A Review of “Tar Heels in Gray” by John B. Cameron

This is the way a regimental history should be written.

I kept saying that line to myself as I read Tar Heels in Gray (McFarland Press, 2021), John B. Cameron’s fine study of the 30th North Carolina Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War. Cameron, a historian of France by trade, grew up in North Carolina reading about the Civil War. This book was in many ways a return to his roots; a personal effort to understand how the men of his community viewed their participation in the war through their military experience in the 30th Infantry.

I found Cameron’s book compelling because he was not interested in re-hashing the 30th Infantry’s military experiences. One brief chapter provides an overview of previous studies and regimental histories that explored the unit’s experiences in battle. Instead, Cameron seeks to use most of the book to interpret significant questions about the men’s lives before the war, their motivations for fighting, their connections to slavery, and their views of the Confederate nation during the war. What emerges from this study is a powerful, empathetic analysis that dramatically conveys the Civil War’s horrific bloodshed to the reader. Clocking in at a brisk 132 pages of main text, the book moves quickly and succinctly.

There are three noteworthy aspects of Cameron’s book that are worth mentioning for the way they challenge previous Civil War historiography while offering new arguments worthy of further consideration.

Soldier Motivations for Fighting: A central aspect Tar Heels in Gray is Cameron’s effort to uncover the motivations behind the common soldier’s desire to fight for the Confederacy. He paints a nuanced portrait. For most men, military service offered several tangible benefits. They believed the war would be a short one, with Confederate victory assured against a weak, divided opponent. By quickly getting into the fight, these men hoped to get some of the action and enjoy some of the “glory” of military conflict. Military service also offered a steady income while the war continued, an especially important consideration for men who did not immediately join the Confederacy when the conflict began but soon realized it would take years and found bounty and monthly payments attractive. Finally, a sense of shared communal participation also influenced the men. As Cameron explains, “The desire to prove your manhood and emerge from the test of battle a hero no doubt motivated many. When friends and relatives are announcing their decision to march off and win the day, the desire to show bravery and be a hero surely brought more than a few to volunteer” (59).

As such, Cameron correctly argues that the personal motivations of the 30th Infantry’s soldiers for fighting reflected a range of motivations: “No doubt there were some who were desperate to maintain slavery. There may have been some who were Southern patriots and felt some Confederate nationalism. However, neither is mentioned or implied in letters or diaries. What the documents do suggest among initial volunteers is a belief that North Carolina had every right to secede, even if it was unwise, and the reaction of the Union was tantamount to armed invasion. There was much talk about the need to defend their homes, to defend North Carolina” (58). In other words, what may have been a deeply political issue for Confederate leaders was a deeply practical and personal issue for many of the enlisted men: they would follow along with their community to defend their state and their personal homes if that was expected of them at the war’s beginning.

But Cameron does not leave these men off the hook when it comes to slavery. The Confederacy’s political leadership was clear about its interest in defending slavery. The various seceding states that issued Declarations of Secession were explicit in their beliefs that slavery was morally right, constitutional, financially important for the Southern economy, and that it was wrong to ban slavery’s expansion into new Western territories. Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency threatened the status quo. Even North Carolina, whose political leaders hesitated to push the state into the Confederacy and only did so after Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to subdue the rebellion after the firing of Ft. Sumter, subtly mentioned its interest in preserving slavery. Weldon N. Edwards, the president of the North Carolina secession convention, announced that he had no interest in partnering with the “Black Republican Union” due to what he perceived as the Republican Party’s desires to end slavery in the South.

Cameron therefore gives readers an important insight about the differences between soldier motivations for fighting and governmental motivations for fighting. The common soldiers who decided to fight for the Confederacy in the 30th North Carolina may have had a range of motivations that did not include a particularly strong view towards protecting slavery. Many of the men were probably poor whites who had limited connections to slavery and no chance of becoming an enslaver someday. But in choosing to enlist for a government that clearly stated its interest in protecting slavery, these men took on that fight and agreed to put their lives on the line for that cause, regardless of how the institution personally affected them.

The same idea can be applied in the other direction. Modern day Confederate defenders are often quick to point out that President Lincoln stated in his First Inaugural Address his wish to not end slavery, only to maintain the Union. Many U.S. soldiers felt the same way. Both of those claims are true. But as the war progressed, the end of slavery became a war measure in the fight to defeat the Confederacy. If a Union soldier who opposed a war to end slavery continued his military service after Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he was now fighting a war to end slavery regardless of his personal views.

One does not need to go into a long dissertation about other U.S. wars where soldier motivations and governmental motivations differed to see other examples of this trend.

Soldiers’ Economic Backgrounds and Class Status: A second insight from Cameron concerns the wealth and status of the men who fought for the 30th North Carolina Infantry. Cameron follows a similar analysis to Joseph Glatthaar in his book about soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia. In that book, Glatthaar used financial data from census records to develop theories about who in Southern society was doing the bulk of the fighting for the Confederacy. Glatthaar broke up the these men into three categories: poor men with less than $800 to their name, middle class men with wealth between $800 and $3,999, and wealthy men with more than $4,000 to their name. Glatthaar’s statistics led him to conclude that the Confederate war was “a rich, moderate, and poor man’s fight.” In other words, Glatthaar argued that all classes of Southern society had a role in fighting for the Confederate cause.

Cameron found that this conclusion did not fit the experiences of the 30th North Carolina and that Glatthaar’s class categories were too broad. He instead broke up the 30th North Carolina into six different classes: Poor laborers who owned no land and had less than $400 to their name, small farmers with less than $5,000 worth of total property, craftsmen/tradesmen, middling farmers with between $5,000 and $25,000, professionals, and wealthy planters with more than $25,000 in personal property.

Using these six categories, Cameron found that 91% of the men in the 30th North Carolina had less than $10,000 worth of personal property and about 78% had less than $4,000. All field and staff officers were professionals or wealthy planters. This data leads to a fairly obvious conclusion: “in military matters as in politics and local society, men of means were assumed to be the natural leaders. Men of no means were assumed to be fit mostly to follow” (45). For the 30th North Carolina, it was indeed a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.

Welcoming the End of the War: A final insight from Tar Heels in Gray follows an argument made by historian Kenneth Stampp in his fantastic 1980 book The Imperiled Union. In that book, Stampp made the provocative argument that by the time Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9, 1865, most Confederate soldiers welcomed the surrender and were not interested in continuing the fight. Cameron makes the same conclusion about the men of the 30th North Carolina. After spending much of 1861 in training and garrison duty, the regiment saw hard fighting for the remainder of the war. Disease, starvation, and desertion was rampant. “Letters from men of the 30th written in the second half of 1864 and into 1865, are filled with despair. Given the lack of food and supplies, large scale desertion and strong anti-Confederate feeling at home, many men of the 30th saw no hope for victory,” argues Cameron (130). They viewed President Davis and General Lee’s continued fighting with anger, despair, and fear. When surrender did arrive, one 30th North Carolina soldier nicely summed up his feelings in a personal diary: “Thank God this war is over.”

Tar Heels in Gray is a great book for a few reasons. By choosing to not solely focus on military matters, Cameron does great work in providing a holistic view of the soldiers and their life experiences. Many of these young men were fairly poor but going about their daily lives in the hopes of moving up in society and, in some case, providing for their own families. Local, state, and eventually Confederate leaders told them that their livelihoods, families, and their state were in danger of being destroyed with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. Whatever they felt about the politics of slavery or disunion, the men of the 30th North Carolina choose to fight for the new Confederate nation. The price they paid for that decision was an eighty percent casualty rate, untold death and destruction, the death of comrades from battle and disease, and, for the survivors, a lifetime of trauma.

I recommend Tar Heels in Gray for any student of the Civil War. Unfortunately, this book was Dr. Cameron’s last work of historical scholarship. After reviewing the book I was saddened to learn that he passed away in 2022.