Zebulon Vance (1830-1894)

Sources

North carolina governor

Tarheel Whig. The background of Zebulon Vance shares many features with the emergence of Abraham Lincoln and that of their mutual hero, Henry Clay. Vance’s home in western North Carolina was similar to Kentucky and Illinois, and he, too, was a self-made man (a phrase coined to describe Clay) who had achieved success as a lawyer after a spotty formal education. Like Clay and Lincoln he had considerable charisma and a striking personal appearance—his photograph was selected for inclusion in an elementary geography textbook as the ideal of the Caucasian race. He also possessed an excellent sense of humor that not infrequently overstepped contemporary standards of good taste. Like Clay and Lincoln, Vance was a devout believer in the Whig Party; his chief political mentor would become William A. Graham, the state party leader who served at various times as North Carolina governor, U.S. senator, member of Millard Fillmore’s cabinet, and Confederate senator. When the Whig Party disintegrated while Vance was in his early twenties, he aligned himself with the American Party rather than join the Democrats and entered Congress in 1858.

Crisis of the Union. Vance tried while in Congress to promote Unionism, adopting a moderate course in the 1859–1860 speakership struggle centered on the anti-slavery polemic Impending Crisis of the South (1857) by Hinton Rowan Helper of his state. In the presidential election of 1860 Vance supported the Constitutional Union ticket of John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts. He vigorously and effectively opposed secession by North Carolina until Lincoln called for troops following the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Vance then urged his state to join the Confederacy, and he organized a regiment which he led with distinction in the New Bern campaign during the spring of 1862 and at Malvern Hill, Virginia, the following July. His military heroism and his attractiveness to former Whigs propelled him into the governor’s chair at the age of thirty-two as a substitute for William A. Graham, who declined to run.

Confederate Governor. Vance’s tenure as governor, like that of such counterparts as Joseph E. Brown of Georgia, was dominated by conflicts with the Jefferson Davis administration. Vance sought to protect the state-controlled recruitment of regiments from the centralizing process of conscription, and he blocked the Confederacy from drafting state officials. He took particular pride in his resistance to the Confederate suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, citing as the greatest achievement of his administration that no North Carolinian was denied the privilege of the writ or the right to trial by jury, and he angered Davis by his lenient treatment of army deserters. Vance’s Whig antecedents and his controversies with Davis brought him into cooperation with newspaper editor William W. Holden, but the relationship shattered when, following the Confederate reverses of 1863, Holden called for North Carolina to negotiate a separate peace with the Union government. Vance crushed Holden to win reelection in 1864 and remained in office until he surrendered the following May to Union troops who had marched into North Carolina with Gen. William T. Sherman.

Return to Power. Briefly imprisoned in Washington, D.C., at the end of the war, Vance resettled in Charlotte, a city with railroad connections that promised future growth. He resumed the practice of law and sought to reenter politics, now aligning himself with the Democratic Party. The state legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1870, but Congress refused to seat him. In 1876 he won a hard-fought race against Thomas Settle to “redeem” the state from Republican rule as governor. His administration emphasized traditional Whig policies that now found a home in Southern Democratic organizations, including support for public education and charitable institutions, energetic promotion of railroad projects, and protection of the interests of the holders of state bonds. The state legislature sent him to the United States Senate in 1879, and for fifteen years until his death he remained in Washington as a spokesman for Southern acceptance of defeat without bitterness or apology.

Sources

John C. Inscoe, Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989);

Glenn Tucker, Zeb Vance: Champion of Personal Freedom (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).