Civil War Resources at Wilson Special Collections Library: North Carolina

Series of orders from the North Carolina Adjutant General's Department

The 21st North Carolina Infantry Regiment of the Army of the Confederate States of America was organized in Danville, Va., on 18 June 1861 as the 11th Regiment North Carolina Volunteers. The designation was changed to the 21st North Carolina Infantry Regiment in November 1861. William W. Kirkland of Orange County, N.C., was elected colonel on 3 July 1861. The Regiment was part of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Order book with entries, 12 July 1861-6 April 1864. Orders were issued by Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, J.E. Johnston, I.G. Trimble, G.B. Crittenden, J.A. Early, R.S. Ewell, G.W. Smith, Stonewall Jackson, the secretary of war, and others. Orders concern troop movements, camp life, discharges, furloughs, and supplies, among other things. Included are Lee's outline of the Confederate victory at Manassas, Va., and Beauregard's order concerning General Butler's treatment of women in New Orleans, La. There are also records of articles passed by the Confederate government and announcements of days of fasting and prayer issued by Jefferson Davis

Also digitized online.

During the American Civil War a separate conflict was fought along the home front. Waged by Confederate authorities against deserters, conscripts, and other dissenters, this inner war was accompanied by occurrences of arson, torture, and even murder, that left a bitter legacy. This thesis traces and examines how desertion, dissent, and the violence of civil war were remembered in Forsyth County, North Carolina. After the war, individuals and organizations wrestled to control and reshape how this traumatic violence -- inflicted by southerners upon southerners -- was remembered. The divisions that had been laid bare during the war continued to play out during Reconstruction in the courts, political campaigns, newspapers, and the streets of North Carolina. Though a memory of dissent held political power during Reconstruction, eventually an amnesia of dissent facilitated the disappearance of a Unionist identity, as the Confederacy's Lost Cause narrative achieved near hegemony in the minds of white southerners.

This thesis aims to recast the story of how white Southern identity and political culture evolved during Reconstruction. It does so by taking seriously anti-Confederate or Unionist memories of the Civil War that do not fit the later Lost Cause consensus. More particularly, it examines the public narratives told by leading spokespersons in North Carolina. By telling narratives of Union loyalty and resistance to the Confederacy, the state's political aspirants tried to reckon with their wartime past, make sense of a postwar world, and present themselves favorably in it. During Reconstruction, Southern Unionist narratives flourished in competition with pro-Confederate ways of remembering that would only triumph by the end of the 1870s. As the context of state and national politics continued to shift, local elites responded by making one or another part of their reservoir of memory more salient, ultimately shaping the evolution of white Southern identity.