Even before a convention of the people of North Carolina passed an ordinance of secession on the first day that it convened, May 20, 1861, preparations were being made for war. In the previous month, for example, the Governor of North Carolina had ordered the seizure of all Federal property in the state. The General Assembly, on May 2, 1861, made it illegal to administer to state officials “any oath or affirmation to support the constitution of the United States.” And on April 29, 1861, my great-great-great-grandfather Daniel Hackney, Jr., was asked to chair a meeting for the purpose of establishing a “Home Guard” for Chatham County, where he lived. His report about that and another meeting several days later was published on May 22, 1861, in the same issue of Raleigh’s State Journal newspaper that announced the passage of secession.

Hackney and three others were appointed to visit Raleigh for a conversation with the governor about this company, which was being formed by those too old for or legally excused from service in “the regular army.” Hackney was elected 3rd lieutenant of the company, and together with the others:

The company pledged themselves, by resolution, to protect the peace and security of the District, and to look to the interest of those who may volunteer in the service of their country, and especially to take care of their wives and children. . . . The company by resolutions, pledged their services, their fortunes, their honors, and their lives to protect the institutions, and the civil and religious freedom of their native land.

On the same page of the State Journal that Hackney’s report appeared, there was a summary of a report from the Southern Baptist Convention. The newspaper noted the importance of that document, which “approves of the Southern Confederacy,”  as “an expression of sentiment from the largest religious denomination in the country.” It goes on to state that “[the report] will form a bright spot in their history, and be an honor to them for all generations to come.” But that was a false prophecy.

The Southern Baptist Convention had been formed in 1845 when white Baptists in the South withdrew fellowship from Baptists in the North after a slave-owner had been forbidden from becoming a missionary. 150 years later, the “messengers” of the Southern Baptist Convention, assembled in Atlanta, Georgia, acknowledged that historical reality, apologized for their failure to support the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and stated that they “lament and repudiate historic acts of evil such as slavery from which we continue to reap a bitter harvest, and . . . recognize that the racism which yet plagues our culture today is inextricably tied to the past.”

Similar tensions and strained relationships emerged in other traditions too.

As noted in the May 29, 1861, issue of the North Carolina Standard newspaper, the Rev. Dr. William Norwood, Rector of Christ Church (Episcopal) in Georgetown in the District of Columbia, refused to allow the prayer for “the President of the United States and all in Civil Authority” to be read in worship for his congregation. Like the rest of his colleagues, Dr. Norwood, a native North Carolinian, had received explicit instructions from his bishop to continue to use that prayer and been warned that failure to do so would be in “willful violation of his ordination vow.” Later that same year, he resigned as the Rector of Christ Church and moved to Richmond, Virginia.

Even the Moravians in North Carolina, who were collectively and culturally further removed from the centers of power than both Southern Baptists and Episcopalians, wrestled with politics and prayer. The records of the Board of Elders for the Salem Congregation (Moravian) in Salem (now Winston-Salem) include this description of a discussion on April 17, 1861, about praying for the President of the United States:

The prayer for the President and the Union in our litany was spoken of. For a considerable time it was prayed every Sunday, and its repeated omission of late has been remarked upon. The Board did not come to a determination whether or not it should be regularly used under the circumstances.

Like Salem, Bethania was another Moravian town in North Carolina. And like other ordained ministers in this Christian tradition with German roots, the pastor of the Bethania congregation kept detailed church records, including a congregational diary. The Rev. Jacob F. Siewers’ last entry in that diary for 1860 refers to a worship service on January 31 with lots of hymn singing and a simple meal together called a lovefeast. It was a custom to gather in the church on New Year’s Eve for that service in order to enter the New Year with prayer. He concludes the entry with his own prayer, which is a heartbreaking plea to God for mercy in the coming storm of 1861:

Cloudy and miserable under foot. . . . About 8 P.M. we had the lovefeast at Bethania; there were several pieces sung by the choir. In spite of the high water and miserable roads there was quite a number in attendance. . . . After 12 a prayer was offered, and the Text of New Year’s Day read. Thus closed this eventful year, with heavy clouds lowering around the destiny of our Beloved Country. May God, our God in Mercy spare us from the fearful results of Disunion and Civil War, and cement us again in peaceful Brotherhood, and Christian Bonds as a nation.

The storm of violence, of course, did eventually appear on the horizon, beginning with the first major battle of the Civil War in Virginia in July of that New Year. What it revealed, however, were not only divisions between North and South but also between the Confederate government of North Carolina and the administration of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, and between North Carolinians loyal to that Confederate government in Raleigh and those who resisted it to protect their loved ones and their livelihoods.

That tension between citizens left behind in their communities and the Home Guard, which supposedly existed to protect them, was very high in the “Quaker Belt” of the central piedmont, where Quakers, Moravians, and Wesleyan Methodists dominated the religious landscape, where I was raised, and where most of my ancestors lived in the Old North State.

And they lived on both sides of that divide. While my great-great-great-grandfather served as an officer in the Home Guard for Chatham County, I have other ancestors who were born to Moravian parents in Forsyth County and were drafted as enlisted soldiers in “the regular army.”  But there are clues this was not their war, and their cousins would take that disaffection with rebellion to another level of resistance.

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On April 12, 1861, South Carolina artillery fired on Fort Sumter, which was surrendered the next day. On April 15, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln asked for 75,000 troops collectively from states that remained loyal to the Union to suppress the rebellion. The Governor of North Carolina, John Ellis, refused to send any troops for what he envisioned as a military invasion. In his response to the U.S. Secretary of War, Governor Ellis described the President’s request as a “violation of the Constitution and a gross usurpation of power.” On April 17, 1861, he issued his own proclamation, calling for the General Assembly of North Carolina to meet in a special session on May 1, 1861, for the purpose of  “[united] action in defense of the sovereignty of North Carolina.” Governor Ellis also ordered the seizure of all Federal property in the state.

On the first day of that special session, legislation was passed to hold an election on May 13, 1861, to select 120 delegates to a convention of the people of North Carolina. Unlike the earlier vote in March, this was not about whether to hold a convention but only about whom to send. The General Assembly had already made the decision on behalf of the people that the convention would meet in Raleigh on May 20, 1861. Furthermore, there would be no restrictions on its scope and no popular referendum on its decisions. The mistakes of the past wouldn’t be repeated this time.

Above and to the right is a partial list of counties in North Carolina and the delegates from those counties who were elected to serve at that convention. The list was published in Raleigh on the front page of the North Carolina Standard newspaper on May 22, 1861. In several places, the names of the entire slate are given along with the actual vote count, including the results from Chatham County.

That’s where my great-great-great-grandfather Daniel Hackney, Jr., a former state politician and an enslaver of 14 human beings, lived. Note that his name appears on the list of eight candidates in Chatham County. Three of those candidates were elected as delegates. Hackney came in sixth. Also on the front page that day was a defense of “the old Union men,” like Hackney, “who exhausted all honorable means to save the Union.”

The delegates who were elected to that convention enslaved an average of 30.5 people each and came with opinions that had been shaped by the President’s request for troops. More than half of them belonged to the elite planter class based on the total number of people they enslaved. The convention voted unanimously to secede from the Union on the first day it convened, May 20, 1861. But that is not to say that everyone in the room was equally enthusiastic about that decision. The editor of the North Carolina Standard was there as a delegate and later recalled the scene in this way:

I remember well that when the act of Secession was consummated the body looked like a sea, partly in storm, partly calm, the Secessionists shouting and throwing up their hats and rejoicing, and the Conservatives sitting quietly, calm, and depressed.

My great-great-great-grandfather would have been in the latter group if he had been elected as a delegate. But it’s important to remember the embarrassing truth that he and most of the other slaveholding, pro-slavery Unionists were only reluctant secessionists because they believed it would eventually lead to the destruction of the institution of slavery. They, of course, were right about that. Yet they would not remain in the Union if it required them to bear arms against South Carolinians.

One of those Unionists-turned-secessionists was Zebulon Vance, who would later become the wartime Governor of North Carolina. In some of his correspondence before he had concluded his term as a U.S. Representative, he wrote that it would be suicidal for North Carolina and the other states of the Upper South (i.e., Delaware, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri) to join forces with the Lower South. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what half of them did. Listed in order of secession, those four states were Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.[1] Zeb Vance’s private fears, shared by many, would prove to be prophetic.

This is how secession was announced in Raleigh’s State Journal newspaper on May 22, 1861, including a sick and twisted use of the biblical story of the Exodus (i.e., the suffering of the children of Israel in bondage in Egypt, their deliverance by the hand of God, and their arrival in the Promised Land) to describe the imagined suffering of secessionists and their liberation in this moment. There is no mention, of course, of the enslaved Africans who were actually in bondage and comprised 33% of the total population of North Carolina, according to the 1860 United States Federal Census:

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1 BACK TO POST Yes, I am aware of the debate over different ways to order this list. North Carolina had the last state convention to pass an ordinance of secession on May 20, 1861, while the earlier ordinances passed in Virginia and Tennessee were ratified by popular referendums in each of those states on May 23 and June 8, 1861, respectively.

On February 28, 1861, there was a state-wide referendum in North Carolina on whether to hold a secession convention and, in the event it was held, the election of delegates for that convention. This was a limited poll, of course, in which the only voters were white male taxpayers.

At the end of the day, those particular men narrowly defeated secessionism by a vote of 47,323 to 46,672. Unionist support, however, was actually stronger than those numbers suggest. That’s because there were also Unionists who voted in favor of holding that convention for the purpose of sending Unionist delegates there to control it. Out of 120 total seats at the convention, Unionist delegates would have had about 80 of them. Most of these Unionists were like my great-great-great-grandfather Daniel Hackney, Jr., who was an as-it-was-with-slavery Unionist, not an as-it-might-be-without-slavery Unionist. The North Carolina Standard newspaper described Hackney, a former state politician, as “a constitutional Union man” in a report about a Union meeting that was held in Chatham County on December 27, 1860.

The ten counties listed above and to the right are part of the election results that were published in the North Carolina Standard on March 6, 1861. Chatham County, where Hackney lived, elected three Unionist delegates and overwhelmingly opposed holding a convention by a vote of 1795-283. (“Chatham has covered herself with glory.”) Forsyth County, where I was raised, elected two Unionist delegates who ran unopposed and overwhelmingly rejected the convention too. Alamance County, where my mother grew up, also elected two Unionist delegates and voted down the convention. (“Three cheers for Alamance for electing straight out Union delegates!”) And the same story was repeated in Guilford County, where my father was raised, with the election of three Unionist delegates, 2771 votes against holding a convention, and only 113 votes for it. Five of those counties are in the “Quaker Belt” of the central piedmont, where Quakers, Moravians, and Wesleyan Methodists would provide fertile soil for disaffection with a pro-slavery rebellion to take root.

Some of the other counties listed there, where the convention vote was much closer, are further east, near the coast. Generally speaking, that tracked with popular support for secession across the Old North State, with less enthusiasm the further west one traveled (i.e., toward the Blue Ridge Mountains) and more enthusiasm the further east one traveled (i.e., toward the “inner banks” along the coastal sounds).

This pro-Union verse, sung to the tune of Dixie’s Land, was published in the North Carolina Standard on February 6, 1861. It reflects a mood that remained popular as late as April 3, 1861, when the following editorial appeared in the same newspaper, together with other reminders that “the disunionists were voted down on the 28th of February” and that Unionists like my great-great-great-grandfather were “not unsound on the question of slavery.” Alas, “not unsound” here means pro-slavery:

North Carolina will not secede from the Union for existing causes. Nearly all the Union candidates in this State advocated a Convention; if they had opposed it, it would have been voted down by 30,000 majority. We state this as one of the strongest evidences that the State is not disposed at this time to secede. It will not do to say that the people of North Carolina are submissionists. They are just as brave as other people, and because they are, they are not ready to fight shadows. . . .

We repeat, North Carolina will not secede. Virginia will not secede. The late action of her Convention shows that she is watching and waiting. She sees no good cause just now to join the war dance of secession. Our disunion friends may as well hang up their fiddles. The people will keep step to no tune of their playing.

Nine days after those words were published, on April 12, 1861, South Carolina batteries opened fire on the Federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The fort was surrendered the next day. Then, on April 15, 1861,  President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation asking for 75,000 troops collectively from the states that remained loyal to the Union for the purpose of suppressing this rebellion by South Carolina and the other states of the Lower South. Listed in order of secession, those six states were Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.

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