Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

[385] their State to save their lives; and by these means the conspirators were enabled to report a vote of one hundred and twenty-five thousand nine hundred and fifty for secession, and only twenty thousand three hundred and seventy-three against it. This did not include the vote in Northwestern Virginia, where the people had rallied around their true representatives in the Convention, and defied the conspirators and all their power. They had already placed themselves boldly and firmly upon earnest professions of loyalty to the Union, and in Convention assembled at Wheeling, ten days before the voting, they had planted, as we shall observe hereafter, the vigorous germ of a new Free-labor Commonwealth.

The conservative State of North Carolina, lying between Virginia and the more Southern States, could not long remain neutral. Her disloyal politicians, with Governor Ellis at their head, were active and unscrupulous. We have already observed their efforts to array the State against the National Government, and the decided condemnation of their schemes by the people.¹ Now, taking advantage of the excitement caused by the attack on Fort Sumter, and the call of the President for troops, they renewed their wicked efforts, and with better success. Ellis issued a proclamation,

February 17, 1861.

calling an extraordinary session of the Legislature on the 1st of May, in which he shamelessly declared that the President was preparing for the “subjugation of the entire South, and the conversion of a free republic, inherited from their fathers, into a military despotism, to be established by worse than foreign enemies, on the ruins of the once glorious Constitution of Equal Rights.” With equal mendacity, the disloyal politicians throughout the State stirred up the people by making them believe that they were about to be deprived of their liberties by a military despotism at Washington. Excited, bewildered, and alarmed, they became, in a degree, passive instruments in the hands of men like Senator Clingman and others of his party. The Legislature acted under the same malign influences. It authorized a convention to consider the subject of the secession of the State, and ordered an election of delegates therefor, to be held on the 13th of May. It gave the Governor authority to raise ten thousand men, and appropriated five millions of dollars for the use of the State. It empowered the treasurer to issue notes to the amount of five hundred thousand dollars, in denominations as low as three cents; and by act defined treason to be the levying of war against the State, adhering to its enemies in establishing a government within the State without the consent of the Legislature, and in holding or executing any office in such government.

The Convention assembled on the 20th of May, the anniversary of the “Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence,” ² and on the same day an Ordinance of Secession was adopted by a unanimous vote. In the mean time the Governor had issued an order for the enrollment of thirty thousand