Wednesday, May 25, 2011

A Look Around the Old North State

Well folks, time for the every-so-often look around different news site and the stories making headlines concerning the War and North Carolina…

Many newspapers picked up the news on a part of North Carolina’s sesquicentennial actives, including the Myrtle Beach Sun News, which you can read here.

Some sources picked up the other event, the symposium held on May 20, including the Washington Post, which, interestingly enough, quotes NC NAACP leader Rev. William Barber, whom I do not recall seeing there, and who just got arrested for disrupting the General Assembly. Funny, I wonder why the reporter did not ask the opinions of the African-American scholars in attendance?

A really good article in the New York Times on North Carolina and secession. You can check it out here.

The Beaufort Observer gets into the action with a series of articles you can check out here.

Another good article can be found in the Salisbury Post, which you can read here. Professor Freeze said the same thing that I’ve been saying for years “To say ‘states rights’ or ‘slavery’ caused secession oversimplifies things…”

The Daily Tar Heel leads people astray with an article on secession you can read here, stating that secession was “Opposed by Unionist in the northeastern, central and western regions of the state, areas with large slave populations in Coastal and Piedmont counties led the call for secession…” We’ve already discussed that two of the leading voices for secession were Burke County’s W. W. Avery, a slave owner and leader in the General Assembly, and Buncombe County’s Thomas L. Clingman, a non-slave owning US Senator. Both of these were from the Mountains. Of course, we could bring up the definition between what is central North Carolina and what is Piedmont North Carolina…

The 101 year old Confederate monument in Reidsville was taken out a day or so ago. You can read about it here and here.

And on a different note, the Smith-McDowell House in Asheville is hosting author Rick Russell – you can learn more here.

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