time. After paying for himself the third and final time, Grandy was set free and headed north to Boston, where he continued to work as a seaman and travel the world. He ultimately crewed a schooner that sailed to the Caribbean and even visited England to raise money to purchase family members still enslaved.¹⁷ Although Grandy successfully freed himself from slavery after years of arduous antebellum labor, most of Pasquotank’s enslaved population anxiously awaited liberation from bondage, liberation that would come only during the Civil War.

While Moses Grandy never advocated violent revolution, his real-life experience working in the swamp relates to the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s less well known second novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), which focuses on the life of an escaped slave who lived in the region. Stowe, whose first antislavery book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, became the best-selling novel of the 1850s, used the Dismal Swamp as the focus for her second book because of the importance of wetland areas to runaway slaves in the South. The high-ground areas within swamps concealed communities of runaways in several regions of the South, and the Dismal Swamp was one of the most prominent. In the novel, Dred preaches angrily against the outrages of slavery, rescues runaway slaves from the dog of a slave hunter, and leads a militant band of escaped slaves in the swamp. The novel elevates a black revolutionary figure as a savior for slaves in a way that would be paralleled later in the war when black soldiers would return to free slaves from bondage in northeastern North Carolina.¹⁸

Even though geographic diversity and dangerous work conditions required a large, controllable workforce to toil in Pasquotank’s labor-intensive industries, they were not the sole reasons for the presence of a large free black community in Pasquotank. The growth of this community was also helped by the religious makeup and political activities of some white residents. A sizable number of Quakers who lived in Pasquotank during the antebellum years encouraged individual manumissions; some of the Society of Friends even bought slaves for the express purpose of emancipating them.¹⁹ The Quakers’ influence in the county can be measured by the size of their meetinghouse: in 1850, it held eight hundred people. Only ten years later, however, Pasquotank County had no meetinghouses, and Perquimans County—which had four meetinghouses in 1850—had only one. This decline in the Quaker population was almost certainly due to rising sectional tensions over the slavery issue.²⁰ By 1860, most of the Quakers in both Pasquotank and Perquimans counties had immigrated to Indiana and Illinois because of the increased threat of violence to abolitionists in the South.²¹

Nevertheless, the Friends played a major role in the American Colonization Society in Elizabeth City during the earlier antebellum period. During the late 1820s, Elizabeth City was one of the most important financial sponsors of this political movement in the state. The local colonization group promoted removing free blacks to a colony in Liberia on the African continent. Between 1825 and 1860, Pasquotank sent 247 of its black residents to the colony, more than any other county in North Carolina.²² Several affluent white citizens in Pasquotank financially supported the organization until the early 1830s, when the money dried up all over the state as a response to the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion in nearby Southampton County, Virginia.

The antebellum history of Pasquotank is filled with events that demonstrate an anxiety over the issue of potential black violence. During 1800 and 1802, fear of an armed slave revolt was rampant in the community after news of slave rebellions in Virginia’s tidewater and North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound region spread to Pasquotank and the other northeastern counties.²³ In 1802, Pasquotank experienced its own insurrectionary scare when a local slave named Mingo reported that six slaves commanded by “Dr. Joe” were going to murder citizens in Pasquotank. Mingo, however, must not have been convincing when the accused plotters were brought to court in Norfolk; the six slaves were acquitted and Mingo sentenced to have both his ears cut off for perjury.²⁴

The proximity of Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion was also frightening to this anxious white populace. The belief that Turner’s men were headed toward the Dismal Swamp only exacerbated local apprehension. In September 1831, local leaders from Pasquotank wrote the governor of North Carolina demanding that either weapons or an army be sent to the region for protection. According to one citizen, the white people of the county were so upset they “patrol and mount guns constantly to keep up appearance without means. The females and children are much distressed.”²⁵ In nearby Chowan County, the militia was called out to prevent Turner’s group from escaping across the state line into North Carolina via the Dismal Swamp.²⁶ The North Carolina legislature responded to Pasquotank’s calls for protection by commissioning two local militia companies, the Elizabeth City Rangers and the Elizabeth City Guards, but it did not do so until 1832.²⁷ The tense feelings left over from the Turner scare also prompted the community in August 1835 to appoint a committee of vigilance “to give the earliest notice to the inhabitants of any designs against their peace and security by those fanatics who are endeavoring to incite our slave ...