On April 15, 1861, North Carolina governor John Ellis responded to President Abraham Lincoln’s call for troops with the often quoted statement: “You can get no troops from North Carolina.”
Although North Carolina as a state had seemed moderate during the Secession Crisis of 1861, Ellis had worked behind the scenes to align North Carolina with the budding Confederate government. In February 1861, citizens of the Old North State rejected a call for a Constitutional Convention to even consider the secession question.
Southern state after southern state declared for secession in early 1861 following South Carolina’s declaration in December 1860. President Lincoln inherited a nation at the breaking point, and he ordered the federal fort in Charleston harbor to be resupplied. South Carolina forces prevented the effort and fired on Fort Sumter. Lincoln then issued a call for troops to put down the rebellion.
Ellis considered Lincoln’s call to arms an unacceptable power grab, and he immediately ordered state troops to seize the federal forts in North Carolina as well as the federal arsenal at Fayetteville. He called the General Assembly into session two weeks later and rushed through a bill that called for a secession convention and authorized Ellis to send troops to Virginia. North Carolina left the Union just a few weeks later.
Though Ellis’ pithy last sentence is often quoted, the full text of his reply to Lincoln lays out a number of Constitutional justifications for secession that were popular at the outset of the war.
Other related resources:
- The Civil War and Historical Governors Papers digital collections from the State Archives and State Library
- Images of the Civil War from the State Archives
- The Civil War on NCpedia
- North Carolina and the Civil War from the N.C. Museum of History
- The North Carolina Civil War Sesquicentennial Committee
Images from State Archives of North Carolina.