April 19 

 

          On this day in 1862, James Byron Gordon (1822-1864), Lieutenant Colonel of the 1st North Carolina Cavalry, sat at his field desk at Camp Ransom near Kinston, NC, and wrote a                                                                 letter to his brother-in-law, Frank Hackett, addressing a                                                                       controversial topic: the Conscription Act. A former state                                                                       legislator, the 39-year old planter was the 2nd largest slave                                                                   owner in Wilkes County when he was appointed Major of the                                                               1st North Carolina Cavalry in May 1861. The regiment saw                                                                     light duty in Virginia, until it was ordered back to North                                                                         Carolina in late March 1862, which did not excite Gordon. “I                                                                 regret very much leaving the army in Va.,” he wrote. “It will be                                                             exceedingly hot here this summer, and nothing to eat but                                                                     bread & bacon.” But Conscription, enacted by the Confederate                                                             Congress three days earlier, was the major topic of conversation in the South. Gordon asked Hackett, who was back home in Wilkesboro, “How did the draft fall upon our peoples?” On the very same day that the state’s largest newspaper called it “inexpedient, unnecessary, oppressive, and unconstitutional,” and around the same time that Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens denounced it as “a very bad policy,” Gordon was supportive. “The conscription Act I think is the very thing for the occasion,” he wrote. “It will bring into the service many men who have been shirking the cause.” While Gordon saw the practical benefits, his neighbors in Wilkes County despised the law. The rugged foothills became a haven for draft dodgers, and 22% of Wilkes County soldiers deserted, many having been forcibly conscripted. Gordon would be promoted to General in September 1863, and die as a result of wounds in May 1864. Yet in the spring of 1862 he believed that compelling reluctant men into service would secure Confederate victory–a hope that would go unfulfilled.

                                                                        

​Sources

James B. Gordon to Frank Hackett, April 19. 1862, James G. Hackett Papers, Private Manuscripts Collection, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, NC; Louis H. Manarin, comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 2:1, 5, 7; 1860 U.S. Census: Wilkes County; Albert Burton Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (1924), 12-26; North Carolina Standard, April 19, 1862; Ezra J. Warner, Generals in Gray (1959), 110; Scott King-Owen, “Conditional Confederates: Absenteeism Among Western North Carolina Soldiers, 1861-1865,” Civil War History (December 2011): 364.