Executing Daniel Bright

Executing Daniel Bright examines the guerrilla war in northeastern North Carolina's Albemarle Sound-Great Dismal Swamp region during the American Civil War by telling the story of how one man went from antebellum farmer and early war Confederate infantry volunteer to guerrilla fighter, who was executed In December 1863, for his involvement in an irregular resistance to Union army incursions along the coast of the state. This book uses Bright's life and abrupt death as a window into the...
More Description

Executing Daniel Bright examines the guerrilla war in northeastern North Carolina's Albemarle Sound-Great Dismal Swamp region during the American Civil War by telling the story of how one man went from antebellum farmer and early war Confederate infantry volunteer to guerrilla fighter, who was executed In December 1863, for his involvement in an irregular resistance to Union army incursions along the coast of the state. This book uses Bright's life and abrupt death as a window into the wider experience of local guerrilla conflict on the North Carolina coast and as a representation of a larger pattern of retaliatory executions and public murders meant to enforce a message about appropriate political loyalty and military conduct on the Confederate home front. The story traces the contours of divided political loyalties in the community of Pasquotank County from the early antebellum period through the end of the Civil War and focuses particular attention on the origins and actions of the influential white unionist minority and free black residents of the community, who became embroiled in local military events. ¶ Revising a prevailing myth of North Carolina's popular Civil War mythology, the book concludes that guerrilla violence was not isolated to the highlands or piedmont region of the North Carolina home front but stretched from one corner of the state to the other.