Flip open John G. Barrett's The Civil War in North Carolina and you will find just one
reference, per the index, to Tod R. Caldwell. Barrett quotes Caldwell in a
March 1864 letter to Gov. Zebulon B. Vance, complaining about "men professing
to be impressing agents from Longstreet's army and elsewhere are getting to be
as thick in this community [Burke] as leaves in Vallambrosa." Caldwell
adds that scarcely a week goes by without a new and hungrier group. (240-41)
Who was Tod R. Caldwell? The short answer would be that
Caldwell was the 1st lieutenant governor of the state of North Carolina, and upon
the impeachment W. W. Holden in July 1871, became the 41st Governor of North
Carolina.
Caldwell was born in Morganton in February 1918. In 1840, he
graduated from the University of North Carolina, and studied law under David L.
Swain. He was admitted to practice law before the Superior Court in 1841. Caldwell served in the House 1842-1846, and
in 1850, represented Burke County in the state senate.
In pre-war politics, Caldwell was a Whig and opposed the
movement to take the state out of the Union, lobbying hard for the Conservative
Union party. In June 1860, the Weekly
Raleigh Register reported that Caldwell spoke at a meeting in Morganton
advocating the nomination of Bell and Everatt, Constitutional Unionist, for
president and vice-president of the United States. In September 1860, he wrote:
"Trusting that every friend of our beloved country, and every foe of Black
Republicanism, Disunionism and Secession, will rally as one man around the
National standard of Bell and Everett, with the war cry of "Death to
Sectionalism" on their lips, I take my stand ready to do duty among the
honest rank and file of the country, who alone are its real defenders in times
of danger...."
Once North Carolina left the Union, Caldwell had a choice to
make. It appears that he was nominated as the Presidential Elector for the 9th
district in October 1861. After this nomination, Caldwell largely disappears
from the public record during the war years. There is one account in the
Raleigh Weekly Progress, May 10,
1864, in which W. W. Avery and Caldwell got into a debate about who would win
the Confederate Congressional district: Leach or Foster.
It was probably at
the same time that Caldwell attended a rally in Morganton in which W. W. Avery
nominated Zebulon Vance for re-election as governor of North Carolina. After
several speakers, Caldwell asked to address the crowd, "and so thoroughly
exposed these Vance leaders and Confederate officer-holders, that Mr. Avery
himself was forced to come to the rescue." After Avery spoke for half an
hour, Caldwell "then took him in hand and trimmed him in good style,
especially in relation to his activity in bringing on the war and then in being
so successful in keeping himself out of it. He also told him that two years ago
he and his party were denouncing Gov. Vance in the most unmeasured terms, but
now--all at once--he had a marvelously proper man, and was their first choice
for Governor."
For the most part, it seems that Caldwell lay low during the
war years. In his application for presidential pardon, penned in Burke County
on July 25, 1865, he wrote that he was "opposed to the late Rebellion from
its inception to its termination, but that, to avoid levies in the armies of
the so-called "Confederate States," he accepted the officer of
Solicitor for the county of Rutherford.... Your Petitioner would add that he
canvassed his section of the state and opposed, upon the hirelings, the
doctrine of secession and disunion to the best of his ability, and exacted
every effort to prevent the call of the State
Convention which passed the ordinance of Secession; -that, during the
existence of the said Rebellion, he actively opposed the David Usurpation --
indeed, so much so, that he was threatened by the Rebel leaders with the
destruction of private property and personal violence." Caldwell was
pardoned on August 14, 1865.
Caldwell's pronounced Unionism soon propelled his political
prospects. Not only did he become president of the Western North Carolina
Railroad, Caldwell became an aid to Governor Holden in July 1865. He represented Burke County in the Constitutional
Convention In October 1865. He was recommended as a candidate for the US House
in November 1865.
Caldwell went on to become the first lieutenant governor of
the state of North Carolina. When Holden was impeached in 1871, Caldwell ran
for governor in 1872 and barely won by a margin of 2,000 votes. While in
office, he fell ill of a gall bladder attack, and died on July 10, 1874.
So why my interest in Caldwell? At the Avery Museum, we have
a desk that belonged to the governor.
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