Remembering Katrina

On the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, some recommended reading: the special Katrina issue of Southern Cultures, cover to cover. Amazing stories, including a riveting first-person account, from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, of taking the high ground in an elegant, "safe" old inn, being engulfed in water up to the second floor, floating out into open sea, holding on for dear life to the limbs of a live oak tree, and more.

An update to their story: the live oak tree has since died, and it's been refashioned into angels standing watch where the old inn used to be.

"Traces of the Trade" in Hillsborough Sept. 6

A couple of months ago, Al blogged about "Traces of the Trade," a documentary made by a descendant of the DeWolf family of Rhode Island, "the largest slave trading family in U.S. history" according to the film. The documentary follows the steps of the filmmaker Katrina Browne and a handful of other descendants as they retrace the paths over which this trading took place: from Bristol, Rhode Island to Ghana to the Caribbean.

The film premiered at Sundance and has been shown on PBS (see trailer). And because the family included a good number of Episcopal priests, it has been taken up by the Episcopal Church nationally as part of the church's ongoing work of reconciliation with its complicity with slavery and racism.

On Sept. 6, as part of a conversation sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina at St. Matthew's church in Hillsborough, the film will be shown. After the film, I'll be part of a panel discussion--in which I'll be bringing our own Thomas Ruffin to the table.

Greening up the Garden

Frank Harmon's beautiful design for the North Carolina Botanical Garden's new visitor education center, slated to be the first Platinum LEED building in the southeast, is coming to life! Director Peter White took Tucker and me, along with Laura Moore (a neighbor and member of the Community Design Commission), on a fascinating hard hat tour today. This generously proportioned, green, and welcoming facility will have a transformative impact on the way the Garden is experienced.

Asheville Before School Starts

I made a very quick trip out to Asheville before school starts--been hearing a bunch about the place and, of course, it was everything I'd heard and more. Reminds me of Burlington, Vermont, Northampton, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon--the combination of restaurants and grunge and people with money, too. I'm looking forward to spending some more time out there in another year. But right now I want to talk about four things in particular.

As I was driving up Patton Street, towards (what I understand to be) the center of town, I saw an obelisk. And I said, ah, that must be a monument to the Confederacy; I'm guessing it was put up in the early twentieth century. So, after parking the car in a nearby lot (complete with spray-painted "Tourists Go Home"--gotta love the local flavor!) and a walk back there, I see that I was pretty much on the mark. It's a monument put up in the late 1930s to Zebulon Vance--governor of our state during the Civil War. And, of course, it was put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. So I was pretty close; and what to my wondering eyes did appear in front of it, but a smaller granite monument put up in the 1924, also by the UDC, marking Dixie Highway and commemorating Robert E. Lee. So far, so good. Actually, calling this stuff is like shooting fish in a barrel--every southern town needs its confederate monument and they're almost all from the early twentieth century. So you can impress your friends and family by making these kinds of predictions. Let's see, big monument; southern town; ... "well, [affecting voice of authority], I bet that's an early twentieth century monument to the confederacy." And almost all the time you'll be right!

So a walk down towards the enormous courthouse and what do I see: a bunch of hippies surrounding a magnolia tree. As close readers of GreeneSpace will recall, I love magnolia trees--and so does pretty much everyone else, which is part of the reason why the moonlight and magnolia school was so popular. They were camping out, protesting the impending destruction of the tree to create ... a condominium, right next to the park they're building! They crux of this seems to be a decision by the local authorities to sell land left to the city by George Pack. One recent report talks about it in this way: "The park land was willed to the people forever by two deeds of the late and benevolent George Pack. The deeds and land now in question are said by many to have been improperly, if not illegally, sold by Buncombe County Commissioners in November 2006." Hmm, I'd want to see the deeds (or will, I take it in this case)--sounds like a gift in fee simple absolute, but perhaps there was a restriction on use or sale?!

Now, I part company with hippies on some issues--like property rights. However, I'm always happy to see people exercising their constitutional rights in order to encourage the rest of us to spare trees from the ax--particularly the ancient, beautiful, and slow-growing magnolia. Sounds like a new piece of what I might call hippie jurisprudence. There's something about trees, which appeals to my sense of vested rights. The old ones are venerable in part because they are old; they've survived the test of time, so that alone is a reason to preserve them, it seems to me. (Not to mention that trees as a stand-in in southern literature for families.)

Anyway, after a short time at the protest, I spotted yet another monument to the side of the courthouse. And this time as I approached it, I guessed--based on the stones--that it was from the 1880s or 1890s. Bingo! 1893 monument to soldiers at Chickamauga in 1863. Ah, gotta love monuments and monument law--and what a day when you see them all combined.

And now I'm ready for school to start, because this has been just the perfect summer.

For Ashley

Earlier this week came the hard news that Ashley Osment's cancer has returned. The rare form of ovarian cancer that struck her last year, which had seemed to respond to treatment, was only hiding out. It has returned in the bottom of both of her lungs. She has gone through one round of carboplatin/taxol and avastin chemotherapy through her blood stream, and on August 25 she'll undergo a second round.

Her friend Maria Palmer has thoughtfully created a web site where she is posting her daily prayers and meditations--a lovely way to be present for Ashley without being intrusive at a time when it's hard to know how to help. Our love goes out to Ashley and her family.

Too many Joneses!

Cute post, Al, but it's obvious I'm no Obama. I'd love to take his courses. Or teach some pale semblance of one of them again someday. But first I have to get this obsession with State v. Mann behind me--which I may soon do if I'm lucky.

On Saturday my goal in the archives was to bear down on Thomas Jones of Chowan County, the Thomas Jones who died in 1822 and was father of Elizabeth Jones and owner of a slave named Lydia. (Lydia subsequently became the property of Elizabeth and was kept hired out until Elizabeth entered her majority at age 18.) Whose family did he come from? Was it true--as it seemed likely, at least, on the surface--that he was the son of the Thomas Jones of Chowan who helped to draft North Carolina's constitution of 1776? That Thomas Jones sounds like quite a fellow. According to Samuel Ashe's Biographical History of North Carolina, he

was bred to the law, was one of the very finest men of the province in genius and learning. About the time of the arrival of James Iredell at Edenton, Mr. Jones was clerk of the court. He was not a man of large means, but was esteemed one of the principal men of his community. He was married and had an interesting household that was on terms of intimacy with the Johnstons and others of that social circle. In 1771 Iredell mentions him as "one of the best as well as most agreeable men in the world."

He died in 1797, leaving a will that named three sons, Zachariah, Levi, and Thomas.

Now, the Thomas Jones who was the father of Elizabeth died in 1822, possessed of over 600 acres. He was a justice of the peace and was evidently well respected. Given the frequency with which these people named their children after themselves, it seemed likely to me that there was a direct line here. And how interesting to re-discover this founding North Carolinian who had been lost to history and to connect him to this important case.

Except, not so fast. It turns out that in the archival file of estate records titled "Thomas Jones, 1754-1798 (more than one estate)" (not even the state archivists can tell these Joneses a part), there's a document dated 1795 that says, "Thomas Jones, son of the late Thomas Jones esquire attorney of law deceased late of Edenton in Chowan County is dead," having died without leaving a will, and thus that Francis Jones, son of this Thomas Jones, is appointed his executor. More confusion ensues, because the will of the Thomas Jones who seems to be the father here, the lawyer and clerk, is dated 1797!

There must be a story here, but unfortunately not a clear enough line to determine that Elizabeth Jones was the grand-daughter, or even great-granddaughter, of Thomas Jones the forgotten old patriot, a man who had his moment but then, according to Ashe, disappeared from public life 20 years before his death.

What Do Sally and Senator Obama Have in Common?

They both are interested in Justice Thomas Ruffin's 1830 opinion in State v. Mann! Sally writes about it and Obama taught it in his seminar on current issues in racism and the law at the University of Chicago back in 1994. How do we know this? The syllabus for the course is up on the New York Times' website. Pretty interesting set of readings!

I have some more thoughts on the syllabus--and why it's not getting more attention--over at the faculty lounge.

"The South Part of Virginia" c. 1657

To follow up on the post below on the contested North Carolina/Virginia line, here's a great old map.



Nicholas Comberford’s 1657 map, The South Part of Virginia Now the North Part of Carolina. The east coast of North Carolina is drawn along the bottom edge of the map. The map extends south as far as Cape Fear and north as far as what appears to be the Virginia border. The western part of the map (on the top edge) is marked as Tuscarora Indian territory. Between the Pamlico Sound and Albemarle Sound (labeled the Roanoake Sound), the map is labeled “This is a swampy wilderness;” the land north of Albemarle Sound is labeled the same.

The original is in the New York Public Library.

Here's another version of Comberford's map, a nice color image--but the heading isn't quite the same! This one is in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.

Quakers with slaves

At right is the cover of the Chowan County grand jury indictment, in spring 1829, of John Mann for the assault and battery of the slave Lydia. (From the North Carolina Office of Archives and History.) The charge was presented by a man named Josiah Small. Yet the slave's owner, as Ruffin's opinion in State v. Mann tells us, was named Elizabeth Jones, who for all this time has eluded historians. Who was Josiah Small and what concern was Jones' slave to him? This document was my first clue in a long journey to find the answer.

Elizabeth Jones was Small's ward. Married to her older sister Matilda, Small assumed guardianship of Elizabeth and two of her brothers after the death of their father Thomas Jones, in 1822. To that household Elizabeth brought the slave she had inherited, Lydia. By 1829, Elizabeth was still a minor (barely, at 17), and Lydia was 23.

What's most interesting to me about the Small household is that Josiah Small was from an old Quaker family. He was a descendant of John Small (c.1639-1700), a Virginia Quaker whose family was among the waves of Quakers who scurried down to North Carolina to escape the wrath of Virginia's governor William Berkeley. A faithful servant of Charles I, "a King's man to his autocratic fingertips" as one historian writes, Berkeley suppressed all dissent from the Church of England, even after Cromwell came to power. By 1660, he'd succeeded in getting the Virginia legislature to pass a law requiring the imprisonment of all Quakers until they left the colony. He stayed in office until his death in 1677.

This was happening during the same period when the boundary line between North Carolina and Virginia was up for grabs. The North Carolina charter of 1663 was at apparent odds with the one of 1665; in conflict was a swath of territory about 30 miles deep from where the line currently is to the middle of the Albemarle Sound. The dispute wasn't settled until William Byrd's survey of 1728--which means that for some 60 years, it was an open question.

The dispute had to do with differences of opinion on the location of Weyanoke Creek, which was supposed to be the boundary. The creek couldn't be found any more. Virginia claimed it was the same as Wiccon Creek, a tributary of the Chowan. North Carolina said it was the Nottoway River. But as William Boyd points out in an introduction to William Byrd's work, major questions of tobacco and trade routes were involved.

As early as 1679 Virginia had prohibited the importation of North Carolina tobacco, a condition which greatly retarded the economic development of the northeastern part of the province, where the soil was well adapted to tobacco culture. If the boundary ran through Nottoway River, North Carolina tobacco could be shipped down that and other streams to Albemarle Sound and thence to points without the colony.

As the debate lingered on, in 1714, Governor Spotswood of Virginia, "claiming that North Carolina continued to grant lands in the disputed region and that 'loose and disorderly people daily flock there,' proposed that Virginia survey a line through the Nottoway River and North Carolina one through Wiccon Creek, and that all settlers between those lines be removed." !! That didn't happen. When Charles Eden became governor of North Carolina, he managed to reach a compromise on the boundary. The line he proposed is the one that eventually, in 1728, was surveyed by a company including William Byrd II.

It's a more complicated story than that, but let me return to the Quaker Smalls. Because of this confusion, it appears that some of Josiah Small's ancestors may have "moved" to North Carolina simply by staying put. At any rate, by the late 1700s his father Benjamin was well established in Chowan County. On his death he left an estate of more than 500 acres and some 18 slaves. Josiah inherited about half of this, plus he had other holdings. By the time of the 1830 census, Josiah had 17 slaves.

Quakers were certainly better off in North Carolina. Under the Carolina Charter of 1663 (written largely by John Locke), "No person . . . shall be in any ways molested, punished, disquieted, or called into question for any differences in opinion or practice in matters of religious concernment, but every person shall have and enjoy his conscience in matters of religion throughout the province."

Quakers had many inconvenient practices and beliefs. They would not swear an oath in court. They considered everybody equal, rich or poor; all were brothers and sisters. Whether you were a lord or a servant, to them you were "thee." They would not fight. And of course, they thought slavery was wrong.

When did the Small family decide to become slaveholders, and why? We know that certain Quakers in Chowan County were considered dangerously abolitionist at least through 1795, when Josiah's father Benjamin, who did own slaves, would have been around 50. In December 1795, some Quakers in Chowan County were accused of actively promoting emancipation. Responding to a perceived "situation of great peril and danger" brought on by "the society of people called Quakers,"--by their "insatiated enthusiasm . . . as to partial and general emancipation"--a grand jury resolved that "speedy and resolute measures ought to be adopted by the good sense & spirit of the people" to combat their pernicious influence." This document links the Quaker agitation to "the miserable havoc & malfeasance which have lately taken place in the West Indies," which must have been a reference to the 1791 revolution in Haiti. Historians have finally understood how terrifying that event was to slaveowners throughout the South--an event too explosive to even talk about. But in my research into the first three decades of the 1800s in Chowan County, I haven't yet found any evidence of Quakers standing on principle against slavery. Perhaps it was there, but the Smalls and many of their relatives by then were well assimilated into the slaveowner class.

A reasonable explanation for this phenomenon of slaveholding Quakers comes from Seth B. Hinshaw's history of Quakers in North Carolina: "The religious conviction that slavery was morally wrong developed quite slowly," he writes. By the time it took hold, Quakers in eastern North Carolina had been owning slaves for many years, handing them down (as we see in the Small family) from generation to generation. It's not a great answer, but it's the best I can do.

Some of this information will turn up in the law review essay I'm writing as a follow-up to my talk on State v. Mann at the Ruffin symposium last fall. I want to acknowledge how helpful the web is for a project like this--rather, how handy the web is for connecting historical researchers with genealogists. A lot of what I know about the Small family comes from genealogical sources, especially Janice Eileen Wallace, with whom I had a fascinating email correspondence. The same is true for Elizabeth Jones and her descendants, for which Sally's Family Place and Sally herself have been very helpful.

Where are the Neo-Confederates When You Need Them?

This evening I want to read Jefferson Davis' July 1852 address to the Phi Sigma and Hermean Societies of the University of Mississippi. But you know what? I can't find it on the internet. It's moments like these that I conclude the neo-confederates really are insignificant. If you can't scan in all the works of your leader and stick them up on the net somewhere, the question just has to be asked: what are you doing? And the answer has to be not much.

Mountaintop experience with Rheingold

On Monday afternoon we visited Howard Rheingold at his Marin County home, a cottage nestled into a lush California garden. On good days, which I suppose most are (Sunday was), his "office" is a wooden chair under a plum tree. His sunflowers are 10-12 feet tall. That would have been special enough, but there's more.

He drove us up to Mt. Tamalpais State Park where we hiked among redwoods, sometimes straight up it seemed, to a gorgeous peak with spectacular view of the Bay.

A few more pics are posted on Paul's flickr page. (Clearly I need a flickr account myself!)

From there we headed to Half Moon Bay, where Paul is among the Brainstorm Techies here at the luxurious Ritz-Carlton. He's twittering up a storm. At this moment he's going crazy over Neil Young.

We'll be heading home tomorrow. Only regret on this great trip is not having packed enough sweaters. But if you're one of GreeneSpace's Chapel Hill readers, I realize you might find it hard to sympathize.

Colorful San Francisco

David Silver, his wife Sarah Washburn, and their friends James Jacobs and ShinJohng Yeo spent the day yesterday showing us their San Francisco: the Mission, Castro, Richmond, etc.

Here's a portion of the fabulous murals on the Women's Building.







One of many murals lining both sides of Clarion Alley.












Schubert's Bakery, on Clement St. Viennese opera cakes and other European delights served up by friendly Asians. We shared a slice of Swedish Princess cake. For more photos of this and our later Vietnamese dinner at La Vie, see David's flickr.

Bay Area bits & bytes

View from Grizzly Peak, Berkeley, near the home of our hosts, Lee Douglas and Betsy Strode.







Alma Kunanbaeva of the Silk Road House Cultural & Educational Center, Berkeley. Alma and her husband, Izaly Zemtsovsky, are friends of our friends David and Mary Alice Lowenthal, but we found out that we have another friend in common: Kazakhstan scholar Paula Michaels.







A stopped dog tells no time: amusement on the way to breakfast on Sutter St., San Francisco.







Plastic dinosaur (made in China), part of "Half-Life of a Dream," exhibit of contemporary Chinese art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.









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Keith Haring sculpture, near SF MOMA. Earlier, we saw his tryptich at the AIDS Chapel in Grace Cathedral.

Internet Archive visit

Safe inside the Presidio, around the corner from the barracks of the legendary U.S. 30th Infantry Regiment (now being transformed into the Walt Disney Family Museum), is the headquarters of the Internet Archive, where we were greeted warmly by Brewster Kahle. We arrived just in time yesterday for the Friday lunch, a weekly event where everybody gathers around delicious food and talks about what they've been doing for the past week. A half-dozen of the folks were interns from Creative Commons. Paul was in his element; me, happy to be there.

San Bruno to Berkeley

YouTube's headquarters is in San Bruno in a beautiful green building designed originally for Gap, Inc. by William McDonough. We got there just in time for lunch with Obie Greenberg, a YouTuber whom Paul had met recently on the UNC campus. A healthy buffet lunch is free for employees (and their guests). There's obvious payback to YouTube from this model, keeping workers working while munching their Mediterranean salads and their watermelon sorbet. (I understand this is the Google model as well.) But it looks like it does the trick! Seems like a fun place to work.



Up in Berkeley, it was a great day to walk around the University of California Botanical Garden. Just our luck to be there the day of a rare blooming of the Corpse Flower (Titan Arum; amorphophallus titanum). Said to have a terrible smell at times, we couldn't smell it (at least I couldn't), but we could admire it's awesome beauty. (The Italian arum in our yard is a puny relative.)

Out west

On vacation. What a lark, what a plunge! Arrived in San Francisco yesterday, spent some time in OCLC's Research Libraries Group office in San Mateo, where I got to hear my lovely and talented spouse talk informally for about an hour and a half about ibiblio and how it started and what makes it work.

Had a delightful dinner with Dan Gillmor and Noriko Takiguchi at Roti, a great Indian restaurant in the upscale town of Burlingame.

Then for the night at the Inn at Oyster Point. Today, on to Berkeley.

The view from Oyster Point toward Gertrude Stein's Oakland.

A Book I Love + book.google=An Antebellum Math Problem

Ok--so I'm sitting here reading John McCardell's fantastic Idea of a Southern Nation. He references an algebra book published in the 1840s by a Davidson prof, D.H. Hill, (also later a Confederate general) that makes fun of yankees.

So I surf over to book.google--what a fabulous research tool this is. And though a librarian was just yesterday criticizing me for my research method (and for also not spending enough time in the archives), I have to say: it sure is convenient to be able to pull up the text on my desktop. So check out this problem from Professor Hill's book:

A Yankee mixes a certain number of wooden nutmegs, which cost him 1/4 cent apiece, with a quantity of real nutmegs, worth 4 cents apiece, and sells the whole assortment for $44; and gains $3.75 by the fraud. How many wooden nutmegs were there?

Fun in math class, eh? (Am I right in thinking that 4x-1/4x=375?)

In honor of Sally's terrific work on State v. Mann, how about this problem involving the hiring of a slave:

A planter hired a negro-man at the rate of $100 per annum, and his clothing. At the end of 8 months the master of the slave took him home, and received $75 in cash, and no clothing. What was the clothing valued at?

Also, on the issue of emancipation and the generosity of North and South, this:

A gentleman in Richmond expressed a willingness to liberate his slave, valued at $1000, upon the receipt of that sum from charitable persons. He received contributions from 24 persons; and of these there were 14/19ths fewer from the North than from the South, and the average donation of the former was 4/5ths smaller than that of the latter. What was the entire amount given by the latter?

Mighty interesting stuff to see what's on the minds of antebellum textbook authors, eh?

(By the way, just so this is clear--the book I love is McCardell's Idea of a Southern Nation.)

Barbeque Church

I've lived in North Carolina long enough to know that barbeque is religion, but I didn't know till lately that there's actually a Barbeque Church.

Related: Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbeque, by John Shelton and Dale Reed, comes out from UNC Press this fall.

Two things I love

Well, it's a Friday afternoon in July and so it's time for a little break from University, Court, and Slave. Time to talk about two things I love.

First, University Microform's Digital Dissertations. I'm able to sit here in my office in Chapel Hill and read Colin Bradley Burke's fantastic quantitative study of colleges in the antebellum period. Second, quantitative studies of history. Reading Burke's study I'm reminded that it wasn't so long ago that scholars wrote their own programs to do data analysis. (He talks about a FORTRAN program he wrote to compute coefficients.) Heck, even I did my own programming for my first quantitative study back in the mid-1980s. (That's because I didn't have an account on my school's IBM 370, so I used a desktop.) Ah, the good old days....

Wingfield, Chowan County

While Al has been keeping GreeneSpace alive, for which I'm very grateful, I've been back at work on my essay on Thomas Ruffin and State v. Mann as a follow-up to last fall's symposium. Lately that project has taken me back to the archives. As anyone who has done this sort of thing knows, it's easy to get lost in the archives, to go down trails you never intended just because they are interesting.

One of the jurors who heard John Mann's case in Chowan County in the fall of 1829 was Thomas I. Brownrigg. He was from a wealthy Irish Protestant family that established the first commercial fishing operation in provincial North Carolina, on the Chowan River just above Edenton. By his day, the estate that his grandfather Richard Brownrigg had established consisted of some 1,400 acres. Thomas' half-sister Priscilla Brownrigg was married to the solicitor (the prosecutor) bringing the case against Mann, John L. Bailey. (So much for conflict of interest.)

In double-checking some of these facts, I found this paragraph written in 1873 by Thomas Brownrigg Bailey to his mother Priscilla Brownrigg Bailey:

I rode over to Wingfield . . . The dear old place, my ancestors' home, around which cluster all the fond and proud associations of my family, is as much altered from the paradise it once was as a skeleton is different from the full and rounded form of youth and health and beauty. I rode down to the rear of the garden and took a long and wistful view of the most beautiful river I have ever seen; its glittering waters looked just as they did forty years ago. And the cypress trees with their broad bases stood out in the water, isolated, only awaiting their time to fall prostrate like others on the strand . . . the waves beating their solemn cadence on the lonely shore and the sighing of the wind through the cedars made symphony with my troubled heart. I felt humbled as in the presence of the dead; I tried to conjure up the long ago, when gay and festive and merrie throng gathered on the lawn, or made the house echo with song and dance and music's voluptuous swell. I tried to imagine where Father poured into your willing ear the words of love and plighted faith, but it would not do. In spite of me I was depressed beyond measure, and there the scarred and ruined house stared me in the face like an ugly demon. I bade silent farewell to the place and rode away.

Accompanying this paragraph was a note saying the house had been occupied in 1863 by the Buffaloes, "a band of traitorous Southerners."

What happened? It appears that during the Civil War there were two Union infantry regiments organized in eastern North Carolina out of white North Carolinians. According to Professor Donald E. Collins, they had their reasons:

Why did 1,300 men from the counties of Eastern North Carolina go against their native state and join the Union army? The answer is complex and is not simply loyalty to the United States and/or opposition to slavery. The nucleus of the First and Second North Carolina regiments, those who entered in the first enthusiastic burst of recruiting, were anti-slavery men who opposed secession. That, however, is even too simple an explanation. As pointed out by historian Wayne K. Durrill in his book A War of Another Kind, in describing the war in Washington County [See: Tidbits], it was a form of class warfare of haves versus have-nots -- the poor whites and small yeoman farmers who opposed and acted against their wealthy slave holding planter neighbors. Such men rushed to join a Union army that would help them punish the secessionist planter class.

Further,

The earliest North Carolina Union soldiers were "carried away with the idea that when they became soldiers they would be licensed to shoot down indiscriminately every disloyal citizen to the government they could find, and appropriate all of the property belonging to such persons to their own comfort, or to the benefit of the Government. " These Unionists were less anti-slavery than pro-white labor. They wished to end slavery as the first step toward deporting Blacks from the country -- to the benefit of the white working man.

These soldiers were called Home Guards. Their role was not to involve leaving the state. Rather, they were to cooperate with northern soldiers, perhaps serving as scouts or doing reconnaissance. "Perhaps the most hazardous duty involved recruiting forays into the no-man's land of the Albemarle Sound and Roanoke/Chowan rivers region where they were regularly harassed by small bands of Confederate guerilas."

But the company that took over Wingfield was no credit to the Union. According to William Mallison in The Civil War on the Outer Banks, after being turned into a post of the Union army, Wingfield went from bad to worse.

It became a center of “fugitive negroes, lawless white men, traitors and deserters from the Confederate army. Their leader, Captain Jack Fairless, a deserter, and his men “pillaged, plundered, burned, and decoyed off slaves in their forays into Chowan . . . Bertie, Perquimans, Hertford, and Gates Counties.”

Capt. Fairless was fatally shot by one of his own drunken men. A fierce battle then took place between the remaining Union men and some Confederates, the Union side "armed with an antique cannon stolen from Edenton." The Confederates eventually prevailed, but Wingfield was destroyed.