In the spring of 1864, William M. Boylan feared for the safety of his human property. The owner of three cotton plantations in Yazoo County, Mississippi, Boylan recognized that the presence of Union gunboats on the Mississippi River posed a threat to his property and a potential lure for his slaves. He had heard accounts of slaves running away to secure their freedom. He resolved to relocate approximately five hundred of his slaves to central North Carolina, where he believed they would be safely isolated from Union forces. Milly Henry, an eight-year-old girl in the spring of 1864, was one of the slaves Boylan selected for removal. Henry remembered that when Boylan gathered his slaves together to tell them of the relocation, he manifested a palpable anxiety about the situation. Boylan informed them that they would be removed to North Carolina in two days and that he “ain’t gwine ter hyar no jaw ’bout hit.” Henry was distressed to discover that she would be separated from her grandmother, her only family member, as many of the elderly and infirm slaves would stay in Mississippi.
A Raleigh native, Boylan had recently inherited land in both Mississippi and North Carolina, an inheritance that likely included both Milly Henry and her grandmother. Like many slaveholding families in the North Carolina Piedmont, the Boylans had established plantations in Mississippi during the 1830s and 1840s, moving thousands of slaves to the Black Belt, a migration that might have included Milly Henry’s grandmother. With these plantations under threat, William Boylan concluded that his slaves would be safer in Raleigh. Milly Henry and Boylan’s other slaves made the nearly nine-hundred-mile trek to North Carolina on foot and by covered wagon in about three weeks. She remembered that they camped along the side of the road and cooked over campfires. When they arrived in Raleigh, Boylan initially divided his slaves between two plantations he owned in Wake County. Within a few weeks, however, he decided, probably due to the high cost of provisions, to rent out many of his slaves, including Milly Henry. Over the next two years, she was rented to three different women. She worked for the first, a Miss Mary Lee, until “she got so pore she can’t feed me.” Her second renter, who neglected to provide her with shoes, beat her so severely that she ran away to her owner, pleading with Boylan to find another placement for her. She was with her third renter, a widow who ran a boardinghouse in Raleigh, when Yankee soldiers marched into the city in April 1865.1
By the time that William Boylan brought himself and his slaves to the North Carolina Piedmont in the spring of 1864, the region had already become overwhelmed by waves of refugees arriving from eastern North Carolina, Virginia, and across the Confederacy. In the final two years of the conflict, as Union armies advanced and the Confederacy contracted, white refugees increasingly congregated in the North Carolina Piedmont, where they believed the physical distance from the enemy would isolate them from the terrors of war and protect their human property. At times they could pretend that the war was not taking place. A disgruntled Greensboro resident complained in February 1863 that “our town is still full of Refugees, who give parties, dance and pass time as merrily as if our fair Country was not passing through a terrible Ordeal; as if all was peaceful & prosperous as in days gone by.”2 While some white refugees maintained the fiction in early 1863 that they could continue their lives unhindered by the war, they could not deceive themselves for long. In the final years of the Civil War, refugees in the North Carolina Piedmont experienced severe overcrowding, traumatic financial difficulties, food shortages, and epidemic disease. The tensions created by these forces served to undermine the social order and hierarchy that the refugees had sought to preserve. Most fundamentally, they undermined the strength of the South’s peculiar institution, as refugeed slaves sought to expedite their freedom.
The arrival of thousands of black and white refugees in the North Carolina Piedmont radically transformed the racial, class, and labor profile of the region. Unfortunately, existing records make estimating the size of the Piedmont refugee population difficult. The Confederate government never conducted a census, and while local governments in other Confederate states conducted local enumerations, no county or municipality in North Carolina did so. The difficulties that white refugees had in securing housing throughout the war suggest that by early 1863 thousands of white refugees had descended on the Piedmont, particularly in urban areas, where schools, warehouses, and barns were converted into living spaces. Piedmont lawyer David Schenck estimated in January 1864 that “many thousands of exiles roam through the land, with tales of sorrow and affliction.” According to Schenck, these “many thousands of exiles” included planters who had been “reduced to penury and want by the ravages and cruelty of the enemy” and “thousands of women and children, made widows and orphans constantly appeal for aid and sustenance.”3
While the extent of the rise of the white refugee population can only be guessed at, firmer estimates can be made about the size of the refugeed slave population. Tax assessments from 1863 suggest that the slave population of many central North Carolina counties had increased significantly since the beginning of the war. Unfortunately, these tax assessments have survived for only six counties and most of these are incomplete.4 In Orange County, where Hillsborough and Chapel Hill were popular destinations for eastern North Carolina planters, the slave population increased from 5,109 in 1860 to 6,103 in 1863 and probably exceeded 8,000 by the war’s end.5 The most complete records, those from Johnston and Cabarrus Counties, indicate that the slave population had increased by between 4 and 10 percent in the year since Burnside’s invasion, and records from other central and western counties indicate a similar increase. Residents of Cabarrus County complained, however, that this figure undercounted the number of refugeed slaves living in their midst, as refugee slave owners refused to have their slaves enumerated, claiming that they had already paid taxes on them in their home county. In 1864, after receiving complaints from Cabarrus County residents, Richard C. Gatlin, the adjutant general of North Carolina, wrote to the local militia commander that he was to “place the slave owners who have lately taken their slaves from the Eastern Counties, to your County, on equality with the other slave owners of Cabarrus” and that their slaves should be taxed and impressed accordingly.6 While these records make it impossible to accurately assess the number of refugeed slaves in the North Carolina Piedmont in 1863 or at any other point, they do suggest that the presence of refugeed slaves significantly altered the demographic profile of the region.
The presence of so many white and black refugees in the Piedmont, particularly in urban areas, contributed to an economic crisis that threatened to unravel the region’s social order. Producing very little, refugees consumed vast quantities of food, medicine, cloth, and other goods in short supply. As economic parasites, refugees drove up the prices of housing, foodstuffs, and transportation. Compounded with inflationary pressures created by the overproduction of paper currency by the Confederate government, shortages created by the Union blockade, and unprecedented demands from the Confederate military for food and war materiel, consumption by refugees pushed prices for both staples and luxury items to unprecedented levels. Few areas of the Confederacy experienced as dramatic an increase in prices as central North Carolina, where prices for eggs, flour, and corn often exceeded thirty times their antebellum levels. When partnered with Confederate taxation, which grew increasingly onerous as the war progressed, inflationary pressures posed challenges to even the wealthiest refugees.7 In March 1864 Macy Outten, a wealthy, childless widow from New Bern who had taken refuge in Hillsborough, complained that “I am growing quite despondent as it regards my pecuniary affairs, the heavy taxes which have been laid upon us is ruinous to persons in my situation.” Required to pay taxes to the Confederate government for her property then under Union occupation, Outten later reflected that “the War has taught me to deny myself many things which I had once thought indispensable.” Despite her difficulties, Outten recognized that her wealth insulated her from the worst effects of the Piedmont’s economic crisis, noting that “I have got along remarkably well in spite of the taxes. Always had Meat which is more than many of my neighbors can say, and plenty of vegetables. . . . I cannot conceive how the poor manage to get along. They certainly must suffer for the necessities of life.”8
Among the hardest hit by the Piedmont’s economic crisis were nonslaveholding women. After the institution of the Confederate draft in 1862, they struggled to manage families and farms without their husbands’ labor. Although their soldier husbands often sent home their wages, these never kept up with inflation, pushing female-headed yeoman families to the brink of starvation. In November 1864 Louisburg resident Anna Long Thomas Fuller observed that “the prospect for the winter is gloomy indeed. Prices are exorbitant. The poor must suffer, I’m sure. I hear there are a number of families in our community who have been without meat for months.” Yeomen Piedmont women manifested their frustration in angry letters to Governor Zebulon Vance and Jefferson Davis, demanding that their husbands be returned to them or that the government provide some relief for their hunger. While most of these letters came from individuals, impoverished women frequently recognized that their situation was not unique and sent communal petitions, a nascent form of political organizing. For instance, in February 1863 soldiers’ wives from Wayne County informed Governor Vance that “we hav seen the time when we could call our Littel childen and our Husbun to our tables and hav a plenty, and now wee have Becom Beggars and starvers an now way to help ourselves.” They implored Governor Vance that “wee think it is hie time for us to get help in time our need.” Dissatisfied with the government’s response to their suffering, some yeomen Piedmont women encouraged their husbands to desert. Piedmont women’s inability to secure affordable provisions for their families culminated in a series of bread riots beginning in 1863. The largest bread riot in North Carolina took place in Salisbury in March 1863, when “between 40 and 50 soldiers’ wives, followed by a numerous train of curious female observers, made an attack on several of our businessmen . . . whom they regarded as speculators in the necessaries of life.” Later in the war, women rioted for food in Greensboro, Bladenboro, and High Point and in smaller communities in Johnston, Granville, Orange, Alamance, and Montgomery Counties.9
Although they did not participate in bread riots, white refugees contributed to the exorbitant rise in prices that brought them about. By purchasing scarce food for themselves and their slaves, wealthy refugees drove up prices for poorer women. Despite their comparative wealth, white refugees were not immune to the economic crisis that permeated the North Carolina Piedmont. Possessing few transferable skills, most white refugees from the plantation districts of North Carolina, Virginia, and the Deep South had to rely on their accumulated wealth and human property to sustain themselves as refugees. For instance, Macy Outten, elderly and in poor health, had to live off of her inherited estate and the charity of her neighbors. Indeed, few white refugees found employment in the Piedmont. Since most refugees were women, children, and elderly men, employment options were limited. Outside of teaching and nursing, white refugee women had few options to earn an income, and even these were usually limited to women without children.10 Some male refugees could find work as ministers and doctors, especially at military hospitals. Dr. James G. M. Ramsey, a refugee from Knoxville, tended to patients at the military hospital in Charlotte, while his wife tutored children in nearby Concord. Their income from these positions, however, was negligible, leading Ramsey to note that “my pecuniary resources were small and daily becoming smaller.” Both he and his wife saw their work primarily as a form of Confederate patriotism rather than a source of income.11
Some refugee planters concluded that the best solution to this financial predicament was to sell some or all of their slaves. In January 1862 Rev. Henry Smith observed in his diary that Greensboro had become crowded with refugees and that “an immense number of people (black & white) are in town today. It is hiring day, & several negroes are to be sold.” Prices for slaves, especially male slaves, increased dramatically during the war, such that the price for prime field hands exceeded $5,000 in 1865. However, while the absolute value of slaves increased during the war, when controlled for inflation, the prices for slaves actually declined significantly. This incongruous aspect of the wartime slave market was reflected in David Schenck’s diary. In September 1862 Schenck claimed that prices for slaves had increased significantly. “Prices of negroes are enormous,” Schenck noted, with “likely boys bringing $2000.” However, Schenck noted in his diary in January 1865 that “Negroes are rapidly declining in price, in fact they can scarcely be sold at any price.”12 Dramatic fluctuations in slave prices scared away both buyers and sellers, as did the institution’s uncertain future. Some slaveholders refrained from selling their slaves because they feared appearing unpatriotic, so tied was slaveholding to the Confederate identity. Others worried that selling slaves would expose them as debtors, which many white Southerners saw as dishonorable.13 An advertisement for thirty slaves in Charlotte in March 1865 noted that “they are not offered for sale as a consequence of faults but simply because the owner lives where he cannot employ them to profit.” Because of the uncertainty about the future of slavery, the slave market almost disappeared in the war’s final years.14
While the market for selling slaves declined significantly after 1863, the market for renting slaves in the North Carolina Piedmont expanded tremendously throughout the war, as refugee slave owners sought to temporarily transfer the responsibility for feeding, housing, and clothing their slaves to someone else.15 Renting out slaves, a well-established practice throughout the South, allowed slaveholding refugees to continue their commitment to the peculiar institution while absolving them of the responsibility to provide for their slaves far from home. For large planters, without land for their slaves to work, the rental market provided an easy way to relieve themselves of the considerable cost that housing and feeding their slaves entailed. As most rental contracts lasted a year, refugee slaveholders saw renting their slaves as a temporary panacea, allowing them time to evaluate their situation and postpone decisions about their own future and that of their slaves. For white refugees in central North Carolina whose husbands and sons were in the army, the absence of male family members to supervise slaves provided an additional motivation to rent out their slave property. Although plantation mistresses had long been accustomed to managing and disciplining slaves at home, as refugees they felt uncomfortable with the added burden of maintaining a slave system predicated on the threat and use of violence, as slaves increasingly used wartime conditions to test the limits of their enslavement.16
As early as March 1862, some Confederates were lamenting that the market for slave rentals had become so glutted that is was impossible to find someone to rent their slaves. Mary Boykin Chesnut observed in her diary that “labor [is] of no value at all. It commands no price whatever. People gladly hire out their negroes to have them fed and clothed. Which latter cannot be done.” In the same month, Josiah Collins, a Washington County planter who had removed many of his slaves to Hillsborough, had to return ten of them to his plantation, despite the imminent threat posed by Union armies, because “he c[ou]ld get no work[,] all at a great cost.” Collins confided to a friend that he “wished he had not attempted to bring them [to central North Carolina]—the expense is heavy, the profit very doubtful.” While the rental market for young male slaves remained viable throughout the war, the market for women, children, and elderly men collapsed after 1863. With the devaluation of Confederate currency, some slave owners doubted the wisdom of renting their slaves. In an effort to dissuade his wife from renting their slaves, Kenelm Lewis informed her that even if she found someone interested in renting them, “the money you would get for the hire [of slaves] would not be of much use to you.” Instead, he advocated that she “keep the mules & negroes at your father’s.”17
In the war’s final years, when the cost of maintaining slaves exceeded their profitability, many slave owners were willing to rent their slaves without compensation. Eliza DeRosset proclaimed in January 1864 that she would rent one of her slaves for only “his victuals & clothes.” By early 1865 some slave owners actually paid for others to care for their slaves. In January 1865 William Pettigrew received a letter from his overseer, who was attempting to find placements for his slaves for the year. He notified Pettigrew that he had to spend $2,000 to place one family and that he was having difficulty placing another slave. “I can’t get any person to take Lucy at any price yet. I hav[e] offered $500 but that don’t seem to be any thing to the people I hav[e] offered her to. I hav[e] tryed every person in 8 or 10 miles Round me.”18
As the passage above indicates, planters like William Pettigrew found owning slaves more of a financial liability than an asset. While the financial difficulties from slave ownership were most pronounced at the end of the war, many planters began to see their slaves as toxic assets early in the conflict. In a letter asking for a loan in August 1862, Pettigrew framed his financial situation in the following terms: “as my lands are in the hands of the enemy, and as my negroes, most of whom are in the up country, have been hired, at a nominal sum, I begin to find my purse requires being replenished from without.” Writing to an Alabama correspondent a few months later, Pettigrew described his current predicament. In March 1862, just after the fall of Roanoke Island, he had “removed my negroes to the Counties of Chatham & Moore [in the eastern Piedmont], regarding their location a safe one.” In the intervening months, however, he had had difficulty securing employment and housing for his slaves and worried that Union soldiers could, within the next few months, occupy all of eastern North Carolina, such that “my negroes would be but fifty miles distant from the invader.” As Pettigrew saw matters, he had three choices: “First, to leave my negroes where they are with the probability that, ere the 1st March next, all of them will have made their escape to the enemy; Secondly, to remove them to the western counties of N. Carolina, where food will be scarce & high & where large numbers of negroes are accumulating from the East. Or Thirdly, to remove them to the south, where the lands are more productive & grain more abundant.”19 After some deliberation, Pettigrew decided to keep his slaves in central North Carolina for the time being.
In January 1863 Pettigrew moved eighty of his slaves west to Davie County, a distance of approximately one hundred miles from their initial relocation in Chatham County. Prior to their forced migration, he had advertised to local farmers that his slaves were available for rent, noting that “the men and women are unusually good hands, and those hiring them I am sure will be pleased.” Although he was able to find renters, prices had dropped significantly, such that he received only $125 for the men and $50 to $60 for the women. Pettigrew considered the price fair, as “the county is over supplied” with slaves, and in an effort to rationalize the low rental prices he was receiving for his slaves, he concluded that “safety is far more important than profit for one’s negroes.”20
While the expansion of slave hiring in the North Carolina interior may have been financially disastrous for slave owners, it was devastating to the emotional and social well-being of the slaves, as hiring out resulted in a further fragmentation of established slave communities and families. For instance, during the two years that Milly Henry spent in central North Carolina, she was rented out to three different masters, further separating her from the community in which she had grown up. Although William Pettigrew attempted to keep families together when he rented out his slaves, by leasing his eighty-seven slaves to fifteen different planters, he nonetheless fragmented a slave community and divided extended families.21 In many cases, slave owners’ motivations in keeping families together derived more from practicality than a disinclination to break apart families. Because it was generally much more difficult to find parties interested in renting women and children, slave owners preferred to rent out entire families in order to avoid the difficulty of placing women and children.
Many planters experienced difficulties in finding appropriate renters for their slaves. On several occasions William Pettigrew discovered that the individuals to whom he had rented his slaves were unable to provide them with adequate food and clothing. In January 1863 he wrote to Dr. Archibald Palmer, who had rented a family of slaves from Pettigrew, that one of the slaves had informed him that he “and his family have not, as yet, received all the clothing due them for the past year. My impression is that they are yet without their winter clothes, blankets, or quilts.” Rented slaves often complained to their owners about their treatment. Osmyn, a DeRosset family slave, protested that his renters “have given him no clothes & he is much in need & begs to have his place changed.”22
While most white refugees sought to sell or rent out their slaves, some more fortunate refugees saw the opportunity to expand their holdings. In June 1861 Michael Cronly, a prominent Wilmington merchant, decided to relocate his family and several domestic slaves to Laurinburg. Although Laurinburg was crowded with refugees, most of whom had come from Wilmington, such that “every available building was occupied, even school houses and stores,” Cronly was able to purchase several properties in town. In 1864 Cronly “went South . . . and bought a great many negroes.” Cronly was able to purchase the slaves at a discount because “the confusion and upsettings of war had thrown numbers of them on the market.” In time, however, Cronly came to regret his decision, as it was impossible to find adequate food and clothing for his newly acquired slaves. “Most of them had nothing to do and consequentially got sick, and ‘guffered.’” When Sherman’s army marched through Laurinburg in March 1865 and their slaves departed in its wake, the Cronly family saw their leaving not as a misfortune but as “a blessing to us that the negroes had left, for they would have been only an additional care.”23
When the rental market for slaves as agricultural workers became saturated, many slave owners decided that their best option would be to rent their slaves to one of several railroads being constructed in western and central North Carolina. Southern railroads had traditionally relied on slaves to perform the most taxing manual labor: wielding picks and shovels, cutting lumber, pushing wheelbarrows, and laying track. Since the 1830s, slave labor, much of it rented, had been instrumental in the construction of Southern railroads. According to the account of one anonymous fugitive slave published in 1838, slave owners sometimes used rental to a railroad as a form of punishment for recalcitrant slaves. Slaves rightly feared railroad work, as railroads developed reputations as brutal and dangerous workplaces. Building railroad beds, slaves pushed wheelbarrows loaded with dirt up wooden planks a foot and half wide; “if they lost their balance, they would fall from ten to twenty feet.” During the two months that the anonymous fugitive slave worked on the railroad, “there was hardly a day that some of the slaves did not get crippled or killed.” Not only were the physical demands of railroad construction taxing, but railroad overseers developed a reputation for brutality, pushing their temporary charges to perform. According to the anonymous fugitive slave, railroad overseers were quick to the lash, “cutting and slashing all the time. Every hour in the day we could hear the whip going.” While slave owners customarily treated whipped slaves with brine, a painful but effective antiseptic, and allowed a brief period for recuperation, railroad overseers “did not use brine. . . . After we were whipped we had to go straight back to our work. They did not care whether we got well or not, because we were other people’s niggers.”24
During the Civil War, the Confederacy relied on railroads to provide transportation, food, and supplies to soldiers. The increase in traffic overtaxed the Southern railroad infrastructure, resulting in worn-out tracks, crumbling railroad beds, overburdened locomotives, and ultimately a significant increase in railroad accidents, many of them fatal. Unable to import new track to replace the worn-out track and without an adequate domestic supply, railroads cannibalized branch lines to repair the main trunk lines. All of these factors led to a significant increase in slave labor on railroads during the Civil War.25 In May 1862, shortly after the Union invasion of New Bern and the exodus of slave owners from the region, the Fayetteville Observer recommended that refugee slave owners hire their slaves to the Piedmont Railroad, as “here will be a fine opportunity for those whose lands are in the hands of the enemy, or too much exposed to render their cultivation safe, to find employment for their negroes, in a locality that may be considered as safe from the ravages of the invader as any within the limits of the Confederacy.”26 Seen as a vital supply link between the interior and Confederate forces in and around Richmond, railroads in North Carolina received considerable support from both the state and national governments. Indeed, these ventures were so highly capitalized and the military need for the construction so urgent that they offered rental prices significantly above market rates (at least for male slaves), driving rental prices up.27 The largest of these enterprises, the Piedmont Railroad, building the long-awaited connection between Danville and Greensboro, hired thousands of slaves, housing them in temporary tent cities along the tracks. At the height of construction in 1862-63, the Piedmont Railroad employed approximately twenty-five hundred slaves, and other railroads, including the North Carolina Railroad, the Western North Carolina Railroad, the Wilmington & Weldon Railroad, and the Raleigh & Gaston Railroad, employed thousands more.28 Newspaper notices in Raleigh, Charleston, and Richmond advertised North Carolina railroads’ seemingly insatiable appetite for slave rental labor. In February 1863 the Chatham Railroad placed an advertisement for three hundred slaves, noting that the “line runs through a healthy country, on a high ridge, and all hands employed on the road will be well fed and cared for.” Hiring records from the North Carolina Railroad Company indicate that it relied heavily on refugeed slaves to maintain the railroad that ran from Goldsboro in the east through Raleigh, Greensboro, and Salisbury, ending at Charlotte. In 1862 the North Carolina Railroad hired 273 slaves, approximately one-third of whom came from refugee slave owners. Two years later it hired nearly three hundred slaves, with almost half of those from refugee slave owners.29
The rental of slave men to work on railroads in central North Carolina further divided slave families. While the railroads rented slave women as laundresses and occasionally to wield shovels and picks alongside the men, more than 95 percent of slaves rented by railroads were men, usually between the ages of fifteen and thirty.30 Hired by a South Carolina planter to supervise his slaves working on a North Carolina railroad, an overseer noted that the men had a “great desire to hear from their families.” The overseer requested that the planter inform him “so as to enable me to tell the fellows how their families are[;] it would have a good effect.”31
Josiah Collins, a Washington County planter, was typical of the refugee slave owners who rented their slaves to the North Carolina Railroad. Census records for 1860 indicate that he was one of the wealthiest slave owners in North Carolina, with 328 slaves and hundreds of acres under cultivation at Somerset Plantation, not far from the Pettigrew brothers. Like many eastern planters, he relocated himself, his family, and their domestic servants to Hillsborough in April 1862. Collins left sixty-six slaves, primarily older men and women, at his Somerset Plantation, under the supervision of an overseer. He sent 171 slaves to a recently acquired plantation in Franklin County that he called “Hurry Scurry,” a name that reflected the haste with which he removed his slaves there. Collins’s decision to split his slaves between Washington, Orange, and Franklin Counties reflected a careful balance between his desire to protect his property in the Confederate interior with a practical consideration of the cost of removing and maintaining his slave property. Even after Union soldiers repeatedly visited Somerset Plantation during the spring and summer of 1863 and his overseer pleaded with him to remove his slaves, Collins refused to do so. Even news that his house had been vandalized and looted did not persuade him to relocate the remainder of his slaves to the Piedmont.32
Unlike most refugees, Collins was able to acquire a new plantation for his refugeed slaves. Presumably, Collins expected that his slaves would, at minimum, produce enough to be self-sustaining. He planned for them not only to grow their own food but also to produce their own clothing and shoes. However, he quickly discovered that his ambitious scheme proved unwieldy, as he was unable to secure usable cotton cards and the farm never produced adequate foodstuffs. In May 1863 he received a letter from his friend Archibald Arrington, a Nash County planter and politician, who expressed his “doubts as to the purchase you made in Franklin [County]. I am apprehensive your people will not be able to raise a support on the farm & if so the deficiency will add to your already heavy expenses incurred for their maintenance & comfort. Your losses have been very great, but when you consider that others less prudent have been totally ruined you ought to feel thankful that you have saved so much from the hands of our ruthless invaders.”33 Shortly thereafter, Collins decided to rent thirty-seven of his slaves at Hurry Scurry, including his most valuable male slaves, to the railroad.
Despite the initial attraction, most slave owners soon discovered that working conditions on railroads imperiled the lives of their slaves. Poorly fed, housed, and clothed, slaves working on Confederate railroads suffered from disease, malnutrition, and exhaustion. Death and crippling injuries were common. Of the tihirty-seven slaves rented out by Josiah Collins (and after his death in June 1863, by his widow) to the North Carolina Railroad, four died. In February 1862 Peter and Alexander, two slaves hired by the Wilmington and Manchester Railroad from a South Carolina refugee, were run over by a reversing train, killing Peter and significantly injuring Alexander. In November of that same year, a train accident on the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad killed a black brakeman who had been recently rented to the railroad.34
Under such working conditions, most slave owners rented their slaves to a railroad only if no other option was available. George Davidson, an Iredell County planter, stipulated in his rental contracts that his slaves “are not to [be] put to work on any Gold Mine, Rail Road, Iron Factories or any work connected therewith.” In 1862 Catherine Edmondston’s husband considered “the expediency of taking a Contract on the Coal Fields R R, so as to place our men hands at least in safety. O! the sword of Damocles hangs over our heads & it may fall at any moment.”35 The number of insurance claims filed for the deaths of rented slaves reflected the peril they faced working on Confederate railroads in central North Carolina. According to records of the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company in Raleigh, the state’s largest insurer of slaves, the rate of claims on slave policies nearly doubled during the Civil War.36 One planter heard from a foreman overseeing his slaves rented to a railroad that “your negroes ar verry much Disatisfide tha cant satisfy those men on the Road with all tha can doo.” His informant warned him that working conditions on the railroad, compounded with inadequate clothing and shoes, would likely result in high rates of mortality and desertion among the slaves. Furthermore, as the railroad charged planters for feeding and clothing the slaves against the rental price, the overseer thought it likely that “you will loose more than you will Make.”37
Unable to find other renters to take his slaves, Charles Pettigrew rented them to work on the Piedmont Railroad in January 1863. Telling his wife that he did “not altogether like the treatment of the negroes, I conducted to go up the country to see if I could find a [new] place for the negroes.” Failing in this endeavor, he went to visit the slaves, encamped some eighteen miles north of Greensboro. There he found them living on short rations (which the railroad charged at exorbitant rates against Pettigrew’s account) and many of them “sick with something like measles.” Their living conditions, he noted, were “dreadfully crowded and if summer finds them in this state I am sure there will be great death among them.” Moreover, he observed that because of the military necessity for the railroad connection, his slaves were “not allowed one moment’s leisure to rest, neither men nor women.”38
For several months, Pettigrew attempted to find new employment for his slaves, without success. In April 1863 he visited them to find that their conditions had declined. They complained that they had been denied rations and were “never allowed to see the light of day at their quarters.” Pettigrew also discovered through conversations with an acquaintance in Greensboro that slaves working on the railroad were often beaten severely and threatened with being shot. Although he contemplated buying a farm nearby and relocating his slaves there, Pettigrew kept most of his slaves working on the Piedmont Railroad despite the conditions. When he visited them a third time in August 1863, Pettigrew saw that his slaves “unquestionably work, very hard, and have asked me to take them from the road.” Despite their pleas, Pettigrew rationalized keeping them on the railroad as they “would be much less satisfied with the scant amount of food I can supply them with on a farm.”39
Pettigrew’s admission that he could not properly provide for the material needs of his slaves undermined whatever paternalistic claims he had to mastery.40 Despite their pleadings, Pettigrew appeared powerless to protect them from physical brutality. In short, Pettigrew forfeited the primary obligations that Southern slave owners claimed entitled them to own other people. Charles Pettigrew’s dilemma was not uncommon, as many refugee slave owners found their claims to mastery slipping away. As historian Wayne Durrill has pointed out, slave removal created a “crisis in paternalism.” Because slave owners could not adequately feed, clothe, house, or even protect their human property, slaves “protested loudly, slowed down their work, and, as a last resort, ran away or plotted their revenge in secret.”41
While male slaves were frequently rented to railroads, refugee slave owners often rented both female and male slaves to hospitals, another wartime growth industry in central North Carolina. The first military hospital in North Carolina opened in Raleigh in May 1861 and others were soon established in Weldon, Wilson, Greensboro, Goldsboro, Tarboro, Salisbury, and Charlotte. By 1863 Raleigh was home to three general hospitals, making it a significant medical center within the Confederacy. By 1865 North Carolina was home to thirteen Confederate general hospitals and many smaller temporary and wayside medical facilities. The majority of the manual labor performed at these hospitals was conducted by rented slaves, many of whom had been brought to the North Carolina Piedmont by refugee slave owners. Josiah Collins’s widow, for instance, rented out more than thirty of her slaves to four Confederate hospitals in 1864 and 1865. Like railroads, Confederate hospitals in central North Carolina advertised heavily to entice refugee slave owners to rent out their human property. Readers of the Daily Confederate, a Raleigh newspaper, would have found three different advertisements on December 17, 1864, to rent their slaves to nearby hospitals. Pettigrew Hospital in Raleigh looked to hire fifty or sixty slaves as “Nurses, Cooks, and Laundresses.” The advertisement promised high rental prices, “good rations and comfortable quarters,” though it noted that “the women must not be encumbered with children.” Competing offers from hospitals in Kittrell’s Springs and Wake Forest offered similar terms to “people wishing to hire their servants.”42
While white doctors and nurses tended directly to wounded or ill soldiers, rented slaves performed the majority of the physical labor at Confederate hospitals. Slave men carried patients into the hospital, and when, as was often the case, the patients did not survive their stay, slaves carried their bodies out of the hospital and dug their graves. Rented slaves also cleaned privies, washed wounded soldiers, chopped wood, cleaned bedding, did laundry, and prepared and served meals. While some of these tasks would have been familiar to plantation slaves, the wartime hospital context often made them unfamiliar. Fearing that slaves made poor nurses, hospital officials attempted to closely supervise their labor, particularly when they had direct contact with patients. What little privacy or autonomy plantation slaves had within slave quarters or in the fields beyond an overseer’s view disappeared under the close supervision of hospital administrators.43
The growing slave population and increased fears of slave rebellion led many communities in central and western North Carolina to expand slave patrols and in some communities to begin patrols for the first time. In 1861 Granville County doubled its slave patrols, and Davie County significantly increased pay for patrollers. Writing from Yanceyville, the seat of Caswell County in the northern Piedmont, James McKee informed his sister that “we have to keep a strict patrol over the negroes in this county as there is so many of them.” The dramatic increase in its slave population led Yadkin County to implement slave patrols for the first time. One farmer wrote to the county judge in 1864 that “I deem it necessary that some one should suggest to you the idea of having some patrols appointed for this district. If there ever was a time it was needed it is now.” Removed slave William Sykes remembered that “de patteroller wus thick dem days.”44
Fear of slave violence was not unwarranted, as violence by refugeed slaves appeared endemic in central North Carolina. In early 1863 two slave owners were murdered by their slaves in Orange County. In the aftermath of these murders, planter Paul Cameron wrote to Governor Vance, “As you might suppose the community is much excited and I am told a strong disposition prevails to take the matter in hand & execute the slaves without waiting the action of the court.” Orange County sheriff Hugh Guthrie urged Vance to expedite the trial in order to pacify the panicked white populace. A young Wilmington refugee living in Laurinburg remembered that in early 1865 they uncovered “a dreadful plot . . . among the negroes to murder the white people and take possession of their property.” Some white Piedmont residents sought to relocate themselves further west because of the threat posed by the increased slave population in central North Carolina. One Caswell County man wrote to a relative in Cherokee County that “if I go to the war, Fannie speaks of going up to the mountains and staying until I return as it is much safer up there than it is here as there is so many negroes here.”45
These episodes of slave violence suggest that refugeed slaves were emboldened to forcefully resist their own enslavement. The case of Henrietta, one of Josiah Collins’s slaves, is illustrative. With her six children, Henrietta was among the slaves that Collins removed from Washington County to his Hurry Scurry plantation in the Piedmont. Starting in early January 1863, Collins received several requests to hire house servants. Dr. F. M. Hubbard, a particularly persistent correspondent from Chapel Hill, wrote no fewer than five letters in January and February 1863, requesting to rent a capable cook, as his own “is an old woman—nearly seventy as I suppose—who is not infrequently disabled by her infirmities” and his only alternative was “putting my wife & daughters in the kitchen to roast & boil. I have no prospect of any cook but Henrietta, except as I have indicated: nor do I see how I can do well without one.”46 Somewhat reluctantly, Collins rented Henrietta to Hubbard in February 1863, separating her from her children.
Only three months later, however, Collins received a letter from Hubbard indicating that “I desire to return Henrietta to your keeping.” Hubbard cited several reasons for no longer wishing to employ Henrietta. First, he noted that “I do not think she is happy or contented here, though she has little to do & I have tried to make her comfortable. She would do better, I think, among her old associates.” Undoubtedly, Henrietta’s separation from her children and other family members made her sullen. Second, Hubbard cited “the difficulty of providing food & clothing for my household. My salary has gone down, & prices have gone up so far beyond my expectation, & are like[ly] to go much higher, that I really fear I can not long continue to feed even all the mouths that I must now provide for.” Like many residents of the central Piedmont, Hubbard was bearing the stress of rampant wartime inflation. He hoped that Collins was “ready to receive her again, as you were not desirous to part with her. If so I will return her to you whenever you may choose, & make such compensation for her services as you may think right.” When Collins did not respond promptly to Hubbard’s letter, Henrietta took matters into her own hands. In a tersely worded letter, Hubbard informed Collins that he was returning Henrietta immediately. “I return Henrietta to your keeping today,” he wrote. “I should of course have waited till I had heard from you, but for the fact that my kitchen was set on fire yesterday morning, & I suspect by her agency. I am not willing to keep even for a day one of whom I have such apprehensions. I hope you will excuse . . . the lack of ceremony in my return of her to you.”47
Refugeed slaves also appear to have run away in disproportionate numbers. Advertisements for fugitive slaves published in Piedmont newspapers between 1862 and 1865 suggest that slaves removed from eastern North Carolina often attempted to flee to Union lines, despite the considerable distance intended to mitigate such flight. An advertisement in the Fayetteville Observer announced in 1863 that a slave refugeed to Anson County had run away and that his owner believed he would “endeavor to get to the Yankees, having been raised, I think, somewhere in Eastern North Carolina.” Similarly, the Daily Confederate in Raleigh speculated that a runaway slave in Graham would “endeavor to reach Newbern, where he was raised.” While most refugeed slaves who ran away sought freedom by fleeing to Union-occupied eastern North Carolina, others attempted to reconnect with family members relocated elsewhere in central North Carolina. In June 1864 a refugee slave owner in Bladen County thought that a twenty-five-year-old slave who had recently run away “may be making his way up to Lincolnton, as his wife has been recently taken there [by her owner] . . . or he may be trying to get to the yankees.” Similarly, a slave owner in Guilford County advertised in 1864 that a teenage male slave had run away. According to the advertisement, Orman had “formerly belonged to Col. Clark, of Newbern, but has been living in the counties of Alamance and Guilford since the commencement of the war. He has a wife living in Graham, and will probably be found lurking in that vicinity. He intimated to the balance of the negroes, some weeks ago, that he intended to go to the Yankees, and will perhaps, try to make his way to them.”48
Rented refugeed slaves were particularly likely to run away, especially those rented to railroads, because of poor working conditions and inadequate supervision.49 In late April 1864 the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad advertised a reward of fifty dollars for the return of a runaway rented slave; weeks later the High Shoals Iron Works in Gaston County offered seventy-five dollars for three runaways who had been rented from a Beaufort County refugee.50 A month later, the Endor Iron Works in Chatham County advertised that two rented slaves had escaped, including “a desperate negro called Charles Hunter, who committed an assault on our Overseer and stole from him one of Colt’s Navy Pistols, with which he is now armed.”51 In November 1864 the Western Democrat in Charlotte ran an advertisement for a runaway slave named Dick who had in the previous two years been rented to the North Carolina Railroad; the Wilmington, Charlotte, and Rutherford Railroad; and the Navy Yard in Charlotte.52
Refugee planters and slave renters complained that more passive forms of slave resistance also proliferated, especially work slowdowns. George Foushee complained to William Pettigrew that a slave he had rented, a cook named Mary Jane, was perpetually ill. During her first three weeks as Foushee’s cook, she rendered “very little service.” From his observations, Foushee concluded that “she don’t seem to be very bad off, just sick enough to keep [her] from work,” leading him to wonder if “a good deal of it is deception.” Many rented slaves ran away to return to their owners and their families. Less than a week after he had rented out a slave boy to a neighbor, Rev. Henry Smith of Greensboro was surprised to find that he had returned. Reverend Smith recorded in his diary that Jim “complains of being sick . . . [and] is very unwilling to go back.” Over the next two months, Jim ran away from his renter at least three times, each time returning to Reverend Smith. Rufus Patterson reported “a general spirit of devilment” among slaves in Lenoir. “I deem it best to be constantly on the lookout. Our negroes need watching.”53
Slave discipline seems to have relaxed somewhat in the war’s final years, especially among slave renters, who often felt that they lacked the authority to discipline slaves and worried that forceful correction might encourage slaves to run away. While these concessions may have enabled slave renters to maintain some authority over an increasingly restless refugeed slave population, they undermined slave masters’ claims to absolute authority over their slaves. As historian Stephen Ash has noted, “every concession granted to keep blacks at home, every appeal to argument instead of the whip, marked the further ebbing of the life force of the peculiar institution.”54
White refugees had more to worry about than the erosion of mastery. The crowded conditions in the North Carolina Piedmont provided fertile ground for the spread of epidemic disease. The movement of millions of soldiers and civilians created vectors for contagious diseases, especially smallpox, while poor sanitation contributed to the spread of typhoid fever. The specter of disease loomed strongest in urban areas where thousands of refugees congregated. In January 1863 army chaplain A. W. Mangum reported that “the small pox is raging all about” Goldsboro. In September 1864 the Fayetteville Observer reported on a significant smallpox outbreak in Caswell County. A resident wrote that “the small pox is raging in our midst. . . . It has spread to a fearful extent, and I fear has become an epidemic.” The newspaper noted that the epidemic seemed to be most virulent among slaves and that vaccination appeared to offer little immunity to the disease. A refugee living in Yanceyville, the largest town in Caswell County, observed that, “in addition to all the war troubles, we are surrounded with the smallpox.” Throughout 1863 and 1864 Raleigh had repeated smallpox outbreaks. In March 1863 newspapers reported ten to fifteen cases and at least seven deaths from smallpox just north of Raleigh. In January 1864, because “the Small Pox has again appeared in the City of Raleigh,” North Carolina surgeon general Dr. Edward Warren offered vaccinations “free of charge.” By June 1864 newspapers were reporting that “there has been no time for eighteen months that we have not had small pox in Raleigh, and we believe the same may be said of Charlotte and other communities in the State. War always brings plague, pestilence and famine; in the small pox and other troubles that have afflicted us we have the plague and pestilence, while the famine is at the very threshold of thousands of families.” The prevalence of disease in urban areas persuaded many white refugees to seek healthier environments. A refugee teacher from Virginia living in Concord, just north of Charlotte, wrote to a prospective employer in the eastern Piedmont that he sought a new home, as he had suffered “very much since I have been here from the typhoid and ague and fever.” In his letter, the refugee teacher pressed his prospective employer about conditions near his new home: “Is your section subject to ague and fever? Have you good water?” Although disease proved less deadly among Piedmont refugees than it did among their counterparts in coastal North Carolina, its prevalence was partially a result of refugees’ mobility and overcrowded living conditions.55
Many white refugee men discovered that leaving their homes not only challenged their livelihood, claims to mastery, and health but also undermined some of their rights of citizenship. By moving to the North Carolina Piedmont, many refugees became effectively disenfranchised. In July 1863 the North Carolina General Assembly passed a measure to clarify the voting rights of refugees. According to “An Act to Enable Refugees and Others to Vote for Members of Congress,” refugees who could not vote in their home counties because of their occupation by the “public enemy” could vote “in the counties where they temporarily reside,” but only so long as that county was within their congressional district. The measure did not create a mechanism for refugees temporarily living outside of their home congressional district to vote, effectively stripping most refugees of their suffrage. Of North Carolina’s ten congressional districts at the time of the bill’s passage, one was almost entirely under Union control and two others had a heavy Federal presence. For refugees from these counties to vote, they had to return home, where they would risk facing the dangers that had caused them to become refugees in the first place. Just prior to election day in November 1863, the North Carolina Standard reminded the many refugees in Raleigh that “refugees can vote for Congress in any County within the District in which they claim citizenship, but not out of it.” The newspaper encouraged “refugees from the 2d and 3d Districts to be sure to return” as “the contest will be close, and a few votes” would likely decide the result of the elections. As predicted, voter turnout in the 1863 elections was very low, especially in the three coastal districts partially or wholly under Union occupation. The vast majority of votes cast in these races came not from refugees but from soldiers, who were allowed to vote in their camps. In the First Congressional District, representing the northeasternmost corner of the state, only 2,360 votes were cast, divided between four candidates. Refugees who came to North Carolina from outside the state had stronger legal protections for the ballot. In April 1863 the Confederate Congress passed a measure that allowed refugees from Virginia, Tennessee, and Louisiana, “driven from his home by the public enemy,” to vote in military camps.56 How many refugees availed themselves of this option, however, remains difficult to ascertain.
Although voting proved difficult, many refugees remained actively politically engaged. White refugees in the North Carolina Piedmont and their political representatives urged continuing the war long after many of their neighbors had soured on the conflict. By the summer of 1863, many native residents of the Piedmont had come to the conclusion that a Confederate military victory was unlikely and that the most viable resolution was a negotiated settlement with the North, a settlement that might preserve slavery even if it did not secure Confederate independence. Many Piedmont natives rallied around peace movement advocates such as Bryan Tyson, James Leach, and William Woods Holden, the last of whom emerged as the movement’s leader and eventually its gubernatorial candidate. As the editor of Raleigh’s North Carolina Standard, Holden had initially supported secession and served as an unofficial spokesman for Governor Zebulon Vance, only to break with Vance over the merits of continuing to fight after Confederate losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The growing peace movement in the North Carolina Piedmont also provided a vehicle for opposing unpopular Confederate policies, especially conscription and burdensome taxation. The peace movement’s opposition to conscription may have emboldened draft dodgers and deserters, who became a conspicuous presence in the Piedmont, especially in the western Piedmont counties of Guilford, Randolph, Forsyth, and Davidson, sometime known as the Quaker Belt. In the fall of 1863, peace movement candidates took six of North Carolina’s ten seats in the Confederate Congress, including all of the Piedmont seats.57
In contrast to the enthusiasm with which Piedmont natives embraced the peace movement, white refugees in the Piedmont continued to support an aggressive prosecution of the war. With their homes under Union occupation and many of their slaves now living in Union refugee camps, refugees had little to gain from a negotiated settlement. Indeed, only a Confederate victory that included a reoccupation of territory taken by Union armies would allow refugees to return to their prewar prosperity. In the 1863 congressional elections, North Carolina’s refugee districts (those under Union occupation) reelected pro-war candidates. While North Carolina’s delegates in Richmond generally supported some form of negotiated peace after 1863, the representatives of the refugee districts, William N. H. Smith and Robert R. Bridgers, continued to push for independence through victory on the battlefield. Indeed, roll-call analysis of the Confederate Congress indicates that representatives from Union-occupied districts provided some of the strongest voices for an aggressive military policy and support for taxation and conscription. The political divide between refugees and native residents of the Piedmont culminated in the 1864 gubernatorial election between sitting governor Zebulon Vance and peace advocate William Woods Holden.58 While the native population split fairly evenly between Vance and Holden, refugees overwhelming sided with Vance, whom many refugees believed provided the best available route to reclaiming their homes and property. In March 1864 the Raleigh Weekly Progress reported on “a meeting of the refugees from the counties East of the Chowan river” that endorsed Governor Vance in his reelection campaign, believing him alone capable of “guid[ing] the ‘Old Ship of State’ through the rough waves of a great revolution.” In May 1864 the Raleigh Daily Confederate published “A Card to the Citizens, Soldiers, and Refugees of Pasquotank County, NC” from George Hinton, a candidate to be the county’s representative in the state legislature. Unable to communicate directly with many of his constituents, who were scattered throughout the state or in military service, Hinton relied on newspapers to disseminate his message. Among other issues, Hinton expressed his opposition to a peace convention and his support for Governor Vance.59 For George Hinton and the refugees he hoped to represent, nothing less than a continuation of the war effort, regardless of the costs, was acceptable.
While white refugee men found themselves shut out from the political process, white refugee women found themselves cut off from government relief aimed at helping soldiers’ wives. Starting in December 1862, the North Carolina legislature passed a series of acts “for the Relief of the Wives and Families of Soldiers in the Army.” Administered through county governments, the relief legislation allocated funds based on the white population in 1860. Underfunded and poorly managed, these relief efforts provided inadequate assistance to soldiers’ families, many of whom never received aid.60
Refugee women and their children found themselves almost entirely excluded from these relief efforts. County governments routinely denied aid to refugee families if their soldier had enlisted in another county, giving preference to local soldiers’ families. The Richmond County Relief Committee for Volunteers’ Families, for instance, regularly refused to provide aid for any refugee woman whose “husband is not a volunteer of this County.” In theory, the relief legislation provided that soldiers’ families from Union-occupied counties could apply to a poor-relief commissioner from their home county, although there is little evidence that these commissioners were ever appointed. Nor could refugees seek aid if their home county was within Confederate lines, as many counties adopted policies limiting aid to those in residence. Adjacent Montgomery County refused to aid a family who had relocated to Richmond County, claiming that “it’s not in accordance to their rules to assist families out of the County.” The Richmond County Relief Committee lamented that many soldiers’ families suffered because of these jurisdictional boundaries, noting that “it is desirable some uniform rule on this subject should be established.” Responding to such concerns, the North Carolina legislature amended the relief legislation to clarify the eligibility of refugee families, such that “when any family of a soldier . . . shall have removed from the county of his residence since the commencement of the war and shall have acquired a residence in another county, they shall be considered residents of the latter county and receive a share of such distribution.” Despite this modification, however, many country relief committees, facing limited resources, continued to favor local families over refugees. By the end of the war, counties such as Wake, Orange, and Guilford that had sizable refugee populations became overwhelmed by indigent soldiers’ families, some of whom went to the courts after being turned down for relief. In 1864 a soldier’s wife from Rowan County successful argued in Wake County Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions that she and her children should be eligible for “provisions . . . as indigent soldiers family.”61
Refugees continued to pour into the Piedmont during the war’s final months. In January 1865 the mayor of Greensboro wrote to Governor Vance that his city had become “fill[ed] with strangers.”62 Union general William Tecumseh Sherman’s invasion of South Carolina in February and March 1865 prompted thousands of South Carolinians to flee northward. Already overcrowded communities in the North Carolina Piedmont worried that the arrival of new refugees would overwhelm their scanty supply of housing and food. Anticipating that South Carolina refugees would inundate Charlotte, the Western Democrat urged potential refugees to remain at home. Only days before Columbia surrendered to Sherman, the newspaper declared, “We think it bad policy for families of women and children to leave their homes at the approach of the enemy.” Instead, they should “remain at their own homes as long as they are permitted to do so. We know it is risky to stay, but it is also a serious risk to leave home with no certainty of finding shelter elsewhere. The interior towns are now crowded to overflowing, and vacant houses are not to be had. It is so in this place, and we learn the same is the case elsewhere.”63
The siege and eventual burning of Columbia created a mass exodus northward, with the majority of refugees headed toward Charlotte. Among those who fled Columbia in advance of Sherman’s army was Lydia Johnston, the wife of Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston. She remembered the chaos in the city, with “the poor people flying almost terror stricken to know what they could do—many leaving with only little bundles of clothes.” Lydia Johnston left Columbia on the last train departing the city, hearing the “roar of the cannon in our ears” as the train left the depot. The journey north from Columbia to Charlotte took much longer than usual, as the overburdened locomotive managed to attain speeds only slightly faster than walking pace. When they arrived in Charlotte, Lydia Johnston and three hundred other refugee women aboard the train searched for shelter, but “none of us able to get rooms. . . . The sight of this town to-day is lamentable: women hunting in every direction for shelter—and the people themselves beginning to move off for a safer place.” Cornelia Phillips Spencer noted that the “smoke of burning Columbia” sent into flight thousands of “panic-stricken refugees, homeless and penniless” who “brought every day fresh tales of havoc and ruin.”64
Although most of the refugees fleeing Columbia were women and children, the refugee hegira included the editor of the Daily South Carolinian, who temporarily opened shop in the offices of the Charlotte Bulletin. In the final weeks of the war, the Daily South Carolinian published intermittent issues from Charlotte, some of which have survived. Less than a week after the burning of Columbia, the editor announced that “the publication of this journal having been resumed in Charlotte we shall continue, as heretofore, to give the latest and fullest intelligence of passing events.” The editor claimed that he now ran the only daily newspaper representing the interests of South Carolinians. He hoped that the newspaper could serve as a social network for South Carolina refugees in Charlotte, noting, “If any of the citizens of Columbia or Charleston, now here as refugees, will send their address to this office, they will confer a favor on friends who may desire to find them. We propose to establish a directory for the use of all such, and shall endeavor to make our office headquarters for ‘news from home.’”65 As only two other issues of the Daily South Carolinian survive from their incarnation in Charlotte, it is impossible to say whether the proposed refugee directory ever came to fruition. It reflected, however, refugees’ desire to maintain connections with their home and with each other.
A week after Sherman’s assault on Columbia, with the city now in ashes, the Western Democrat noted that “Charlotte is now overrun with refugees. It is almost, if not quite, impossible to obtain shelter for those already here, and we hear that a large number of others are expected. Under the circumstances we think it nothing but right, that those abroad who may be fleeing the enemy, should be made acquainted with the state of affairs here, in order that they may seek refuge elsewhere.” The newspaper claimed that Charlotte residents “have done and will do all that they can to assist the unfortunate, be they rich or poor, but they are now overtaxed, and we would therefore, in all kindness, advise those who may be leaving their homes, to go to the country, or some place other than Charlotte. . . . This town was crowded before the enemy advanced on Columbia, and consequentially it was impossible to accommodate many refugees from that direction.” One Charlotte resident claimed that refugees arriving from Columbia occupied all available housing, noting that “my house is a perfect hotel.” She complained that refugees consumed not only space but scarce provisions: “I have nearly exhausted all I have to eat—my eggs but few left—and very little flour—I feel worn out.” Margaret Burwell, who ran Charlotte Female Institute with her husband, wrote in February 1865 that “there is the greatest crowd of refugees from South Carolina pouring into Charlotte, we are importuned every day to take Boarders, [that] I hate to hear the bell ring. I feel sorry for them but still I can’t love my neighbors better than myself, & I really have as much as I can do now, & provisions are not to be had, price go up every day, eggs were five dollars a doz yesterday, today they are six.”66
Many Charlotte residents and refugees feared that their city would be Sherman’s next target. In late February 1865 Rev. A. W. Mangum wrote to his sister from Salisbury, not far from Charlotte, that “we are now in the mist of the worst features of the war. Day after day, it is thought that Sherman has been moving on Charlotte & this place since last Friday. First the refugees & plunder from Columbia scattered far and near along the road, crowding Charlotte particularly to its utmost capacity.” Mangum had heard that the Confederate government had ordered all government property be removed from Charlotte and Salisbury, suggesting that it did not expect to hold the region. He noted that “night and day the citizens here are running off things or burying them.” Fearing Union occupation, many retreated farther into the interior, leaving Charlotte for Greensboro. A Confederate soldier stationed near Greensboro noted that “the people of Charlotte is . . . coming into Greensboro. This country is full of refugees. All of the valuable property that is easy to move is a coming and is in Greensboro.”67
Sherman’s army did not head north from Columbia to Charlotte but turned east toward Fayetteville, entering North Carolina during the first week of March 1865. On March 11, 1865, Sherman’s forces occupied Fayetteville, with much of the town’s civilian population fleeing. Their number included many refugees who had come to Fayetteville from coastal North Carolina. In a letter published in the Raleigh Weekly Progress, “A Refugee” described the “evacuation of Fayetteville,” noting that after Confederate officials urged civilians to leave the town, “loved ones separated; fathers embracing their children; husbands and wives parted—but I must stop. The grief of such partings is too sacred for the public eye. . . . The confusion among citizens was, of course, intense.”68
From Fayetteville, Sherman marched northwest toward Goldsboro, another community crowded with refugees. Among them were eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Collier’s extended family (including her grandmother and her aunt), who had come to Everettsville, just south of Goldsboro, in August 1861 after the capture of Hatteras Island. According to her diary, Collier and her extended clan lived in her family’s house until the occupation of Fayetteville. On March 11, 1865, she noted that “everybody is in the wildest state of excitement—Goldsboro is to be evacuated in less than 24 hours—Sherman has occupied Fayetteville.” Delayed by the battles of Averasboro and Bentonville, on March 23, 1865, Sherman rendezvoused at Goldsboro with reinforcements who had marched from Wilmington, including nine regiments of U.S. Colored Troops. Rather than immediately march west on Raleigh, Sherman decided to rest and resupply his fatigued soldiers at Goldsboro. Foragers from Sherman’s army visited the Collier residence shortly after their arrival in the area. Elizabeth Collier chronicled in her diary that foragers repeatedly confronted the women in the household (her father having taken to the woods when Union soldiers arrived), demanding food and threatening violence to body and property if not obeyed. Finding that their small town was “filled with Yankees & that they were plundering the houses,” the Colliers secured a Union soldier to guard their house, although bummers looted “every thing out doors . . . all provisions taken—fences knocked down—horses, cow, carriages & buggies stolen & every thing else the wretches could lay their hands on—even to the servants clothes.” On March 27, when bummers eventually gained entrance to their home, Collier wrote, “Now they commenced their sacking of the house & did not cease until they had taken everything to eat the house contained.” When told that the bummers would return later that night to burn the house down, Elizabeth Collier and her family fled to a neighbor’s house and, when that residence came under threat, to Goldsboro. There Collier applied to Union general John M. Schofield for a pass to cross into Confederate lines. Although granted the pass, Collier and her mother were permitted to take only two trunks with them. Surprisingly, Elizabeth Collier, the formerly wealthy daughter of slaveholders, did not despair over having to abandon most of her worldly belongings but rejoiced when she saw Confederate soldiers again, noting in her diary that “I really do not think I was ever so happy in all my life, as I was when I first saw our men—rebel soldiers in the grey jackets.” Like many refugees, Collier and her family went to Hillsborough, where they stayed until the end of the conflict.69
The final weeks of the war made even Piedmont natives into potential refugees. In early March 1865, Lucy Bryan, a Raleigh native, wrote to her friend and old classmate Sue Capehart, a refugee from Bertie County living in Granville County, less than forty miles to the north. She revealed that Raleigh residents worried about Sherman’s inevitable march west from Fayetteville to the state capitol, as “everybody seems to be in a state of excitement about the Yankees.” Bryan claimed that she tried not to obsess about their imminent arrival, though the tone of her letter suggests that she failed in this effort. She also distinguished between her own situation and that of her friend, who had experienced difficulty in securing housing in the Piedmont, noting that “I know you feel so good, having a home of your own, how disagreeable it must be to be a refugee. We have certainly been particularly blessed in that respect, for which I am more than thankful.” Three weeks later Lucy Bryan faced the prospect of becoming a refugee herself. She wrote to Sue Capehart on March 23, 1863, that she had been “busy packing up my ‘rags’ (for they are not much more) to get away from the Yankees. I have not had time to do anything scarcely.”70
Most Piedmont residents, both refugees and natives, knew that their options for eluding the approaching Union army were limited. By the end of March 1865, not only was Sherman’s army, more than ninety thousand strong, preparing to march west from Goldsboro, but Union raids led by Gen. George Stoneman had entered North Carolina from the west. Frequently dividing his forces, numbering some six thousand soldiers, Stoneman attacked Boone on March 28 and by April 10 had forced the surrender of Salem and Winston in the western Piedmont. Bounded by Sherman in the east and Stoneman in the west, refugees and natives in the central Piedmont had nowhere left to go.
Despite these limited options, some Piedmont refugees and natives engaged in a frantic scrabble to put as much distance between themselves and Union troops as possible. With the boundaries of the Confederacy contracting around them, these refugees faced increasingly narrow choices about where they could run. The plight of Tennessee refugee Dr. J. G. M. Ramsey reflected the futile efforts that many refugees took to avoid becoming ensnared by the Union noose. Like many Charlotte residents, Dr. Ramsey believed that Charlotte would be Sherman’s next target after Columbia. He noted that “Sherman was advancing through and desolating South Carolina and my office was in such danger as to lead me to prepare for a further hegira.” Ramsey wrote to his wife that he “was going to, I knew not where, but that Sherman should not get either me or my money if I could help it.” Holding bank reserves that he had brought from Knoxville, Ramsey buried his “treasure” in the secluded banks of the Catawba River, then took a train north to Greensboro, where his train broke down. There, in early April, he heard “rumors of the approaching crisis at Richmond” and of Stoneman’s raid near Salem. Although Greensboro had been considered one of the safest and most secure locations within the Confederacy, this news brought about “a general stampede from Greensboro.” What location could be safer than Greensboro, however, was unclear, as “we could get no further north and very little further south.” Ramsey decided that west remained the only viable option and made his way to Salisbury. There he found that “every public and private house was full of people. . . . At the mansion house I found a small space between the feet of a small table unoccupied. I crept into it. The entire floor of the room was covered over with men, some snoring, some drunk, some sober. I slept little and rested none.” His wife, Margaret Ramsey, who remained in Concord, just north of Charlotte, reflected in her diary on how the war had dispersed her family. On April 16, 1865, less than a week after her husband desperately huddled under a table in Salisbury, she noted that “now the household [was] scattered, no two together.” Her children were spread across the country and “their father I know not where.”71
Longtime Piedmont refugees recognized that Sherman’s march into North Carolina meant the war was nearing its end and that no place within the Confederacy would be safe. The Cronly family, which had left Wilmington for Laurinburg in 1862, heard “rumors of the burning of Columbia and the terrible sufferings” of its residents. The news “greatly alarmed us, for we now fully realized that there was no escape for us from the same fearful visitation.” They also worried about the behavior of their slaves. Although the Cronlys’ slaves “performed their daily duties as usual . . . they often had meetings at each others houses and were no doubt better posted as to Sherman’s movement than” their owners. Indeed, the Cronlys suspected that their slaves engaged in clandestine “communications with the enemy.”72
Refugees prepared both physically and psychologically for the eventual arrival of Union soldiers. Many refugees hid their valuables either on their person or in clandestine caches, burying their jewelry and silverware late at night, often worrying that their slaves would reveal its location. Stationed with his unit in defense of Petersburg, William Blount Rodman instructed his wife about what to do were Union soldiers to take Greensboro, where she had lived with their children as refugees since 1862. Although he thought it unlikely that the Confederacy would allow Greensboro to fall, he urged her to “have on hand at all times corn enough to feed the family on for about a month.” If Union soldiers visited, she should “remain at home in the house, be calm, dignified and civil. If you can see any officer ask him for protection. Give them what they ask for if you have it, because they can take it. Conceal your jewelry about your person.” Rodman tried to assuage his wife’s fears about what would happen were Union soldiers to visit, noting that “I do not think you would be in any personal danger. I have never heard in all their raids and robberies of any personal injury done to a lady. Calmness and a dignified lady like bearing will tell on the rudest men as well as on gentlemen.”73
Anticipating that Sherman’s forces would occupy Raleigh within a month, Rev. Drury Lacy wrote to reassure his daughter in March 1865 that he and his wife were safe, saying, “Raleigh is considerably stirred up about the Yankees, though I have seen nothing like a panic.” Although some people had fled Raleigh and government supplies were being relocated to Greensboro, Lacy noted that “I don’t think of being a refugee, unless they occupy the place & compel everyone to take the oath. I shall have then to take my leave.” Three weeks later Lacy again wrote to his daughter, saying, “We are at the edge of the Crater and it is crumbling beneath our feet every moment. Sherman’s army are expected here some time this week. . . . If the enemy should come this week this is probably the last letter you will receive from me unless they in their vindictiveness banish me from the City, which they may do unless I take & subscribe the Oath which I think they will inflict upon all who remain in the City.”74
The final influx of refugees into the North Carolina Piedmont came during the fall of Petersburg and the evacuation of Richmond. On March 29, 1865, Jefferson Davis put his wife, Varina, their children, and a small entourage on a train bound for Charlotte, while he stayed in Richmond for the inevitable final assault of Union forces on Lee’s army at Petersburg. At her husband’s direction, Varina Davis brought very little with her, although he did provide her with a small purse of gold coins and a pistol for self-protection, instructing her on how to load and fire the weapon. Just before she boarded the train, Jefferson Davis told her that since she “cannot remain undisturbed in our own country,” once in Charlotte, she should “make for the Florida coast and from there board a ship to a foreign country.” For Varina Davis, this journey would mark her second iteration as a refugee in the North Carolina Piedmont, having spent the summer of 1862 in Raleigh during the Peninsula Campaign. Because of the poor state of the rolling stock and rail lines between Richmond and Charlotte, her journey took four days. Indeed, her train broke down shortly after it left Richmond, forcing her to spend the night aboard. Her route south, a route used less than a week later by her husband and most of the Confederate cabinet, took her over the Danville connection, the recently constructed but already worn-out railroad link between Danville, Virginia, and Greensboro, built primarily by refugeed slaves from eastern North Carolina. On April 1, 1865, en route to Charlotte, Varina Davis wrote to her husband from Greensboro that “rumors numerous & not defined” of Union raids engulfed the city. She expected that her party would be able to make it to Charlotte unhindered. In Charlotte Varina Davis rented a modest house from Abram Weill, a Jewish merchant. She encountered many other prominent Confederate refugees in Charlotte, including Lydia Johnston, the wife of Gen. Joseph Johnston, Myra Semmes, the wife of Confederate senator Thomas J. Semmes, and Confederate senator Louis T. Wigfall, who had fled Richmond with his family in early March 1865. There Varina Davis awaited information about the situation in Richmond.
Only a few days after her arrival in Charlotte, Varina Davis received word that Richmond had fallen and that her husband had evacuated. “The news of Richmond,” she wrote her husband, “came upon me like the ‘abomination of desolation.’” Jefferson Davis himself left Richmond on April 2, 1865, accompanied by the Confederate cabinet, after receiving a telegram from Robert E. Lee that he was abandoning Petersburg, twenty-five miles south of Richmond. His overloaded train made slow progress out of Richmond to Danville, where Davis sent a telegram to his wife alerting her of his departure from Richmond. Davis stayed in Danville less than a week, until news reached him that General Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. From Danville, Davis moved fifty miles south to Greensboro, close to General Johnston’s headquarters. Like the thousands of refugees then living in Greensboro, Davis hoped that this Piedmont city would isolate him from the threat of Union armies. Davis also hoped that Greensboro could serve as a temporary capitol for the Confederacy, from which he and the rest of the cabinet could devise a plan to continue the war. The Greensboro railroad depot operated as a de facto Confederate office, with many cabinet members residing in the train coaches. Davis himself stayed with the family of John Taylor Wood, his nephew and aide, whose wife and children had come to Greensboro as refugees. Receiving a hostile welcome from locals, who worried about the consequences if the Confederate president were captured in their town, and after receiving repeated disillusioning reports on the military situation, Davis and the rest of mobile Confederate government moved on to Charlotte. In the intervening days since Varina Davis had traveled from Greensboro to Charlotte, Stoneman’s cavalry had cut the railroad lines between the towns, forcing the presidential entourage to travel by horse and wagon.
Jefferson Davis and his party arrived in Charlotte on April 18. He discovered upon his arrival that Varina Davis and their children had already moved on to South Carolina, because, as she wrote her husband, “rumors of a raid on Charlotte induced me to decide to come this side of Charlotte.” As in Greensboro, Davis received a cool welcome in Charlotte, unable to find shelter except in a modest house owned by a Northern-born merchant, because of “a threat made by Stoneman’s troopers to burn every house giving refuge to Jefferson Davis.” While waiting to meet with his host, Davis received a telegram informing him of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. As Davis pondered the telegram’s implications, a gathering crowd of soldiers and civilians demanded that he make a speech, one that ended up being one of his final public addresses as president of the Confederacy. The crowd undoubtedly included refugees who sought shelter in one of the few locations still nominally under Confederate control. Davis warned them of a coming “very great disaster,” presumably a reference to Johnston’s impending surrender to Sherman, then being negotiated at the Bennett homestead, just east of Hillsborough. Thanking his audience for their enthusiasm and apologizing for not being able to deliver better news, Davis called himself “a refugee from the capital of the country.” Davis’s self-identification as a refugee indicates how persuasive the refugee experience was in the Confederacy. Indeed, for the president of the Confederacy to label himself a refugee suggests that by the end of the war, it had become a confederacy of refugees.75