Rebels against a Rebellion: Secession and the Political Culture of Southern Unionism in North Carolina

In February 1861 three months before seceding from the Union, North Carolinians narrowly rejected in a statewide referendum the call for a secession convention. Among the people who voted against the call was hardcore Unionist Nelson Walls, a farmer who lived in the central piedmont region during the early 1860s. Robert Mitchel of Fayetteville met with him during the war periodically and believed that Walls “always talked against the war said there was not cause for it on the part of the South that it was perfect madness...soon after the close of the war he came to me with tears in his eyes said thank God I am once more under the stars and stripes and I can now express my sentiments without fear of being molested.” One northern soldier who marched through North Carolina referred to the hardcore Unionists, who remained loyal to the U.S. after secession but endured four years of home front occupation at the hands of Confederate authorities, as “rebels against a rebellion.”

Nelson Walls was a southerner far from alone in his views of secession. The scholarship on dissent in the Confederacy is thin—only a handful of statewide studies of Unionism have been published to contrast with the mountain of scholarship on the strength of Confederate nationalism in the South—but the source material available for studying committed Unionists remains largely untapped. This paper will examine the political culture and ideology of the hardcore, unconditional Unionists of North Carolina during the period 1860-1861. At the base of this paper is a database of more than 360 claims approved by the U.S. government’s post-war Southern Claims Commission, a body set up during the 1870s to adjudicate the validity of southerners’ assertions of wartime Unionism and remunerate the claimants for property seized by the U.S. army.