Tar Heel Editor

By Josephus Daniels

Born during the Civil War, Josephus Daniels has lived a remarkably full life and played a substantial part in one of the most significant periods of our nation's history. This volume of the autobiography of Wilson's secretary of the navy covers the period up to the year 1893 and is concerned with his early interests, his schooling, and his early ventures into the field of journalism.

Originally published in 1939.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780807873434

Josephus Daniels

Josephus Daniels (May 18, 1862 – January 15, 1948) was a newspaper editor and publisher from North Carolina who was appointed by United States President Woodrow Wilson to serve as Secretary of the Navy during World War I. He was a newspaper editor and publisher from the 1880s to his death; most famously at the Raleigh News and Observer.

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Part One

WASHINGTON AND HYDE COUNTY

I

I AM BORN—AND NAMED

IT ’ S A boy, sound in body and limb."

These were the first words ever said in my presence, but it was years afterwards when they were repeated to me that I understood what they meant to my mother on May 18, 1862, when they were addressed to her in a quiet tone by Dr. David Tayloe, the family physician. He was a friend who, in her travail, felt a peculiar responsibility as physician, for my father was in Wilmington working in the Navy Yard, seeing that ships were in condition to run the Confederate blockade, and he could not leave that work to welcome me on my arrival.

I asked the doctor only one more question before he took his leave, my mother told me years afterwards. I asked him, ‘Is the baby good-looking?’—and when he replied, ‘He is beautiful,’ I turned over and went to sleep, happy that a good-looking man child was born.

So far as I know, Dr. Tayloe, who wished to make my tired mother happy after her labor in childbirth, is the only person who ever pronounced me beautiful, and I am sure the recording angel did not score that kindly fib against him.

There were no trained nurses in those days, no lying-in hospitals, if my parents could have afforded such a luxury. But neighbors and friends, devoted and capable, if with no training but experience, and a faithful Negro nurse more than made up for the modern attention in maternity hospitals, at my birth and in the anxious days that followed. Neither my mother nor I lacked anything needful—medical skill or loving care. Perhaps there was more then, if not so trained, than in the present-day facilities and paid-for attention.

The home of Dr. Tayloe’s ancestors, Elmwood, on the south side of Main Street, was built in the early eighteenth century by Colonel Tayloe, member of a prominent family which has furnished physicians of distinction in Washington, N. C., and in Washington, D. C. The house was moved from a low hill at the head of Main Street, where it formerly stood facing east. The former grounds—so my mother told me—were the most beautiful in Beaufort County, with a long row of cedars and elm-bordered driveways.

The house in which I was born was on Second Street, and from the second-story window, near which I lay in my cradle (they had cradles then and babies were none the worse for being rocked to sleep), I found my lullaby in the music of the waves of the Pamlico River as they beat upon the shore. And as my eyes opened to what was going on in the strange world into which I had been born—and a stormy one, too, for the Civil War was at its height—I could see the ships as they sailed up and down the wide river. Sometimes they would be Confederate and sometimes Union ships, for Washington was alternately in the control of one army and then another. I do not know, but I guess from what I was told later, that the first fright I ever had was when the Yankees set fire to the town. By that time we had moved, and the house in which we then lived was burned down in the devastation that left Washington a city of chimneys, standing as silent sentinels of the destruction. My mother often told how, bundling me up in my baby carriage and putting me in the care of a colored girl, she managed to save a few of her belongings, only, in spite of her vigilance, to have a part of them stolen by thieves, who fattened on the disorganized conditions following the demoralization. But, according to my mother, who had spirit and nerve, she drove off some of the plunderers and saved enough to resume housekeeping. Without a male relative, but with devoted friends, she experienced the hardships of a besieged town, which was sometimes captured by the Federals and sometimes by the Confederates, and was twice driven from her home when most houses succumbed to the flames. As a boy I often heard her relate the terror which frequent fighting and destruction brought to her and her neighbors, and the privations consequent upon a beleaguered town. I grew up with that knowledge, learned from one who lived through those days of Civil War. My baby sleep was broken by the roar of artillery, the shelling from gunboats on the river, and the crackling flames of the fires that burned the roof over the heads of my mother and her children.

It was a long time before my father could come to see me. North Carolina needed the supplies the blockade runners could bring in at Wilmington, and there were not many men skilled in ship construction in the South—and so my mother waited, and I guess I shared with her (though I didn’t know what it was), the yearning that he would come and look me over. I was too young to recollect the visit when I was a few months old, though my mother in the after years told me every detail and incident. His home-coming began with a tragedy. As he neared the town a Yankee sentinel halted him. All persons going into Washington at that time were arrested by Federal outposts. Confidential data or blue prints about Confederate ships were found on his person, and he was brought to town under arrest as a spy before the commanding general. Leading citizens interceded, and when his character was made known he was liberated. But hours intervened after his arrest before my mother heard of his release, and she never could speak about her anguish and dread without living over again the agony through which she had passed. She said he was so happy to be at home and play with his new son and my brother and abide in the love of his family that the near-tragic experience was soon forgotten. But his stay was short. I do not recall his figure or face, though my mother talked so often about our joint happiness then and at Ocracoke not long before he died that I was almost convinced I remembered all she told me about his loving play with me and my older brother.

My father would not agree, when my brother Frank was born, that his son should bear his name. It may be that he thought the name Josephus unmusical, as a music teacher told my wife when he learned she was to marry me, saying to her sister, How can so charming and lovely a lady marry a man with the unmusical name of Josephus? But when I arrived, a craft without an inch of rigging on, there was no telegraph and mails were slow and uncertain; so my mother had her heart’s desire and gave me the name of my father before he knew of my arrival and could make objection.

I do not know how the name Josephus came into our family. In the direct line no one of that name has been traced, but our records are little known beyond the Revolution. It must have been an early favorite name in the family. Some years ago when I was in Bremerton, Washington, I met the wife of a Naval officer from Ohio, who told me that her father’s name was Josephus Daniels. When I made a voyage to Hawaii there was a sailor on the New York whose name was Josephus Daniels. The officers of the ship thought he had taken that name because he came aboard the same day I did. I asked him about it, and he said he was from Kentucky and was named for his uncle, who was Josephus Daniels. It is evidently a name that has long belonged to members of our clan.

I never thought about my given name’s being unusual when I was a boy. My mother had called my father Jody, and she bestowed that loving contraction on me when I was young and afterwards called me Joe, as did my brothers and schoolmates when I was in my teens. It was only when I moved to Raleigh that the full name Josephus was hung on to me, and even then my intimates and afterwards my closest associates in the Cabinet called me Joe. President Wilson never called any of his Cabinet by their first names, though after McAdoo’s marriage to his daughter he called his son-in-law Mac and always thus referred to him.

In 1919, when with my Naval staff I was in England as the guest of the British Navy, I was made aware that the name Josephus was something of a jawbreaker. At a dinner given in the House of Commons to the American Secretary of the Navy and the American Admirals by the Honorable Walter Long, First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Curzon made the address of welcome and in the course of it referred to my name, saying that when it was much in the papers during the World War and afterwards, it always recalled a college song he had heard when he was a student. He related that he and other English students joined in a summer vacation on the Mediterranean with Yale students, and that a favorite song of the Yale youths, which he had never forgotten, ran thus:

"There was a farmer had two sons

And these two sons were brothers;

Josephus was the name of one,

Bohunkus was the other’s."

When I was about twelve or thirteen years old I observed that both my brothers and all my schoolmates signed with two initials, while I had only one. I did not reflect that my first name was long enough for two, and so I decided to give myself a middle name and for a time signed myself, in the few times I wrote letters, J. S. Daniels, the S standing for Seabrook, the maiden name of my mother. I thought my mother’s name as well as my father’s should be preserved, and she had no daughter who could bear it. But my mother gave no encouragement, saying that as I had been baptized Josephus I should add nothing to it. I think that, inasmuch as her husband had no initials and I was named for him, she thought I should be called as he had been.

I have observed that the only way to insure that a boy gets his full name is to give him a name of one syllable. We have four sons—Worth and Frank have always been called by their real names, while our son Josephus has had his name contracted to Joe and Jonathan to Jona. In my early school days, our playmates called the three Daniels boys Big Bud, Little Bud, and Babe.

I never went to a performance where the song Josephus Orange Blossom was sung—and it was at one time popular—that my companions did not insist that I join in the song bearing my name. It was long an English music hall favorite. I declined because it was about a colored gentleman named Josephus Orange Blossom. It contains rather heavy-handed humor, with direct reference to Civil War days. The song begins

"My name is Josephus Orange Blossom,

I’m the gayest colored gemman in the land,

With the pretty girls I always plays the ’possum,

I’m red-hot hunky-dory contraband."

As to my surname, I recall that when Wilson became our home there were four families named Daniel and Daniels. None claimed kin. So far as I know, our Daniels family was related to none of them though one of our dearest friends was Henry M. Daniel, and Mr. Willie Daniel was one of my mother’s staunchest friends. Some years ago a prominent man named Charles Daniel, Congressman from New York, who was a good friend of Grover Cleveland, asked me why I had an s to my name. I didn’t know, but invented this story, which I have enjoyed telling to all men named Daniel whom I have met.

In the beginning of the family all its members were called Daniel, perhaps descending from Daniel in the lion’s den, that illustrious and courageous man who could tame lions. As time passed and their number increased, it befell that some members fell into sin and brought disrepute on the family. Whereupon there was a gathering of the clan and it was decided that henceforth every person named Daniel who sinned should add an s to his name so as to show he was not of the real Daniel family, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous use of ‘A.’

That story never displeased a person named Daniel. It was rather evidence that he and his forebears had walked in the straight and narrow way while some of my ancestors had been branded for wrongdoing.

II

THE ORIGINAL WASHINGTON

WASHINGTON HAS always prided itself upon being the original Washington. It is the first town to be named in honor of the illustrious George Washington. Because of this primacy it looks down on the nation’s Capital as parvenu and exalts itself as the first Washington. In the years before the War of the Sixties it was a port of importance. Shipbuilding was a leading industry, for ships, home-built, plied between Washington and the West Indies, carrying lumber and other supplies and bringing back cargoes of tropical fruits and molasses, laces and shawls for women, sufficient to supply the adjacent country when transported on the plank road as far up as Wilson. It is the county seat of Beaufort and situated on the northern bank of Pamlico River. This section of North Carolina was first known as Pamptico, the name of an Indian tribe found here by the first white settlers. In 1696 it became the County of Archdale, but was soon afterwards incorporated as the County of Bath. In 1738 the County of Beaufort was formed from the Precinct which had been named in honor of Henry, Duke of Beaufort, who had inherited the proprietary rights of the Duke of Albemarle.

The history of the town of Washington began on November 30, 1771, when the Assembly, in session at New Bern, authorized James Bonner to establish a town on a plantation owned jointly by James Bonner and William Boyd, a minor. The town was incorporated April 13, 1782, by the Assembly meeting at Hillsboro. Bonner was a friend of General Washington, under whom he held a commission as colonel, and he named the town for his Commander-in-Chief. The George Washington Bicentennial Commission, in 1932, after investigation, established the fact that, of the four hundred and twenty-two cities and towns in the nation named for George Washington, this city in North Carolina has the distinction of being the original Washington. First recorded mention of the town as Washington was made in an order of the Council of Safety of Halifax, dated Monday, October 1, 1776.

The present courthouse, at the corner of Second and Market streets, was built around 1800. The clock in the building, as tradition has it, was first sent to Bath, but was not installed there, and was subsequently sent to Washington. It is probably older than the building. In the courthouse is a will dated 1820, written in French, indicating that Colonel Louis Fallaide, an officer and close associate of Napoleon, lived in Washington at that time. Fallaide accompanied Napoleon from Elba to France to regain his lost Empire.

A more shadowy figure of the history of the town was Cosimo de Medici, who lived in Beaufort and Hyde counties before the Revolution and until 1792. He was captain of a troop of cavalry and a good soldier, but was so arrogant that his men complained of him to the government at New Bern. He is supposed to have been related to the famous Italian family of that name. A deed of 1790 bears his name as a witness, and one of the 1792 records contains a transfer of property by him in payment of a debt. A record in Hyde County courthouse at Swan Quarter says that he had left the United States and gone to the Southern Continent of America in 1791, but the local belief is that he had a part in Count de Ferson’s attempt to rescue Marie Antoinette in June, 1791.

It was because of Washington’s repute in shipbuilding that it became my birthplace. My father, as a boy, perched on the top of a tree overlooking Bay River in Pamlico County, used to watch the larger ships go by, and he formed the youthful ambition to make himself proficient in the construction of ships. The trend was natural, for his father, who lived on Bay River, divided his time between farming and building vessels known as schooners, which engaged in the coastwise trade. And so my father packed up his belongings in the early fifties and sailed for Washington, where he obtained a position in Farrow’s shipyard, and became expert in building and repairing ships for the West Indies trade and for other ports.

After serving his apprentice days in Washington, he went to Rhode Island, where larger ships were constructed and where he could perfect himself in ship construction. I often heard my mother relate how my father told of the experiences of the young Southerner in Yankeeland, particularly the differences in the use and meaning of words. His associates put together some of my father’s expressions in this sentence: Josephus reckons he can tote a right smart chance—a use of reckon and tote and right smart chance unknown to their vocabulary. He told also of a sentence he made of New England expressions as strange to Southern ears as his conversation was to the fellow-workers in the Rhode Island shipbuilding plant.

My father did not remain long in Rhode Island, though his compensation was larger and the outlook was better for a skilled shipbuilder than in the South. There was a compelling reason. In his early days in Washington he had met my mother, in her radiant and beautiful young womanhood, and she was the magnet, aided doubtless by love of his native State, which caused him to return to Washington. He brought with him little more than skill in the craft that was to stand him in good stead in Washington until the early sixties, and then in Wilmington, where he contributed his superior craftsmanship and skill in fashioning and keeping in repair the famous blockade runners that sailed out of Wilmington during the war. Vance and Maffitt and Sprunt and others are justly famed in song for their incomparable success in bringing necessities and medicines to the people of North Carolina almost till the end of the war. But the very names of the men who built the ships and kept them in repair for this dangerous service, my father among them, are unsung.

Shortly after North Carolina passed the Ordinance of Secession, one of the first needs of the Confederacy was to create a Navy and to build new ships and refit old craft for commerce and protection. Captain William Farrow, who had long been a shipbuilder in Washington, and my father and other skilled ship workers volunteered to serve in the Wilmington shipyards, where they kept in condition the ships which enabled the Confederates to run the blockade. The success of that enterprise, calling for courage and daring, made it possible to bring supplies on the Advance (a will-o’-the-wisp, often seen but always at a distance), and on ships from other countries so that Governor Vance could clothe the soldiers and secure medicines and other articles sorely needed for the army and the civilian population of North Carolina. During this service the yellow fever epidemic broke out in Wilmington and my father contracted the disease. When he was convalescent he received permission to visit his family in Washington. He came from Wilmington to Washington on the train, part of the way, and walked the rest of the way, except when he hitchhiked, though that word had not then been invented.

With the fall of Fort Fisher, or when blockade running was being abandoned and the ship worker at Wilmington was no longer needed, my father was sent to Petersburg or Norfolk by the Confederate authorities who were in charge of the Navy work at Wilmington, for special duty, the nature of which my mother did not know. Upon its completion he returned to Washington, where his family was living in straitened circumstances. He shortly went to see his sick father in Pamlico County and to obtain supplies to take back to Washington. He was stricken with fever. Eastern North Carolina was in the hands of the Federal troops; the shipyard at Wilmington was closed, as were all other Confederate shipbuilding plants. Upon his convalescence he secured a position in the general mercantile establishment of Mr. Hume in New Bern, which was then garrisoned by Federal troops. Quite a number of Washington families, among them the McDaniel family, close friends, had refugeed to Ocracoke, and thither my father carried his wife and two sons, having obtained a cottage where they could live comfortably, far from the scenes of war. It was there that my brother Charles Cleaves Daniels was born on September 23, 1864. My father was compelled to be away and my mother bravely bore her travail without his comforting presence. He was never to see his last-born son, for he died shortly thereafter in New Bern, as is related by my older brother in his history of our family, which gives a more complete account of my father.*

Because of my father’s absence in Wilmington at the time of my birth and also at the time when she was driven from her home by fire, everything about the running of the blockade had lasting interest for my mother. My father acquainted her with the work he was doing in the shipyard and the bravery of the men who dared everything to bring needed supplies from abroad. In after years she loved to repeat to her boys the incidents he had related to her and afterwards to read all that was written about the most heroic adventures afloat in the Civil War. I kept all she told us in my mind, and the stories of daring by the men who ran the blockade have always had peculiar fascination for me. After I became a man I loved to listen to the true yarns Mr. James Sprunt loved to spin about those days when he and others braved the hazardous perils of the deep, and I had a certain satisfaction that the skill of my father had some part in making the ships seaworthy.

If the South could have continued successfully to run the gauntlet and exchange cotton for munitions and supplies from European nations, it could have prolonged the Civil War. It was only when Federal ships of the Navy bottled up Southern ports that the South was strangled and could no longer resist. It learned by bitter experience that Sir Walter Raleigh was right when, long ago, he had said, in words that were later reechoed and expanded by Admiral Mahan: Whoever commands the sea commands the trade, whoever commands the trade of the world, commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.

Many years later, when I was Secretary of the Navy, speaking at the Naval War College I reviewed the Naval exploits of the sixties and proved that the South fought with the necessary supplies until the Federal Navy stifled it by shutting up its ports and strangling its shipping. The Federal Navy, under Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln, has never received credit, in historic appraisement, for the large part it played in defeating the Confederacy. I made a study some time ago of the sturdiness and character of the officers and men on those hazardous adventures, and the staunchness of the blockade-running ships which depended upon the skill of ship mechanics like my father. I never quite realized the dependence of a country in war upon skilled ship workmen until the World War. The Navy and the Shipping Board found an alarming scarcity of riveters and others trained in ship construction. We had to use all persuasion to keep many of the men from enlisting in the fighting ranks. They were as truly enlisted in winning the war as men in uniform, and neither in the World War nor in the Civil War did they receive the rewards and appreciation to which they were entitled.

The average cost of a blockade runner in the sixties was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold. They were mostly built of iron, which does not corrode like steel in salt water. Of the seventy-five ships running the blockade in and out of Wilmington, thirty-four were either captured or destroyed. Among the distinguished officers who ran the blockade was Captain Newland Maffitt of Wilmington, whose skill as a resourceful navigator and captain courageous has given him lasting fame. Some years ago, in a Confederate memorial address at Wilmington, I essayed to tell the story of his hairbreadth escapes and to appraise his greatness. One of the ruses he employed, as told to me by Mr. James Sprunt, was to give fake orders, in a voice loud enough for the enemy ships to hear, and then to give his engineers whispered instructions: Full speed ahead, sir, open your throttle valve! And his ship thereby delivered hundreds of barrels of munitions to the Confederates at Wilmington. That ammunition was used afterwards by General A. S. Johnston at the Battle of Shiloh. Mr. James Sprunt, a high authority on sea power, was right in saying: The Northern Navy, doubtless, contributed more than any other arm of the Federal forces to the defeat of the Southern Confederacy, by bottling up the ports of the South and preventing the introduction of munitions and supplies to the South. But it took many months and heavy cost to finally end blockade running.

Miss Mary Cleaves Seabrook, wife of Josephus Daniels, Sr. Photograph taken before her marriage on January 1, 1856.

Josephus Daniels, Sr.

Oldest son, Franklin Arthur Daniels, State Senator and Superior Court Judge.

Youngest son, Charles Cleaves Daniels, Former Solicitor and Assistant U. S. Attorney General.

General I. N. Palmer, Federal General in command in Washington, N. C., during the war, who denounced his troops for pillaging.

The Commodore Hull in the waters of North Carolina during the war.

View of Washington, N. C., with Federal Navy craft in the Pamlico River.

The only property my father owned at the time of his death was a small cottage in Washington that he built with his own hands about the time of his marriage. After his long days of work in the shipbuilding plant, before the Civil War, so my mother told me, my father would work as long as there was light, building his own home. My mother said she would go with him and happily watch as each portion of the building was put together and every shingle nailed in place. He had an assistant who would work on the building all day and carry out the directions given him by my father. The fact that it was his own handiwork made my mother proud of their modest little home, which she sold for a small sum years afterwards to help pay for a home she bought in Wilson, and about the same time she sold her portion of the Seabrook farm on Smith Creek in Hyde County to obtain money to help pay for our Wilson home. To these amounts was later added five hundred dollars obtained from the sale of the Eliza A. Farrow House, opposite the courthouse in Washington, to Jonathan Havens. This house was given my mother by my foster grandmother who lived with us in Wilson until she died.

Among my mother’s cherished possessions was my father’s chest which held his tools. I recall my boyish wonder that any man could be strong enough to wield the heavy implements of the ship carpenter. She took that chest with her when she moved to Wilson and kept it under lock and key, and I recall her distress when, returning one summer from a trip to the mountains, she discovered that it and its contents had been stolen. I once heard President Wilson say no fond mother or wife ever gave place over the mantel to a yardstick or a tool belonging to a civilian dead son or husband, but that place was reserved for the sword of one who had won honor in battle. While my mother hung no saw or other tool of my father over the fireplace, she preserved them sacredly because they were associated with the only man whom she had ever loved.

In relating the sieges through which she passed in the early sixties, my mother did not emphasize the dates of the taking of Washington by Northern soldiers and the repeated conflicts between Federal and Confederate troops in the Civil War, or the particular time of the devastating fires. However, the bombings and burnings and devastation were so fixed with horror in her mind and continued so real to her that she would describe them to her children years afterwards with as much vividness as when they made life a succession of terror and fear. Because of her graphic accounts I was later interested to learn from records what occurred in Washington, which suffered more in the war than any other South Atlantic place. The history of those days, collected by the Honorable Lindsay Warren, supplying documentary evidence to my mother’s recollections, is summarized to show how war worked a destruction that called for all my mother’s fortitude to brave its dangers and hardships.

The Federal troops, the 24th Massachusetts, accompanied by gunboats, a week after the capture of New Bern, entered Washington on March 20, 1862, two months before I made my appearance in a world of strife. A garrison, consisting of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, was brought in. They met no resistance, the Confederates having withdrawn. A large fleet of gunboats was anchored in the river off the town. The Federals retained control until the spring of 1864. On September 6, 1862, the Confederates under General Martin undertook to drive out the Federals and occupy Washington. They obtained possession of the western section of the town. The streets were swept by artillery fire, the opposing guns being within a block of each other. A large number on both sides were killed and wounded. When Federal reinforcements came up, the Confederates retired after an all-day battle. It was during this battle that the Union gunboat Pickett blew up in the river, killing her captain and nineteen of her crew and wounding six. I saw the old wreck many years after, when as a boy I visited my birthplace. During the engagement on shore, the Louisiana shelled the town for six hours. My mother said that not a house in seven blocks escaped the fire.

Another attempt by the Confederates to drive out the Federals was undertaken by General D. H. Hill’s troops on March 30, 1863. The besieging forces were composed of the brigades of Daniel and Pettigrew, on the south side of Pamlico River, and the brigade of Garnett of Pickett’s division on the north side. The force under General Hill numbered about nine thousand. The Confederates seized the fort below the town and held in check a large fleet of Union gunboats attempting to pass it. The Federal garrison, at the beginning of the siege, numbered fifteen hundred, which was increased to two thousand when the transports ran the blockade. The Federals, under General Spinola, marched overland from New Bern with a force of eight thousand men. They were met by Pettigrew at Blount’s Creek and driven back. The Confederates feared to make a land assault and daily engaged the Union gunboats and forts. Washington was again riddled with fire. The exigencies of the Virginia campaign required the dispatch of a large portion of the Confederate troops, and on April 15 the siege was abandoned. The brilliant feat of General Hoke in capturing Plymouth on April 20, 1864, caused the Union troops, under General Harland, to evacuate the town. As the soldiers left, the town was given up to sack and pillage and was set on fire, the purpose being, it was said, to destroy Naval stores. General I. N. Palmer, a brave Federal soldier, was so indignant at the plundering by the retiring soliders of his army that he characterized the outrages in the strongest language. He said that their conduct blackened the fair fame of the Army of North Carolina and that the ranks are disgraced by men who are not soldiers but thieves and scoundrels, dead to all sense of honor and humanity, for whom no punishment can be too severe. Later a board of investigation denounced this sack of Washington, saying that there could be no palliation of the utterly lawless and wanton character of the plundering. This judicial denunciation of the conduct of the departing soldiers makes it plain why my mother’s only ham was stolen. It was the only meat she possessed, and she followed the thief amid the lurid flames and compelled its return.

The fire kindled by Union thieves and scoundrels, as they were called by their commander, burned from Pamlico River through to the northern limits of the town and consumed the buildings on eight blocks. The bridge was also fired, and nearly half the town was destroyed by that conflagration. Congressman Warren, an authority on Beaufort County history, after a study of the events of that day, says, No military necessity required the burning of Washington. It was not necessary to cover the evacuation or to aid the escape of the garrison. No hostile force was then invading the town. That seemed the sorrow’s crown of sorrow to the town whose population had been reduced from thirty-eight hundred to less than five hundred, but it was not the end of suffering. Nine days later, when the Confederate soldiers entered, an accidental fire broke out, said to have originated from the burning of old records by one of the citizens. The fire was fanned by a high wind, and almost the other half of the town was left in ashes. Again my mother found herself one of the victims of the holocaust. She succeeded in saving only one piece of furniture that she valued—a mahogany table upon which she and my father ate their first meal after they set up housekeeping. It was her prized possession. She not only saved it through two fires in the Civil War in Washington, but afterwards when her home in Wilson was devoured by the flames she again saved that table though almost everything else was burned to ashes. It is one of the few treasured heirlooms she left to her family. It came through the flames unharmed. I rejoice in its possession.

My mind is stored with incidents of our life in Washington related to me by my mother. This is one of them: When the Federal troops took possession of Washington, they passed every day by our home. As they passed, my brother Frank would be swinging on the gate, and with his cap upturned in his hand would greet each one with, Say, Mr. Yankee, give me a sixpence. Most of them would smile and drop a sixpence in his cap. Doubtless some of them warmed up to the little Southern boy as they longed to see their own children in their far-away home. When my mother observed his financial thrift, she called him in and told him he must not beg and made him promise that he would not ask soldiers again for money. Not long afterwards she observed Frank on the front gate again, hat in hand, and the soldiers dropping in coins as they passed. She called him in and said: Didn’t I tell you that you must not beg? Yes’m, he answered, but I did not ask for any money. She said, But I heard you speak to each one as he passed, and then he would give you the money. What did you say to the soldiers?

I never asked for money, he answered. I just said ‘Please, Mr. Yankee, have you got ary sixpence?’

He had kept his promise to my mother; he did not ask for a sixpence; he only ventured an interrogatory, but it produced a shower of small coins that made him feel rich.

House in Washington, N. C., in which Josephus Daniels was born, May 18, 1862.

Refugee home of Mr. and Mrs. Josephus Daniels, Sr., at Ocracoke, where their youngest son, Charles Cleaves, was born September 23, 1864.

FOUR EMINENT WASHINGTONIANS

William C. De Mille, playwright and motion picture director.

Cecil B. De Mille, celebrated motion picture producer and director.

Edward J. Warren, lawyer, legislator, and juror.

Susan Dimock, M. D., first North Carolina woman physician.

I was interested in a scandal my mother told me of the most discreditable conduct of some Washingtonians in those hectic days. She said it shocked the town and afforded a topic for gossip which for the nonce made people forget the tragedies of war. Congressman Warren gave this account of the incident in an article in my paper years ago, but did not disclose the names of the six intoxicated men. Though my mother named them, my memory does not retain them. It ran like this:

"On March 30, 1862, with the Federals in undisputed control of the town, six well-known and prominent citizens, all old men, were the guests at dinner of Captain Murray, of the U. S. gunboat Commodore Hull, lying in the stream off Washington. Every one of them had either a son or a relative in the Confederate Army. It was a convivial affair. They pulled off a drunk that evidently required some time for recuperation. Captain Murray proposed a toast: ‘Here’s to the reconstruction of the Federal Union, a plantation in Georgia with one hundred niggers, and a summer residence in North Carolina.’ The Washingtonians drank it with great zest, their liquor at that time having taken proper effect. It is reported that the captain ordered them rowed ashore and safely put to bed. This was a shocking and horrible act of disloyalty."

The stories of pillage and incendiarism suffered by the people of Washington, as my mother often related, doubtless made me as a boy a hater of war. That early passion caused me to be the last member of Wilson’s Cabinet to vote in 1917 that the United States should enter into the most terrible of all wars, but I stood with my chief after my most agonizing Gethsemane.

Washington has been the home of a number of distinguished men and women. Some attained eminence in other States, but most of them gained distinction in the service of their State. Those most widely known in recent years are William and Cecil De Mille, leaders in the film world. Some years ago I visited Mr. Cecil De Mille’s studio at Hollywood, and he introduced his fellow Washingtonian to the mysteries of producing his famous pictures. We both promised ourselves to return some day to our birthplace and stage a reunion with old friends. The home in which William De Mille was born still stands on the corner of Bridge and Second streets. It was built around 1800 by Thomas De Mille, one of the first vestrymen of St. Peter’s Church. The two brothers early became stars in the motion picture industry. They are the sons of Harry Churchill De Mille, who won high place as actor and playwright. In association with David Belasco, he wrote many plays, including The Charity Ball and Men and Women. His home, after he moved from Washington, at Pompton, N. J., became after his death the Henry C. De Mille Memorial School for Girls. William was born in Washington in 1878 in the old brick house in which his father had been born twenty-five years earlier. It was intended that Cecil be born at the family home in Washington, but his birth was premature (in 1881) and occurred while his mother was vacationing in the Berkshires. Their grandmother was born Margaret Blount Hoyt, the name indicating distinguished North Carolina families. They are related also to the Bragaws and Hardings. Together they produced The Royal Mounted, and Cecil wrote the highly successful Return of Peter Grimm, which David Belasco bought and produced without credit to the author. William produced Strong-heart, Class-mates, The Warrens of Virginia, and other plays.

In the summer of 1913 Cecil De Mille and Lasky met for lunch in a New York café. Both were nearly broke. Lasky had failed in an attempt to build a New York replica of the Folies Bergère of Paris, and De Mille had lost considerable money backing an unsuccessful play. Jokingly at first, and then seriously, they decided to risk what few dollars they had left in the most insecure gamble of the day—the films. They were joined at lunch by Samuel Goldwyn, a glove merchant. The three formed the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. Cecil has produced over three-score celebrated pictures, the latest, Union Pacific, is the saga of the first continental railroad, which glorifies the little men who built the road and linked the East with the West.

On West Main Street stands the former home of Dr. Susan Dimock. Boston has named a street in her honor and Washington might follow suit by giving her name to an important street or avenue. I have always been deeply interested in her career. She was the first woman physician I ever heard of and the only North Carolina woman doctor in the seventies. She studied and later served as resident physician at the New England Hospital for Women and Children and also did general practice in Boston. It is now one of the three hospitals in this country staffed exclusively by women. Miss Dimock entered it in 1866, as a medical student, and studied at the Massachusetts General by a special arrangement under which women were admitted on days when Harvard students were not present.

I often heard my mother talk of her and her mother, who had been my mother’s friend in their youth. Both of these widows, after being burned out in Washington, refugeed to Wilson. My mother was fond of telling this story, to which she knew no answer: After pursuing her medical studies in this country, Miss Dimock went to Europe to take a post-graduate course. Completing her studies, Miss Dimock took passage on an ocean liner to return home, and her mother went to New York to welcome her gifted daughter. The steamer was lost at sea. The mother was almost distracted with grief, and remained in New York hoping against hope that the body of her only child might be found. Despairing at last, she decided to consult some well-known spiritualists in New York, hoping she would receive a message from her daughter in the spirit land. The spiritualist assured her that communication could be made with her daughter and set in motion the measures to connect the living mother with the spirit daughter. After a time there came rappings and when they were translated by the spiritualist the words were: Mother, Dottie is with me in the spirit land. That was all, but it was enough to convince Mrs. Dimock of the genuineness of the message. My daughter had a dog named Dottie and she was her inseparable companion and she took Dottie with her to Europe, Mrs. Dimock told my mother, and she added: Nobody in New York knew my daughter had a dog and if that had been possible they could not have known the name of the dog. The message must have come from my daughter, though I cannot explain it. I tried to get in touch with her again, without avail.

What is the explanation, if I was not in touch with my daughter’s spirit? Mrs. Dimock would ask.

* Appendix I, pp. 513-24.

III

HYDE COUNTY

NOT FAR from Belhaven, the clear waters of Smith Creek flow into Pungo River. It was there that my mother was born. She always thought that Smith Creek received its name from the family of her cousin, Margaret Smith. But there are so many Smiths that she could not be certain. This Margaret Smith, a maiden lady school teacher of Hyde County, once visited us—spent the winter in our home in Wilson. No week-end visits in those days. Kin people came for a month and visited sometimes the whole winter and always welcome. My cousin Margaret was thin and trim and angular, the very picture of an old-maid school teacher. And she was accurate in speech and correct in all her ways, as neat as a pin and punctual to a second. I was never good at mathematics. In it she was a wizard and literally loved to pitch into a problem in arithmetic that baffled our whole family. She knew more accurately about family history than my mother, for she had never moved from the neighborhood in which the Seabrooks and Cleaves settled when they came to Hyde County. My brothers and I loved to ask her about the days when she and my mother walked miles to school and had to pass through a swamp where once they saw a bear in the road and ran home like frightened rabbits. She and my mother, half a century later, trembled at the recollection of that childhood fright.

Among the happiest of my childhood recollections, my mother would often say, was when my sister Elizabeth and I were permitted to take off our shoes and stockings, and wade in the clear water of Smith Creek, and when Uncle Gabe, a colored slave, would take us fishing. He was a noted fisherman and kept our table well supplied, and in season there were plenty of oysters gathered from near by. Long afterwards, following my mother’s direction, my wife and I trekked through the trees and found the place where the Seabrook house had stood and dipped our hands into the waters where my mother had loved to wade barefoot. Her eyes, grown old, brightened when we described every tree and carried her some of the sand we had taken from the creek bottom, and twigs and pine burs from the trees of her childhood home.

That was in 1922, a little less than a year before my mother died. I had gone to Hyde County upon the invitation of my Chapel Hill college friend, Julian S. Mann, legislator and superintendent of the State Prison, to visit him and make the commencement address at the school at Middletown, and to visit the oyster beds at Engelhard, the home of my old friend, Israel B. Watson. The friendship between Jule Mann and myself began when we were barefoot boys crabbing and swimming at Ocracoke.

My mother had not visited the home of her ancestors for many years, and she took her first vacation in the middle seventies, taking me with her. Our destination was first Washington, where I was born, and then Ocracoke, where she had refugeed during the last part of the Civil War, and Sladesville, Hyde County, where my mother’s kin people, Mrs. Elizabeth Boomer and Miss Margaret Smith, lived.

The visit had been timed so that mother could attend the Ocracoke camp meeting held every year at that summer resort. Our first stop was at Washington, where we visited in the home of Mr. and Mrs. John A. Arthur. Though no blood kin, they were my mother’s nearest and dearest old Washington friends. Mrs. Arthur’s maiden name was Avent, and she had gone to Washington from Hyde County. My mother told me that when an Avent relative, long before the Civil War, joined the church, he believed that it was a sin for a Christian to own slaves. He was troubled to know what course to follow. He felt that, even if the law would permit him to free his slaves, the condition of free Negroes in the South was not such as would justify him in giving them that status. He therefore got in touch with the society that was sending Negroes to Liberia, and his slaves were sent to that country. Mr. Avent undertook to do what Thomas Jefferson wanted the country to do with reference to slavery, writing in 1820: I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.

In 1820 there was no refuge in Liberia for emancipated slaves, and Jefferson had believed expatriation ought to go hand in hand with emancipation. Mr. Avent, after his conversion, agreed with Jefferson that holding slaves was an abominable crime. Like Jefferson, Mr. Avent thought holding and selling slaves would be injurious to the youth of the South. He had the Liberia escape, which had merely been begun in a limited way during the last years of Jefferson’s life. My mother admired Mr. Avent for following his convictions but said his act brought much criticism upon him. However, he felt he was doing God’s will and endured it without regret for his action.

In visiting at Mr. Arthur’s in Washington, I learned something of my mother’s girlhood and early marriage. She was the most beautiful bride of her decade, Mr. Arthur told me, and I loved her as if she were my own daughter. That fatherly affection was fully reciprocated and she talked to him as to a father. They laughed much at their recollection of the morning in Wilson when, after visiting us, Uncle John, as we called him, was so engrossed in talking at the depot that he forgot to get aboard the train and didn’t realize the train had left him until my brother informed him. The attachment between my mother and the Arthurs was strengthened because Mr. Arthur had been a good friend of my father, who for a time had a position in Mr. Arthur’s store. When shipbuilding did not give steady employment, Mr. Arthur always had a place for my father in his store. As evidence of the affection my parents had for Mr. Arthur, they gave my older brother, Frank Arthur Daniels, his middle name in honor of their best friend.

Washington always held a dear place in my mother’s heart. It was there she had found a home and love when left an orphan. It was there she was married and there her children were born. It was in the old Methodist Church there that she consecrated her life to Jesus Christ. Two of her children were buried hard by the church.

Among my earliest recollections in hot summer afternoons in heated Wilson, when not a breath of fresh air stirred, is hearing my mother say: If I could only go down to the bridge and get a breath of air from the Pamlico River! She always missed the river. On the first evening we were in Washington, Mr. Arthur took us to the bridge in his low phaeton, and my mother stood long, looking on the moonlighted surface of the Pamlico and drinking in deep draughts of the cool breeze after a very hot day.

The days and nights were too short for my mother in the old home. We rarely slept in the same house two nights in succession, her old friends inviting her to supper and to spend the night. They talked mainly of old times and old friends, of the tragic days of the war when fires swept over Washington.

One place I wished to visit above all others in Washington was the courthouse, an old building standing on the corner of two streets. It had defied all attempts to modernize it. Why did I wish to visit that building? The most tragic story my mother had told her boys related to a noted trial in that courthouse, and somehow it fascinated me so that I asked to be taken there. The incident hung around a celebrated trial for murder, the defendant being Rev. George Washington Carrawan, of Hyde County, who was the most popular preacher of the day, the owner of many acres of land and many slaves. He was charged with killing a school teacher named Lassiter, from Perquimans County. Though Carrawan’s slave had aided his master in disposing of the body, his evidence was incompetent and the case rested on circumstantial evidence. The distinguished Judge Edward J. Warren (father of Congressman Lindsay Warren) made the last speech for the prosecution. During the close of Warren’s eloquent speech to the jury Carrawan said to his wife, That speech hangs me. As the jury rendered the verdict of Guilty, Carrawan, standing to receive the sentence, calmly took a pistol from his pocket, aimed it deliberately at Judge Warren, and, before he could be reached, fired. The bullet struck a locket Warren was wearing, caromed to his lapel made of thick cardboard, and falling to the floor left Judge Warren uninjured. The shock knocked him down, but he rose quickly in time to see Carrawan draw another pistol and kill himself. The speech of Mr. Warren is published in a law book, Classics of the Bar, thus preserving the record of a tragedy which so far as I know has no counterpart. My mother lived just across the street from the courthouse and heard the explosion of the pistol. At once there came a cry, Carrawan has shot Judge Warren! And before she could comprehend what had happened the people pouring out of the courthouse said, And Carrawan has shot himself! It frightened and shocked her so that every incident was clear in her memory. I had heard her relate the details so many times that I made up my mind if ever I went to Washington I would see the very place where the tragedy was enacted. I could almost hear the crack of the pistol as I was shown where Carrawan stood, so realistic had my mother made the whole scene to her boys as she talked of the days when she was young in Washington.

The time came for us to take our steamer for Ocracoke and the camp meeting. We left Washington in the late afternoon on a sailing vessel, commanded by Captain Alf. W. Styron. Half a dozen preachers headed by the venerable Dr. William Closs, pious ladies, and fishermen made up the passenger list. Shortly after nightfall a great calm settled on the river and the ship hardly moved until after midnight. That was not the worst thing that settled down. A million—it looked like a billion—mosquitoes lighted on the sails, making them look black, and they nestled down on the bald head of the aged presiding elder. To add to the distress, for the mosquitoes had their stingers with them, there was no ice on the ship and people suffered from thirst. Fortunately there were limes, and my mother and other ladies made limeade which I was deputized to carry to the preachers and older people.

Will you have a glass of limeade? I asked Dr. Closs.

You are a dear, good boy to bring a refreshing drink to an old man, he said, and thinking it a good joke I handed him a glass of tepid water without lime or lemon. He quickly changed his mind about the dear, good boy until I produced a limeade.

In spite of the discomforts, we had a jolly time on the ship. There are those who imagine that deeply religious people lack joyousness. I have found no people who are happier at innocent merriment than preachers and attendants at revivals and camp meetings. There were stories and songs and much gaiety, even when all had to fight the voracious mosquitoes. My reputation for truth suffered when I later related to schoolmates in Wilson that a billion mosquitoes blackened the white sails. They thought me a Pamlico Munchausen.

My mother on that trip to Ocracoke in the late seventies was going back to visit an old friend, Mrs. McWilliams, who had also refugeed to Ocracoke during the war but had never left the island. I could not understand the far-away look in my mother’s eyes or the starting tears when the ship came in sight of land. Later I understood the memories of those hard days when the news that my father was dying in New Bern and was to pass away before she could reach him, overpowered her. But her brave heart lifted her up when she was with old friends who had shared the privations of the last days of the war and the months following.

The Island of Ocracoke, where the author’s mother went as a refugee after her home had been burned in Washington near the close of the Civil War and where his brother Charles was born. The house is hidden among the trees to the left of the church.

Lighthouse at Ocracoke, the oldest unchanged lighthouse on the Atlantic Coast; built in 1798. It was around this lighthouse the author played when he was a small boy and later climbed to the top to see the ships in the offing.

The people came in large crowds to the preaching at the camp meeting. My mother, Mrs. McWilliams, and Mrs. Edward Mann were among the Amen attendants, never missing a sermon or a song service and rejoicing as sinners were converted. I had heard of camp meetings and was interested to see the people living in tents and finding happiness in the preaching and the singing, and some of them in shouting. Those were