On December 18, 1863, just north of Elizabeth City in rural
northeastern North Carolina, a large group of white Union
officers and black enlisted troops under the command of Brigadier
General Edward Augustus Wild executed a local citizen for
his involvement in an irregular resistance to Union army incursions
along the coast. Daniel Bright, by conflicting accounts either
a Confederate soldier home on leave or a deserter and guerrilla
fighter guilty of plundering farms and harassing local Unionists,
was hanged inside an unfinished postal building. The initial
fall was not mortal, and according to one Union soldier’s
account, Bright suffered a slow death by “strangulation,
his heart not ceasing to beat for twenty minutes.”
Until now, Civil War scholars considered Bright and the Union
incursion that culminated in his gruesome death as only a
historical footnote. In Executing Daniel Bright,
Barton A. Myers uses these events as a window into the wider
experience of local guerrilla conflict in North Carolina’s
Great Dismal Swamp region and as a representation of a larger
pattern of retaliatory executions and murders meant to coerce
appropriate political loyalty and military conduct on the
Confederate homefront. Race, political loyalties, power, and
guerrilla violence all shaped the life of Daniel Bright and
the home he died defending, and Myers shows how the interplay
of these four dynamics created a world where irregular military
activity could thrive.
Myers opens with an analysis of antebellum slavery, race
relations, slavery debates, and the role of the environment
in shaping the antebellum economy of northeastern North Carolina.
He then details the emergence of a rift between Unionist and
Confederate factions in the area in 1861, the events in 1862
that led to the formation of local guerrilla bands, and General
Wild’s 1863 military operation in Pasquotank, Camden,
and Currituck counties. He explores the local, state, regional,
and Confederate Congress’s responses to the events of
the Wild raid and specifically to Daniel Bright’s hanging,
revealing the role of racism in shaping those responses. Finally,
Myers outlines the outcome of efforts to negotiate neutrality
and the state of local loyalties by mid-1864.
Revising North Carolina’s popular Civil War mythology,
Myers concludes that guerrilla violence such as Bright’s
execution occurred not only in the highlands or Piedmont region
of the state’s homefront; rather, local irregular wars
stretched from one corner of the state to the other. He explains
how violence reshaped this community and profoundly affected
the ways loyalties shifted and manifested themselves during
the war. Above all, Myers contends, Bright’s execution
provides a tangible illustration of the collapse of social
order on the southern homefront that ultimately led to the
downfall of the Confederacy.
Microhistory at its finest, Executing Daniel Bright
adds a thought-provoking chapter to the ever-expanding history
of how Americans have coped with guerrilla war.
Barton A. Myers is a postdoctoral fellow
in military history at Cornell University in
Ithaca, New York. |
