Judkin Browning . Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2011. Pp. xiii, 250. $37.50.
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/ahr.116.5.1501
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoThe coastal counties of Carteret and Craven, North Carolina, were reclaimed to Federal rule in the spring of 1862, less than twelve months after the state's secession. Prior to May 1861, anti-secessionist sentiment had been strong in the area, particularly in Carteret County, and such a brief exposure to Confederate authority augured well for the resumption of Unionist loyalties. As Judkin Browning demonstrates in this valuable study, however, the reality was more complex, the outcome more contingent. After welcoming the arrival of Union troops in 1862, by early 1865 the majority of the counties' white residents were no longer persuaded of the merits of federal governance. Occupation, so unfamiliar to Americans, had proven the architect of a significant change in political sentiment. Military occupations are “messy and complicated undertakings” (p. 5) at the best of times, as Browning admits. In the case of eastern North Carolina, as elsewhere in the South, the main complication predictably involved race. Unlike most other occupied areas, North Carolina was not exempted from Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. For the area's slaves, Lincoln's intervention heralded immediate freedom; for blacks and whites alike, it meant a dramatic change in the behavioral rules governing every strand of social, economic, and political life. Browning identifies “four pillars” of African American empowerment: escape, employment, enlistment, and education. In pursuing their goals, newly freed slaves revealed an unquenchable desire for freedom and independence that would offend white racial sensibilities and lead to confrontation and inevitably violence. When in January 1863 a black woman requested that Beaufort merchant Joel Henry Davis release her daughter, whom he was still holding in slavery, Davis and his son-in-law Henry Rieger tied her to a tree and administered a bloody lashing. The woman was only released after the intervention of a New Jersey soldier. Tellingly, Davis and Rieger both escaped arrest when the local provost marshal, a captain from the 43rd Massachusetts Regiment, admitted that “the matter was one which I did not understand and about which I should be obliged to ask advice at Headquarters” (p. 82).
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