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The Daily Tar Heel

Civil War: UNC senior speaks in favor of Union cause

Click on the timeline to see The Daily Tar Heel’s Civil War headlines. Click on a headline to be taken to the article.

Editor’s note: One hundred fifty years ago Sunday, reports of the attack on Fort Sumter appeared in area newspapers. This stories from the Civil War are presented as they might have appeared in a student newspaper. All photos and article data courtesy of Wilson Library.

APRIL 1861 — Although it appears all students in Chapel Hill are in favor of the secession, at least one is not.

John Wesley Halliburton, a senior from Woodville, Tennessee, was asked to speak after the raising of the Secession flag on Saturday, following speeches from the president of the University, David Lowry Swain, and other students. In a letter to his fiancée, Halliburton said:

“A few boys were called on (students I mean) and then I was asked to speak but declined as I was not in favor of Secession. They insisted and for five minutes I told them how I loved the Union,” he said.

“All were astonished that I should be the only Union man in the crowd.”

Halliburton was not punished by his peers for expressing his views. Following his declarations, fellow students carried him on their shoulders and he was given a bouquet, although it was a Secession bouquet.

When one student hissed at Halliburton for expressing his pro-Union beliefs, Halliburton’s friends knocked him down.

Halliburton said:

“One old fellow came up and said, ‘My young friend you are alone I believe but I will fight with you — I will see you have fair play.’”

Halliburton bristles at any suggestion that he is betraying his homeland, holding steadfastly to the belief that secession is not the solution to the hostility that grips the country.

“As if I sought to ruin a land that holds my darling my life — my all! Is it not mean!” he said.

However, Halliburton steadfastly insists that the South owes its loyalty to the United States of America.

“The preamble of the Constitution says ‘We the people of the United States of America,’ not ‘We the people of South Carolina,’” he said to his fiancée in March.

“You know that if war does begin before it ends we will be so used to horrors that ‘mothers will but smile to see their infants quartered by the hand of war.’ You know that secession is not peace,” he said.

Although he opposes secession and does not look fondly upon war, he plans to join his fellow classmates in fighting for the Confederacy, though not in the name of the South but in the name of love. His fiancée and second cousin, Miss Juliet Halliburton of Little Rock, AK, is pro-secession, and he seeks “the triumph of her opinion.”

Though he may be alone in opposing secession amongst his fellow students, Halliburton is not the sole man in Chapel Hill who wishes to remain in the Union. Josiah Turner, a lawyer who hails from Hillsborough and represented the area in the North Carolina Senate, also opposed secession.

Even President Swain hoped that secession could be avoided. But now that the inevitable has occurred they all wish to defend their homeland and the Confederacy, despite any initial misgivings.

Halliburton will speak at commencement in May.

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