East Baton Rouge Parish Library

Executing Daniel Bright, race, loyalty, and guerrilla violence in a coastal Carolina community, 1861-1865, Barton A. Myers

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

contains biographical information

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

illustrationsmapsplates

index present

non fiction

Executing Daniel Bright

bibliography

313017811

Barton A. Myers

Conflicting worlds

race, loyalty, and guerrilla violence in a coastal Carolina community, 1861-1865

Executing Daniel Bright examines the guerrilla war in northeastern North Carolina's Albemarle Sound-Great Dismal Swamp region during the American Civil War by telling the story of how one man went from antebellum farmer and early war Confederate infantry volunteer to guerrilla fighter, who was executed in December 1863, for his involvement in an irregular resistance to Union army incursions along the coast of the state. This book uses Bright's life and abrupt death as a window into the wider experience of local guerrilla conflict on the North Carolina coast and as a representation of a larger pattern of retaliatory executions and public murders meant to enforce a message about appropriate political loyalty and military conduct on the Confederate home front. The story traces the contours of divided political loyalties in the community of Pasquotank County from the early antebellum period through the end of the Civil War and focuses particular attention on the origins and actions of the influential white unionist minority and free black residents of the community, who became embroiled in local military events. Revising a prevailing myth of North Carolina's popular Civil War mythology, the book concludes that guerrilla violence was not isolated to the highlands or piedmont region of the North Carolina home front but stretched from one corner of the state to the other

The roots of Civil War loyalty : black labor and Whig politics in Pasquotank County -- "The work of evil minded citizens" : divided loyalties and the origins of guerrilla war in the North Carolina no-man's-land -- "An Elysium and an asylum to the buffaloes and Union men" : Edward Wild's raid and the execution of Daniel Bright -- "Without aid or protection from any source" : negotiating neutrality for Pasquotank County -- Epilogue : the problem of verifying loyalty in the no-man's-land