Biographies on Confederate governors

     Knowing what is available is an important thing to both the reader and the researcher. That is why I create these lists: to see what is available and to know where the holes in the scholarship are. W. Buck Years, in 1985, released The Confederate Governors, a collection of essays on the role of governors of each state during the war. There is also Malcolm C. McMillan’s The Disintegration of a Confederate State: Three Governors of Alabama’s Wartime Home Front, 1861-1865 (1986). Several (all?) states have general histories of governors. For example, North Carolina has Crabtree’s North Carolina Governors, 1585-1958: Brief Sketches (1958). This list does include published papers. North Carolina’s John W. Ellis has two volumes of published papers, including a biographical sketch, but he does not have a traditional, full-length biography. If you see anything I missed, please drop me a line.

 

Alabama

John Gill Shorter (1861-1863)

Andrew Barry Moore (1857-1861)

Thomas H. Watts (1863-1865)

Arkansas

Henry Massie Rector (1860-1862)

Thomas Fletcher (acting 1862)

Harris Flanagin (1862-1864)

Florida

Madison Starke Perry (1857-1861)

John Milton (1861-1865)               

     Hughes, Civil War Correspondence of Florida’s Governor John Milton (2015)

Abraham K. Allison (1865)

Georgia

Joseph E. Brown (1857-1865)

     Fielder, A Sketch of the Life and Times and Speeches of Joseph E. Brown (1883)

     Hill, Joseph E. Brown and the Confederacy (1972)

     Parks, Joseph E. Brown of Georgia (1977)

     Roberts, Joseph E. Brown and the Politics of Reconstruction (1973)

Louisiana

Thomas Overton Moore (1860-1864)

     Moore, Thomas Overton Moore: A Confederate Governor (1960)

Henry Watkins Allen (1864-1865)

     Cassidy and Simpson, Henry Watkins Allen of Louisiana (1964)

     Dorsey, Recollections of Henry Watkins Allen (1866)

Mississippi

John Jones Pettus (1859-1863)

     Dubay, John Jones Pettus, Mississippi Fire-eater (1975)

Charles Clark (1863-1865)

Missouri

Claiborne Fox Jackson (1861)

     Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of  Southern Identity (2021)

Thomas Caute Reynolds (1862-1865)

     Reynolds, Letters of Thomas Caute Reynolds, 1847-1885 (1943)

North Carolina

John Willis Ellis (1859-1861)

     Ellis, The Papers of John Willis Ellis (1964)

Henry Toole Clark (1861-1862)

     Poteat, Henry Toole Clark: Civil War Governor of North Carolina (2009)

Zebulon Baird Vance (1862-1865)

     Dowd, Life of Zebulon B. Vance, (1897)

     Yates, Zebulon B. Vance as War Governor of North Carolina, 1862-1865, (1937)

     Adler, Zebulon B. Vance and the “Scattered Nation” (1941)

     Yates, The Confederacy and Zeb Vance (1958)

     Camp, Governor Vance: A Life for Young People. (1961)

     Shirley, Zebulon Vance, Tar Heel Spokesman. (1963)

     Tucker - Zeb Vance: champion of Personal Freedom. (1966)

     Szittya, Man to Match the Mountains: the Childhood of Zebulon Baird Vance. (1980)

     Cooper, Zeb Vance: a Leader in War and Peace. (1985)

     Weinstein, Zebulon B. Vance and “The Scattered Nation.” (1995)

     Vance,  My Beloved Zebulon: the Correspondence of Zebulon Baird Vance and Harriett N. Espy. (1971)

     McKinney, Zeb Vance, North Carolina’s Civil War Governor and Gilded Age Political Leader. (2004)

     Mobley, “War Governor of the South” : North Carolina’s Zeb Vance and the Confederacy.(2005)

     Johnston, Zebulon Baird Vance Letters, 1843-1862 (1963)

     Mobley, The Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 1863 (1995)

     Mobley, The Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 1864-1865 (2013)

South Carolina              

    Francis Wilkinson Pickens (1860-1862)

    Milledge Luke Bonham (1862-1864)

    Andrew Gordon Magrath (1864-1865)

Tennessee

    Isham G. Harris (1857-1862)

         Elliott, Isham G. Harris (2009)

Texas

Edward Clark (1861)

Francis Lubbock (1861-1863)

     Lubbock, Six Decades in Texas (1900, autobiographical)

Pendleton Murrah (1863-1865)

Virginia

John Letcher (1860-1864)

     Boney, John Letcher of Virginia, (1966)

William “Extra Billy” Smith (1864-1865)

     Mingus, Confederate General William “Extra Billy” Smith (2013)

 

Did Judah P. Benjamin draft North Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession?

   Joseph C. Sitterson, in his 1939 book, The Secession Movement in North Carolina, makes an interesting claim, that Judah P. Benjamin reportedly wrote North Carolina’s ordinance of secession.[1] Sitterson writes that Convention delegate Burton Craige introduced a the resolution at the request of Governor John W. Ellis. The simple ordinance “repealed and abrogated the ordinance of 1789 by which North Carolina had ratified the Constitution of the United States and declared the union between the state of North Carolina and the other states, under the title of ‘The United States of America’ dissolved.” Is there any truth to this?

Judah P. Benjamin

   Judah P. Benjamin is one of those interesting people in history. Born in 1811 in St. Croix, in what is now the United States Virgin Islands, his parents were Sephardic Jews. In 1813, the family moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, and then to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1821. Benjamin enrolled in Yale College in 1825, but did not graduate, and moved on to New Orleans where he eventually worked in a mercantile business, clerked in a law firm, tutored French Creoles in English, and eventually earned a law degree, being admitted to the bar in 1832 at the age of 21. Benjamin specialized in commercial law. In 1842 Benjamin won election to the Louisiana House of Representatives, then served in a Louisiana Constitutional Convention, was appointed a United States Attorney in New Orleans, served in the Louisiana State Senate, and in 1853, was elected a United States Senator. He was twice offered a place on the United States Supreme Court but declined both times. Benjamin remained a United States Senator until February 1861. When the Senate was not in session, he tried cases before the Supreme Court. Benjamin served as a Confederate Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State, and was with Jefferson Davis as the president moved through North Carolina and South Carolina at the close of the war. Benjamin escaped, fleeing to Great Britain, and becoming one of the leading barristers in the country before retiring to Paris where he died in 1884.

   At time the delegates were meeting in Raleigh to considered secession, Benjamin was serving as the first Confederate attorney general in Montgomery, Alabama.

   J.G. de R. Hamilton, in his book Reconstruction in North Carolina, tells us that North Carolina’s ordinance “was prepared by Judah P. Benjamin” and “brought to Raleigh from Montgomery by James Hines, a North Carolinian, and delivered to Gov. Ellis, who asked Burton Craige, the member from his county, to introduce it.”[2] Hamilton does not give a source for this information. Barrett, in his history of North Carolina and the War, leaves out this little piece of information. Just how Benjamin came to draft North Carolina’s ordinance of secession seems to be somewhat of a mystery.  

John W. Ellis

Turning to Governor Ellis’s papers, we find an interesting letter from former United States Senator Thomas L. Clingman. Writing from Montgomery on May 14, 1861, Clingman tells Ellis: “I enclose you drafts of Ordinances which I think ought to be adopted at once by our convention. I got Mr. Benjamin the Attorney General to draw them up and hope they will be put through on the 20^th.”[3] In Jeffrey’s biography of Clingman, we read that Ellis sent Clingman to Montgomery after the capture of Fort Sumter. Clingman’s job? To “negotiate North Carolina’s entrance into the Confederacy.” There is no mention of the Ordinances.[4] It is possible that Ellis and Clingman discussed the matter of the Ordinance prior to Clingman’s departure from Raleigh to Montgomery. At the same time, Clingman might have taken it upon himself to visit Benjamin and ask for some guidance regarding the Ordinances, and Benjamin wrote the Ordinances and gave them Clingman who gave them to Hines who caught a train to Raleigh. This begs another question: who was James Hines? Was he just a messenger? A quick search has not produced an identity. And yet another question: did Judah P. Benjamin play a role in any other Ordinances of Secession passed by the other Southern States?

---

[1] Sitterson, The Secession Movement in North Carolina, 246-47, n.103.

[2] Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 29.

[3] Tolbert, The Papers of John W. Ellis, 2:50.

[4] Jeffrey, Thomas Lanier Clingman: Fire Eater from the Carolina Mountains, 162.  

Governor Ellis in Richmond

In doing some research today, I came across the following, concerning a visit of Governor Ellis to  Richmond in May 1861. I'm not sure I've come across this before. We know that Ellis only had two months to live. The Avery referred to is William Waighstill Avery, one of the most interesting characters in North Carolina history.

From the Richmond Dispatch, May 14, 1861

   Serenade to Gov. Ellis.-The patriotic and eloquent Governor of the Old North State was serenaded last night at his lodging, at the Exchange Hotel, the First Regiment Band having been engaged for that purpose by a number of citizens.

   Hon. Wm. W. Avery was introduced to the people, who excused the absence of the Governor on account of indisposition, and proceeded to deliver an impassioned address, which was received with enthusiastic applause. He said North Carolina was a unit on the secession issue, and would stand or fall with the Southern Confederacy, with which her fortunes were now indissolubly linked. She had paused for Virginia to act, though confident how she would go in the great contest;  there was now a race between them as to who should be first in the new and out of the old Confederacy. He promised on the part of North Carolina, arms, ammunition and men in any quantity, ordered in sustaining Southern Rights. They could soon be on the soil of Virginia. Addresses were also delivered by Judge Person, and Hon. W. M. Ransom. His Honor the Mayor, introduced the last two gentlemen. 

Gov. Henry T. Clark

Several months ago, I purchased a new biography on North Carolina Governor Henry T. Clark, written by R. Matthew Poteat. I read some of it, got distracted, and put it aside. After finishing the book on Stanly, I returned to the book on Clark, went back a couple of chapters from where I had stopped and picked up the book again. It was finished yesterday, and here is my review.

If you talk about North Carolina governors during the war, you usually talk about three men: John Ellis, Henry T. Clark, and Zebulon B. Vance. As we discussed a couple of weeks ago, Vance is the most written-about Civil War era governor. Ellis has no biography, and Clark finally has one.

Clark was born in 1808 in Edgecombe County, North Carolina. His father, James West, was a US Congressman. Henry attended the University of North Carolina, and later gained admittance to the North Carolina Bar, but seldom practiced law. He was more interested in managing his family’s land and property. Clark was selected to serve as a delegate to the Nashville Convention in 1850, and soon thereafter was elected to serve as the representative for the Tenth District in the North Carolina senate. He was re-elected six times. In 1858, his colleagues elected him as speaker of the senate. He was occupying this position in July 1861 when Governor Ellis died. Since the state had no lieutenant governor, Ellis was elevated to the position of governor until the next general election in September 1862.

Clark laid the groundwork for much of the state’s involvement in the war. Almost all of North Carolina’s regiments were mustered into service under Clark’s administration. He also established a state-sponsored gunpowder manufacturing plant in Wake County, and a salt-manufacturing facility in Chatham County. And, he laid the ground work for a state-owned blockade runner that Zeb Vance would later purchase. However, Clark would catch flak for the loss of much of the eastern coast of North Carolina to the Federals, even though much of the fault rested with the Confederate government. For unknown reasons, Clark chose not to pursue another term of office in 1862, and instead, retired to his home near Tarboro. Later in the War, Clark’s Tarboro home was raided by the Federals, and he himself was almost captured. After the end of the war, Clark served again in the North Carolina Senate. He died at his home in Tarboro in 1874.

I really wanted to like Poteat’s examination of Clark’s life, and to be honest, the second part of the book (once the war begins) is much better than the first part of the book. Poteat seems to be obsessed with slavery. Chapters two and three seem much more an examination of slavery that of Clark’s life. The author makes several leaps of logic (aren’t these called fallacies?) with no documentation. For example, Poteat writes on page 52 that “owning slaves was not simply an aspect of his business, it was part of his heritage, and he [Clark] believed the system to be the natural order that God had intended.” And on page 66: “Clark’s view of slavery was consistent with that of most white men of his day. He believed that slavery was a necessary and just institution, essential to the South’s social and economic way of life. Conservative white southerners like Clark considered slavery the foundation of republic virtue, necessary to maintain the social order and an engine of human, moral, and material progress.” Both of those statements might be true, but there is no documentary evidence cited that Clark actually believed either of those statements.

I guess the statement that really is a leap of logic falls on page 138. Poteat speaks of many joining the Ku Klux Klan after the rise of the Radicals during reconstruction. He writes: “There are no records that tell of Clark’s thoughts or involvement (if any) with the Klan, but Col. William L. Saunders, the alleged leader and ‘Grand Dragon’ of the North Carolina KKK, was his nephew by marriage. The two men corresponded, and given Clark’s Democratic pedigree, racial views, and associations, it’s very likely he supported the Klan to some degree.” This statement is so flawed that it is difficult to find a place to begin. Might Clark have been involved with the Klan? Sure. However, since there is “no record,” what right does Poteat have to infer that Clark “likely… supported the Klan to some degree” just because he had someone in his family who allegedly was in the Klan? I can’t imagine a lawyer ever getting away with such allegations in a court of law today.

Poteat does well when discussing the efforts of Clark as governor during the war years. However, this book has serious flaws that will influence generations to come.

R. Matthew Poteat. Henry Toole Clark: Civil War Governor of North Carolina. 207 pages, illustrations, notes, index. McFarland, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-7864-3728-3.