Josephus Daniels: His Life and Times

1. The Loveliest Village of the Plain

In the early eighties Wilson was strictly a cotton town. . . . People depended almost solely on cotton, though some small farmers raised their hog and hominy, and the large planters grew watermelons and some vegetables. But King Cotton ruled.

—JOSEPHUS DANIELS

Throughout his life, Josephus Daniels emphasized his humble roots in the sandy soils of North Carolina’s coastal plain. Those roots were never quite as humble as Daniels insisted, but they were humble enough. Daniels’s father, also named Josephus, was a first-generation American. Father and son were named for the first-century historian Flavius Josephus, whose eyewitness account of the Jewish Revolt and subsequent Roman sack of Jerusalem could be found in the libraries of the more literate early American families. (It was said of that time and place that beyond the good book were very few other books, but the works of Josephus were among those few other books.)¹ The elder Josephus Daniels, later nicknamed Jody, was born on January 21, 1828, in the little town of Bayboro, North Carolina, near Pamlico Sound. He was one of six sons born to Clifford and Susan Carraway Daniels.²

In the early 1780s, Clifford’s widowed father, Thomas Daniels, had migrated from Northern Ireland, with Clifford and three other sons, to Roanoke Island, North Carolina.³ Thomas and his sons were fishermen. Sitting at the confluence of Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds, tucked within North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Roanoke Island proved an excellent location to practice their trade in the New World. There, and in the surrounding tidal areas, the first two American generations of Josephus Daniels’s family fished, farmed, and became shipwrights. An Ulsterman of Scottish decent, Thomas came from a clan that was rapidly claiming territory across Virginia and the Carolinas. These Scots-Irish (Scots who had done England’s dirty work in Ireland) established a reputation for hardscrabble frugality: Wherever they settled, they gained a reputation for practical piety and aggressive independence. A saying among their neighbors held that the Scotch-Irish kept the Sabbath and anything else they could lay hands on.⁴

After reaching adulthood, Clifford moved from Roanoke Island to the mainland town of Bayboro, along the Bay River inlet. There he settled and started his large family with Susan Carraway. After Susan’s early death, Clifford married Millie Jones, and with her he had six more children (four girls and two boys).⁵ To earn a living, Clifford fished, as his father, Thomas, had. But he also engaged in some small-scale farming, which seems practical if for no other reason than because of the number of mouths he had to feed, and as his boys from his first marriage matured, he developed a modest business constructing and repairing small schooners, which were employed in the local and coastal shipping trade.

Several of Clifford’s eight sons, including the senior Josephus, joined the small but growing family shipbuilding business. For reasons lost to time, in his early twenties, Josephus left Bayboro and the little family shop forever. Most likely young Daniels simply left a small backwater town to seek his fortune in the wider world, as countless ambitious youngsters have done before and since. First, he ventured north across the Pamlico River to the town of Washington in Beaufort County, where there were more and larger shipyards. A few years later, around 1850, he migrated to Rhode Island, where for some time he worked in still larger yards. Putting a strictly economic spin on Daniels’s move, we can surmise that a skilled wage-worker in the shipyards of Washington or Rhode Island could earn more than would have been possible in the small, and increasingly overcrowded, family shop in Bayboro.

The general economic conditions of the late antebellum era drove the market for shipwrights in eastern North Carolina. During these years, the southern economy grew rapidly, as the Atlantic trade, in which cotton played no small part, boomed. Larger shipyards bustled with activity, and good hands could be hard to find. Little Washington, as it was known, was a thriving port compared with Bayboro. There, Josephus Daniels, with the basic skills he had picked up in his father’s shop, quickly became an employee of the Farrow shipyard. William Farrow, or Captain Farrow as he was known locally, had been a successful merchant captain who, with age, saw more profit and less risk in leaving the rigors of the sea and settling onshore in the shipbuilding business. In addition to offering Daniels a steady job at a decent wage, Captain and Mrs. Farrow were the custodians of an orphaned girl from a once-prominent local family. Her name was Mary Cleaves Seabrook.

According to family lore, Daniels was smitten by Mary Cleaves from their earliest acquaintance. She gave him the nickname Jody. A mutual affection eventually blossomed between them, but Mary Cleaves was only fourteen or at most fifteen when they met. Although marriage at such an age was not unheard of at the time, by the consent of at least some of the parties involved, it was agreed that Mary Cleaves was too young to wed. Economic opportunity interrupted Jody’s subsequent courtship of the young orphan, as both Daniels and Farrow thought the expansion of the local shipping and shipbuilding businesses warranted a move into larger ships. Although Farrow was too old to learn those new tricks, he thought Daniels might be up to it, but since he lacked formal schooling in marine architecture, Daniels would need some on-site training to learn how to construct the larger ships. Farrow encouraged, and perhaps even funded, Daniels’s decision to make an educational tour of the northern shipyards. There the younger man could study the construction of those larger vessels, a turn of events that led him to Rhode Island, where he stayed for more than two years.

Of Jody Daniels’s time in New England practically nothing is known. Eventually, however, now in his mid-twenties, he returned to Washington, again settling into life as a shipwright in Farrow’s shipyard. Soon, displaying an entrepreneurial bent that he passed on to his son Josephus, Jody began some small-scale shipbuilding on his own. He had other business pursuits as well. Although the long-run trend in the coastal trade was without question positive, the industry was highly cyclical, and during the occasional downturn Jody Daniels worked in the retail store of John A. Arthur, who had become his closest personal friend outside the Farrow household.

Also, after returning from New England, Jody renewed his courtship of Mary Cleaves, and on New Year’s Day 1856, twenty-seven-year-old Jody Daniels married twenty-year-old Mary Cleaves Seabrook. Mary Cleaves, as she was usually known to friends and family, came from a higher rung on the socioeconomic ladder than Jody Daniels. Born into a relatively prosperous slave-owning family, Mary Cleaves grew up on a plantation in Hyde County, which lies to the east of Washington along the northern bank of the Pamlico River at the point at which the river flows into the Pamlico Sound. Although the area was largely marshland, the rich soil along the creeks that drained into the Pamlico could yield profits to those who had the initiative (and slave capital) to levee, drain, and cultivate it. But farming there proved to be a hard life. Visiting long after the area had been tamed, Josephus Daniels lamented the oppressive heat and mosquitoes that blackened the sails of the vessel on which he toured the county, which despite the state’s subsequent growth would remain lightly settled.⁶ Heat, humidity, hurricanes, black bears, swarms of mosquitoes in the air, and snakes underfoot made carving an economic niche in this soggy wilderness an insurmountable challenge to all but a few. Mary Cleaves’s father, James Seabrook, was one of those few, as had been both of her grandfathers.

James Seabrook, whose birthdate remains in dispute, was a farmer who also dabbled in medicine. After reaching adulthood, he established a farm on Smith Creek within eyesight of his parents’ place and slowly but steadily built a modestly prosperous operation. Wishing to share his good fortune with a wife, in 1827, after a brief but formal courtship, James Seabrook proposed to nineteen-year-old Lois Davis, who was descended on her mother’s side from a prominent family of land- and slave-owners, their name variously spelled Cleves or Cleaves. Lois received the proposal with enthusiasm. Her parents did not, for there was another suitor, a Mr. John Bell. Much older than James Seabrook, Bell had more property, and perhaps more importantly, the Bell name was older and more renowned among locals than that of Seabrook. The Davises had no intention of seeing Lois marry down either socially or economically, so they chose old Mr. Bell for their daughter. Lois, however, chose young Seabrook and eloped—ran off, in the vernacular of an earlier time—with him. Though the Davises were horrified, no doubt, the exact sanctions they imposed on their daughter remain unrecorded. For his part, Bell held no grudge and remained on good, though understandably distant, terms with the newlyweds.

The marriage of James Seabrook and Lois Davis proved to be a happy one. Among the sources of this happiness was economic success; the modest farm James had established by the time of their marriage subsequently grew and prospered. By the early 1830s it produced Wheat, corn, and cotton as well as fowl, sheep, hogs, and cattle; there was a vegetable garden, an orchard, and an abundance of other fruits. Fish and oysters were plentiful in the nearby waterways. Surplus crops were sold up the Pamlico River in Washington or down the Pamlico Sound and then up the Neuse River in New Bern. The labor demands of such an operation were met by a number of negro slaves.⁷ Although the exact number of slaves is unrecorded, at the time only one-third of all southern families owned even a single slave.⁸ To own a number of slaves and enough land to feed and keep them fully employed indicates the Seabrooks possessed considerable wealth, much more than, for example, Jody Daniels’s family, which included twelve children, owned little land, and held no slaves.

The Seabrook–Davis marriage was more than a corporate venture. Spiritually, it appears that through Lois, James converted from a rather ill-defined Jeffersonian Deism to formal Methodism, a commitment which they successfully passed to subsequent generations of the family. In addition to a prosperous plantation and a devotion to the Methodist Church, the union of Thomas and Lois Seabrook produced three daughters, one of whom died in infancy, and two, Elizabeth Porter and Mary Cleaves (called Polly as a child, though the name did not stick), who lived to old age. Unfortunately, neither Thomas nor Lois Seabrook enjoyed a similarly long life. Thomas died in 1836, less than a year after the birth of his youngest daughter, Mary Cleaves, and Lois died twelve years later at age forty. Although the cause of death in each case is unknown, the fact that Thomas lingered and was treated by local physicians suggests disease as the proximate cause—perhaps yellow fever, which was not uncommon in the area at the time.

Though widowed at a young age, Lois Seabrook did not succumb to despair. Life without a spouse was hard, but the physical labor was still left to slaves. In the years following her husband’s death, Lois managed the family plantation with the help of an African American slave who served as overseer. Young Mary Cleaves undoubtedly learned a thing or two about feminine independence from her mother. Whatever she learned from the experience, it would serve her well in the hard years to come. The Danielses knew backbreaking manual labor; the Seabrooks did not.

At the time of Lois Seabrook’s death, her daughters were still minors. Her estate entered probate, and its dissolution was overseen by a court-appointed executor. Initially, the disposition of the estate followed a fairly common path. Family papers and surviving legal documents refer to two separate transactions, one involving tangible (that is, non–real estate) assets and one involving land. At the time the will was executed, all tangible assets, including furniture, slaves, farm equipment, and so forth, were liquidated, a not uncommon practice at the time. The region’s agricultural economy was based on credit. Farmers borrowed to get the crop in the field with the expectation (and hope) that at harvest, the combination of yield and price would be enough to pay off the debt, with something left over for store-bought necessities and luxuries. In that economy, the primary difference between large farmers and small ones was the size of their debts. Thus the monies from Lois Seabrook’s tangible assets (and some of her real estate) settled outstanding debts and property tax liabilities, with the remainder going to compensate the executor and the guardians of Elizabeth and Mary Cleaves. The girls themselves received nothing directly from the liquidation of these assets. As for the real estate, a portion of the land remained in trust for the girls until they reached adulthood, and thus they ultimately derived some wealth from their parents’ economic success. However, each sister’s share of the net proceeds would turn out to be only a little more than $1,000, a substantial sum at the time to be sure, but because of subsequent events, it would be nearly twenty years before they took possession of these monies, and they would face many hard times before that day arrived.

Despite the family’s earlier prosperity, other than the land held in trust, the amount left after the estate was settled could not have been much, because the only cash with which the girls left Hyde County was $500 each, which, in an act of great charity, had been willed to them by their mother’s old suitor, John Bell, who died the same year as their mother. With this generous endowment, more than twice per capita national income at the time, the girls were shipped to the home of their new guardian, Captain William Farrow, a family acquaintance who lived in Washington farther up the Pamlico River in Beaufort County. It appears the Farrows took control of the endowment that Bell left the Seabrook girls as well as the (net) cash flow from the rent on the Hyde County land held in trust in the girls’ names. It follows that most if not all of that income went toward the upbringing of the girls. Whether in the end the girls actually received the full value of their mother’s estate is doubtful, though it should be noted that in the years that followed, Mary Cleaves remained close to the Farrows, and there was never any hint that they misappropriated any funds from the estate. However, the same could not be said of the estate’s executor. After reaching adulthood, Mary Cleaves’s sister, Elizabeth, sued the executor over monies from the liquidation of Lois Seabrook’s tangible assets, and although the exact terms of the settlement of the case have not survived, the formal charge was misfeasance.⁹ In the end, other than the land in Hyde County, the value of which would not grow appreciably over the years, as farming moved inland with the state’s population and economic activity, neither Elizabeth nor Mary Cleaves entered adulthood and then marriage with much more than her good name, a relatively genteel upbringing, and the clothes on her back.

After the move to Washington, through a mutual acquaintance Elizabeth soon met George Griffin, an up-and-coming merchant in the town of Wilson further inland on the coastal plain. They subsequently married in the early 1850s, and Elizabeth moved to Wilson, where Griffin’s downtown livery stable, among his other small business ventures, grew if not prospered. Mary Cleaves, who had grown into an angular young woman of above-average height, remained in the Farrow home for almost eight years. Sometime early in her stay there, she met Farrow’s young protégé, Jody Daniels. Love followed, and after Jody’s return from Rhode Island, the couple married at the beginning of 1856.

By all accounts, the marriage was a happy one. If Tolstoy is correct and all happy families resemble one another, then at least part of that happiness derives from the important ways in which husbands and wives complement each other. Such was the case with Mary Cleaves and Jody Daniels. Although decidedly working class, from a family of no renown in a time and place in which such things mattered, Jody had a few assets to recommend him. He was bright enough, kind, handsome, hardworking, and entrepreneurial, and he possessed a valuable trade. Although he would have little chance to grow rich working with his hands, he had been ambitious enough to leave the backwater of Bayboro and establish himself in a successful business in a more bustling provincial town. Perhaps most importantly to his orphaned bride, any summary of his character would note that he was reliable.

Mary Cleaves, on the other hand, came from a well-regarded, albeit downwardly mobile, family. She too was bright, and although not beautiful in any classical sense, she possessed a pleasant countenance that locals might generously call pretty—certainly on the pretty side of plain. Possessing a good sense of humor, and generally more outgoing than her husband, she had a tremendous physical and mental energy, which had been honed during those years when she and her sister helped their widowed mother manage the family estate. This drive, which is easy to recognize in those who possess it but otherwise difficult to characterize, she passed on to her own children. Whatever it is and wherever it comes from, Mary Cleaves had it. She would remain an anchor in the Daniels family until she left this world in her eighty-eighth year.

One source of contention did emerge during the couple’s courtship. Mary Cleaves, like her mother, was and would remain to her dying day a devout Methodist, whereas Jody’s family had little commitment to a church beyond their claim to being Ulster Protestants, which in those days contained no more information than saying they were not Irish Catholics. One source claims that Mary Cleaves, stubbornly, would not marry Jody until he formally became a Methodist. The Methodists, originally followers of the Anglican theologian John Wesley, mixed high-church tenets with low-church evangelizing, a combination that proved to be popular in rural and small-town America. The church maintained features of Anglicanism, including an episcopacy and formal articles of faith, but it combined them with less ceremonial Sunday services, fervent preaching, and a strong emphasis on individual faith and responsibility. On North Carolina’s socioeconomic ladder, the Methodists tended to occupy the middle rungs, lower than the Episcopalians but higher than the state’s Baptists. Popular though the church might have been, given that Mary Cleaves had to insist that her betrothed join it, one assumes Jody joined with some reluctance. Still he joined. Years later, one of their sons described both parents as members of the church, even noting that Jody became a member of the Board of Stewards. Perhaps his enthusiasm for Methodism increased with age.¹⁰

Despite their happy home, the young couple’s life was not without travail. They lost their first child, a boy, during infancy. This was not uncommon at the time. Intestinal tract and respiratory infections yielded infant mortality rates more than twenty times higher than today’s rates.¹¹ Neither the germ theory of disease nor the efficacy of public sanitation was well established at the time. Dysentery, often simply recorded as diarrhea, when it was recorded at all, was a big killer. Town dwellers were particularly susceptible. A second child, another son, was born on September 9, 1858. Although named Franklin Arthur, after founding father Benjamin Franklin and John Arthur, Jody’s close friend and sometime employer, the boy would be known simply as Frank. As for the family’s dwelling, between Jody’s return from New England and his marriage to Mary Cleaves, he had constructed with his own hands a small house in Washington, and here the little family lived quietly and in the relative comfort of a stable and happy home. All of that was about to be swept away with the winds of war.

By the time of Frank’s birth, the political dispute between the states—encompassing slavery, the tariff, western settlement, and a host of related issues—had already resulted in bloodshed on the plains of Kansas. A little more than two years later, that conflict broadened into the Civil War. Southern radicals proposed secession as the only answer to the (threatened) tyranny of abolition. Jody Daniels maintained an unambiguous position on these developments. Though his wife had grown up in a slaveholding family, and although he could not be described as an abolitionist, he had no attachment to the institution of slavery. Furthermore, an ardent Whig, he openly opposed secession, and he remained, even during the Civil War, a Unionist. The Whig Party, once a national party, had split over slavery and abolition. In 1856, at Ripon, Wisconsin, a group of northern Whigs, abolitionists, nativists, a few antislavery Democrats, and members of various other splinter groups formed the Republican Party. In the late 1850s no party could straddle the growing political chasm between slavery and abolition. Men like Jody Daniels could continue to call themselves Whigs, and here and there one could find a group of locals who operated politically under the old name; but after the emergence of the Republicans there was no longer a national Whig Party.

In his objection to secession, Jody Daniels was not alone and perhaps at the time not even in the minority in his state. Secession never achieved the same sanctified status in North Carolina that it reached in the more barn burning regions of the South, such as South Carolina, which had left the Union shortly after Abraham Lincoln’s election in the fall of 1860. Early in 1861, six other states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) joined South Carolina in secession and the formation of the Confederate States of America. After the attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor (April 12, 1861), the recently inaugurated Lincoln called for 75,000 federal troops from the states remaining in the Union. Refusing to comply, the Virginia legislature seceded on April 17. Arkansas followed on May 6, and the next day the Tennessee legislature approved a military alliance with the Confederacy. With its neighbors to the north, south, and west now aligned with the Confederacy, and the Union demanding troops, North Carolina could not remain aloof from the impending hostilities. In May a special session of the state legislature called a convention to address the issue, and on May 20 the convention adopted an ordinance that repealed North Carolina’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

Jody Daniels would serve the Confederate States of America, but not ardently. His war record remains a bit foggy even after much investigation by several parties, including his two oldest sons. In the years following Reconstruction, when such things mattered a great deal in North Carolina, his sons maintained that he volunteered for service with the Confederate navy. This was not quite accurate. Jody managed to avoid service in a Confederate army regiment, as he and his employer, Captain Farrow, ended up working in the Confederate naval yard in Wilmington, North Carolina, where Jody performed wage work for the Confederate navy. He was primarily employed repairing privateers and blockade-runners. Although Jody never actually served in the Confederate navy, as the war intensified, the difference narrowed between workers in strategic industries, such as shipbuilding and repair, and uniformed personnel. By the last year of the war, the Confederate government subjected, at least nominally, nearly all prime-age, able-bodied men to conscription of one form or another. It will never be known whether Jody served the Confederate navy out of a sense of duty to his state, or because it allowed him to avoid service in an army regiment or because he was nominally conscripted, or because he simply needed the money after the Union blockade had drastically reduced commercial shipping in the area. The question turned out to be important in the lives of his sons. After the war, having a distinguished record in a Confederate uniform, or having a father with a distinguished record, gave one a leg up in southern politics, and anyone without such a record was subject to questioning at best and possibly open condemnation. As the elder Daniels was never formally a member of the Confederate armed forces, his sons would be subject to the charge that he was a shirker or, worse, a Yankee sympathizer.

With Captain Farrow, Jody reported for work in Wilmington in the early summer of 1861. He contracted yellow fever soon after he arrived, but he recovered enough to enjoy a brief leave during which he continued to convalesce. He returned to Wilmington sometime in the late summer or early autumn. Over the next three years, he would only see his family on four more occasions, though at least two of these visits lasted several weeks. The Confederate States of America began formally conscripting able-bodied men into the army in 1862. As a worker with a skill deemed essential to the war effort, Jody was technically exempt from the draft, as long as he employed his craft in the service of the Confederate government. However, a second conscription act in 1864 allowed previously exempt workers to be drafted while remaining employed—in essence they became conscripted labor.¹² Jody Daniels avoided this fate as well. Although he was never in uniform, his service to the Confederacy was clearly of a military nature, and for much of the war he was not entirely free to come and go as he pleased. In any case, to abandon his employment as a shipwright would have formally exposed him to the military draft. He chose inglorious wage work over service in a regiment of the line.

There can be no doubting that Jody’s young family suffered during his wartime absences. The uncertainties of war, reduction in income, separation for many months on end punctuated by the few intervals when Jody secured leave—all of these things must have been a challenge for Mary Cleaves and her soon-to-be growing family. As for Jody, among the emotional hardships that he endured was his absence when Mary Cleaves gave birth to their son Josephus on May 18, 1862. Given the timing of the boy’s birth, it is likely he was conceived during his father’s convalescence leave late the previous summer. Interestingly, on two of Jody’s four subsequent leaves, he and Mary Cleaves conceived children. A daughter, Florence, was born in 1863, and died a short time later, though no cause of death was given, and another son, Charles Cleaves, was born in September 1864.

On one of his later leaves, Jody approached Union authorities in eastern North Carolina and received permission to ship goods, largely foodstuffs, from Union-held Hyde County into nearby, but Confederate-held, Little Washington in exchange for cotton.¹³ Such trade across lines was not uncommon in areas that avoided the worst of the fighting. Knowing the area well, with personal connections on both sides of the shifting no-man’s-land that separated the Union and Confederate forces, Jody was well positioned to facilitate this trade. However, he had neither the financial capital nor the mercantile connections to have arranged these transactions without help. At least part of the time he worked on behalf of a merchant named Hume, who operated out of Union-held New Bern, and in conjunction with a murky character named Kitcham. It is likely that he also dealt with his old friend John Arthur, or Arthur’s business associates, at the Washington end of the trade, and it is likely that Hume and Kitcham had traded with Arthur before the war.

To legally trade across military lines, which is to say in order to avoid having his goods confiscated and getting himself hanged or shot as a spy, Jody had to have written approval from the Union army. To obtain this approval he had to post a bond of $500, which he could not have secured without financial backing. What was subsequently more important for his sons’ postwar reputations, he had to formally swear and sign an oath of allegiance to the Union, an act about which he had no moral qualms. All of this guaranteed him the protection of the Union army, but it did nothing for him once he crossed into Confederate-held territory. Indeed, on at least one occasion he was taken into custody as a spy, an offense for which he most likely would have been executed if local residents had not intervened on his behalf. Given that he had officially renounced his allegiance to the Confederacy in order to trade under his Union bond, he was running a tremendous risk of being charged with desertion or even sedition by Confederate authorities. At the very least he exposed himself to conscription into a Confederate regiment.

On one of his trading excursions, during a leave in early 1864, Jody returned to Little Washington and moved his family to Ocracoke Island on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Although Ocracoke would become a popular vacation spot a century later, in the winter of 1864 it was a spit of barrier sand beyond the wilderness of North Carolina’s far eastern coast. With no suitable port nearby and little commerce to speak of, primarily inhabited by fishermen, Ocracoke was primitive even compared to nearby Hyde County, where Mary Cleaves had grown up. Mary Cleaves had just lost a child; she had a six-year-old and a two-year-old in tow; and she was soon to realize she was pregnant with yet another child. To send her off to Ocracoke may seem curious in retrospect, but Jody had not spent the war isolated in a frontier outpost. Living in the most thriving and soon-to-be-last open port of the Confederacy, and currently trading with parties on both sides, he was well informed and well positioned to recognize that the combination of the increasingly constricting Union blockade and the pincer movement of Union forces in Virginia and Georgia would in time strangle what remained of the Confederate States of America. With some prescience he foresaw that those forces would eventually converge in eastern North Carolina, and he did not want his wife and sons to be in the path of the conquering forces.

Decades later, in his memoirs, Josephus Daniels claimed that his mother had twice been burned out of her home in Washington. This could not have been literally true, because the home Jody built survived the war and was sold by Mary Cleaves a few years after Jody’s death.¹⁴ Washington did, in fact, suffer from two major fires, one when the Union army pulled out and one shortly thereafter when the Confederates moved in. Mary Cleaves stayed with friends during this time, and so it is possible that the homes in which she resided were in fact burned to the ground. It is also possible that her son embellished or spoke metaphorically when, years later, he referred to these events and their impact on his mother. In either case, by 1864, Jody felt his family had seen enough of the war, and thus he decided that the certain hardships of Ocracoke would be easier to bear than the uncertain ones imposed by the victorious Yankees.

After moving his family to Ocracoke, Jody made one last visit there in the late summer of 1864, bringing supplies from the mainland. His oldest son, Frank, remembered that this was the last time he saw his father alive.¹⁵ Josephus, barely two at the time, had no memory of his father, and Charles was yet to be born. Because of the shifting control between Union and Confederate forces in the towns of the coastal plain, the trading business in which Jody was engaged became too dangerous, and after he had provisioned his family on Ocracoke, he returned to work in the Wilmington naval yard sometime in the late summer or early autumn of 1864. He remained there until the Union navy began its final assault on Fort Fisher at the mouth of the Cape Fear River south of Wilmington. Once the fort fell on January 15, 1865, Wilmington ceased to be a valuable Confederate naval resource. Shortly before the fort was taken, Jody left Wilmington for good. Either he received his formal release from labor service, which was unlikely, or he simply left without receiving a furlough. He headed north toward home, crossing Union lines near New Bern. There he again worked with the local merchant, Hume, with whom he had traded across Confederate lines the previous year.¹⁶

With the war winding down, all might have worked out for Jody and his family had it not been for the fact that Captain Farrow had died earlier in the war, leaving no children. Jody felt responsible for Mrs. Farrow, who had once taken into her household both Jody and Mary Cleaves, and he attempted to look after the widow, even though she remained in Washington while he was in New Bern. Troops from both armies now roamed the area, often with no clear line between them. Thus there was little commerce passing through Washington in late 1864 and early 1865. (It was exactly the fear of these conditions that had driven Jody to move his family to Ocracoke.) However, succumbing to the appeals for supplies from local citizens, the Union commander at New Bern, General Innis Palmer, allowed a river steamer to be loaded with goods that were to be exchanged for cotton in Washington. Jody was familiar with the trade across no-man’s-land from his earlier dealings with Arthur, Hume, and Kitcham, and hoping to pick up some cash by trading and to look in on Mrs. Farrow, he offered to join the expedition. Palmer allowed him to do so under the terms of his earlier bond and oath of allegiance, and the steamer departed New Bern on January 21.

Supposedly, a truce had been worked out between Palmer’s representatives and a captain of the Georgia troops stationed near Washington. In the event, when the steamer arrived in Washington, the Union officers onboard found no Confederate officer with whom they could treat. After anchoring downriver, they returned the next day. What they met on their return was a hailstorm of Confederate fire from the banks of the Pamlico. Among those wounded onboard was Jody Daniels. No trade was consummated, and the steamer returned to New Bern that same day. Jody lingered for several more days but died on January 28 as a result of his wounds. Because he was shot by Confederate troops while onboard what was essentially a Union army vessel, not a few of his sons’ future political enemies suggested that Jody had been a Yankee sympathizer. While he certainly did possess antisecessionist and antislave sentiments, and while he had traded across Union lines, there is no record suggesting he gave material aid or service to the Union army. He traded with the army’s permission, not on its behalf.

Between the time the steamer docked in New Bern and Jody’s death, word was sent to Mary Cleaves on Ocracoke. Given travel times and the uncertain state of military affairs in eastern North Carolina at the time, in all likelihood Jody died before Mary Cleaves even heard about his wounds. She nonetheless left the three boys in the care of friends, probably the McDaniels, another Washington family that had retreated to Ocracoke to wait out the end of the war. According to her oldest son, Frank, Mary Cleaves found her husband’s death so overwhelming that for months she was incapacitated to plan for her future. But for her children she would not have cared to live.¹⁷ She would live for another fifty-eight years, would never think of marrying another man, and would always keep green the memory of her beloved Jody; but at the time, one could have forgiven her if she grieved more for the predicament in which she found herself than for her dead husband. Other than the small house in Washington, which contained nothing but a mahogany table and Jody’s hand tools; the few possessions she had managed to transfer to the shack on Ocracoke; and the deed to the property she shared with her sister in Hyde County (which at the moment was about as illiquid as an asset could be), she had nothing but three young mouths to feed.

After seeing to the burial of her husband, Mary Cleaves returned to Ocracoke, as the war wound down in the spring of 1865. With no spouse, no job, and no prospects, she was nearly destitute. She seems to have gotten hold of a small amount of cash either from Jody’s late trading operations or from loans secured by or from friends on Ocracoke. (Given her stubbornly self-sufficient nature, it was most likely the former.) With this money and no small amount of determination, she confronted her precarious situation. Her first goal was to find long-term accommodations, and to this end, in the late summer or early autumn of 1865, she moved with her three young sons—Frank, now seven; three-year-old Josephus; and the infant Charles—from Ocracoke to Wilson, North Carolina, where her sister, Elizabeth, had lived for more than a decade.

WILSON

The town of Wilson, which Josephus Daniels always called the loveliest village of the plain, lies in the eastern North Carolina plain between the watersheds of the Tar and Neuse Rivers. The coastal plain stretches for roughly 200 miles inland, running from northeast to southwest, parallel to the Atlantic coast. The table-flat fields spread to the horizon, broken only by the occasional river, stream, or piney wood. Daniels evocatively and lovingly described the scene of his childhood. There were no hills, he wrote, only the wide sweep of flat land, lush with vegetation. Boundless aisles of corn, the emerald blades and tassels bending to the quiet breeze which rippled over the countless acres, stood on either side of the road. . . . Across the road, the blooms of the cotton plant stretched out in beauty in long rows as far as the eye could see. The yellowing leaves and flowers of tobacco contrasted with the varied colors of corn and cotton. Back of these, and often in long stretches, the pines lifted their needles and the stately oak gave grateful shade.¹⁸ That description fits much of the region to this day. On either side of Wilson the plain is disrupted by the Toisnot and Contentnea Creeks. The former lies on the northeast side of town and the latter on the southwest side. The two creeks meet southeast of Wilson and there are joined by other small waterways, which ultimately flow into the Neuse River.¹⁹

Neither the Toisnot nor the Contentnea was navigable in any meaningful economic sense, and the area that became the town of Wilson was, initially, nothing more than a crossroads long traversed by natives. Among the local economic resources were the excellent fishing prospects offered by the shad migrations up the Toisnot and, especially, the Contentnea. When whites first moved into the area in the early eighteenth century, the Tuscarora Indians, part of the Iroquois federation, maintained a town they called Tosneoc, which local whites, largely of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon descent, variously turned into Toisnot, Tosneot, or Tossnot, depending upon their particular linguistic take on the native term. The first church, Tosneot Primitive Baptist Church, was built in 1756. A general store was established in 1808, and in 1839 the Wilmington and Raleigh Railroad (later the Wilmington and Weldon) laid tracks through the area and opened a depot near the little settlement most commonly called Toisnot. In the next year the settlement received its first post office, officially called Tossnot Depot. Having a railroad stop nearby increased the economic importance of Toisnot, and subsequently the town itself became known as Toisnot Depot. The town served as an entrepôt for local economic activity, with farmers bringing commodities to the railhead and purchasing manufactured goods brought in via rail from more exotic places like Wilmington and the wider world beyond. By 1850, there were roughly 250 residents in the immediate vicinity of the crossroads.²⁰

During this period the area around Toisnot Depot was part of the much larger Edgecombe County, which itself dated from colonial times.²¹ Typically, as local population density increased in rural hamlets like Toisnot Depot, there emerged a demand for locally provided public services, such as roads, courts, tax assessment, law enforcement, and so forth. Accompanying this demand was a perception, not always mistaken, that distant county officials were more likely to see the hinterlands as sources of tax revenues, which were in turn spent on infrastructure (and patronage) in or near the county seat. Between 1787 and 1855 such motivations led to no fewer than nine unsuccessful attempts in the state legislature to create, in the western parts of Edgecombe County, a new county surrounding Toisnot Depot.²² Before these efforts yielded fruit, the town of Toisnot Depot and a nearby village of Hickory Grove became jointly incorporated, through an act of the state legislature, as the village of Wilson in 1849.

The town was named for Louis Dicken Wilson, a member of the local gentry who had served five years as a state representative and seventeen as a state senator. Wilson raised a local company for service in the Mexican War, and his troops joined Winfield Scott’s army as it marched victoriously from the sea to Mexico City. Alas, Wilson never basked in the glory of Scott’s victories, having died from fever on the road to Chapultepec.²³ Wilson’s name lived on, however, when the twin towns of Toisnot Depot and Hickory Grove became Wilson in honor of his memory. Finally, six years later, after three-quarters of a century of local political effort, in 1855 a county of the same name was carved out of the surrounding counties of Edgecombe, Nash, Wayne, and Johnston, and the village of Wilson became the seat of Wilson County.

At the time the state legislature formally chartered the town of Wilson, the tobacco boom had not yet hit eastern North Carolina, and on the eve of the Civil War, cotton was by far the most valuable cash crop that passed through the town. The primary economic activity besides farming was, as it had been since the eighteenth century, the processing of naval stores, especially tar and turpentine, from the local pine forests. With the rise of the steam engine and the ironclad ship, tar, which was used as caulking in wooden ships and a general weatherproofing agent, was not as sought after as it once had been, but the other major store, turpentine, had other uses and remained the most prominent of the locally manufactured goods. During the 1850s, when the town had only a few hundred residents, it had no fewer than five turpentine-distilling operations, making Wilson possibly, at least on a per capita basis, the turpentine capital of the world.²⁴

Still, cotton dominated the pine tree in the local economy, and where there was cotton in the Old South, there were slaves. In 1860 roughly one-third of Wilson County’s population and nearly 40 percent of the population of the village of Wilson itself consisted of slaves. In addition, 3 percent of Wilson’s prewar population consisted of free blacks. How harmoniously the three groups—white, free black, and slave—got along would be subject to some degree of interpretation. Whites throughout the antebellum South, and indeed into the postbellum era, had a tendency to confuse black passivity and servility with contentment and even happiness. Josephus Daniels suffered from this view. I never heard of any charges of cruelty to slaves, he wrote. Humane feelings were united with self-interest in the protection of valuable slave property. Slaves received sufficient food and clothing and medical attention from the same doctors who attended their owners. After emancipation they regarded their former owners as friends who would and did aid them in need.²⁵ Other accounts of the period would dispute this interpretation, but whatever the true relationship among the various classes and races of Wilson, the Civil War would alter it forever.

After learning of Jody Daniels’s death, Mary Cleaves’s sister, Elizabeth, and her husband, George H. Griffin, encouraged Mary Cleaves to move to Wilson. The Griffins promised to house the family, and they reasoned that in terms of educational and economic opportunity, Wilson would be a better place to raise the boys than the remote Outer Banks. They were without question correct in this reasoning. Since Ocracoke was isolated geographically, culturally, and economically, for a single mother of three young boys to prosper there in 1865 would have been unlikely. Mary Cleaves must have realized as much after spending a few months there at the end of the war. While always guarded about receiving charity, even from a sister and her kindly husband, Mary Cleaves recognized that Wilson would be a much better location for the boys than Ocracoke. As for the family she was joining, in financial terms at least, Elizabeth had married somewhat better than Mary Cleaves, and by 1865 George Griffin—Uncle Griffin to Josephus Daniels and his brothers—had a successful buggy repair and manufacturing shop and livery stables in Wilson.²⁶ If nothing else, Uncle Griffin had managed to survive the war, keep a good roof over his family’s head, and maintain a strong cash flow from his expanding businesses, all things Jody Daniels, no matter how kind and well intentioned he might have been, had failed to do.

Although Elizabeth insisted that Mary Cleaves move in with her and Uncle Griffin, upon arriving in Wilson, Mary Cleaves just as firmly insisted on renting a home. Unfortunately, her bad luck continued, and soon after she and her sons moved into the rental house, it burned to the ground. She managed to save only a few personal items that had survived the war in Washington. Everything else was lost. After being burned out of her home, Mary Cleaves surrendered to her sister’s wishes, and she and the boys moved in with the Griffins, who lived near Uncle Griffin’s buggy shop on Goldsboro Street just off the town’s main intersection. Despite the Griffins’ charity, the proud Mary Cleaves resolved to be self-supporting.²⁷

In those days, for a widow with no work experience outside the home to make a living was quite difficult. However, given that so much of the clothing of the day was made and repaired within the home, nearly every woman below the loftiest rung on the socioeconomic ladder could make a modest living at millinery and dressmaking. Furthermore, it was one of the few forms of employment that was generally perceived as respectable for women at the time. Thus this was the business to which Mary Cleaves turned in the fall of 1865. For the next fifteen months, except on Sundays, she worked constantly at the job. Though a dedicated worker, Mary Cleaves had never sewed professionally, and so she put in long hours doing the same work that a more experienced seamstress could perform in considerably less time. The tedium must have taken its toll, because late in 1866 she accepted a position that she had previously turned down—that of Wilson’s postmistress.

At the time, patronage appointments made up the vast majority of federal government jobs, and the post office was no exception. In a Republican-dominated era, such a position would have normally gone to a local Republican. However, as Josephus Daniels later recalled, When I was a boy there was only one white voter in the town of Wilson who voted any other than the full Democratic ticket.²⁸ This was Willie Daniel, an antisecessionist Whig who had followed the Whigs into the Republican Party. Despite his political heresy, Daniel remained on good terms with the town’s other leading citizens, including George Griffin and, through the Griffins, Mary Cleaves. Out of a sense of charity—since Mary Cleaves, like the Griffins, was a Democrat—and out of respect for her brother-in-law’s high standing in the town, Daniel agreed to support her for the post office position.²⁹ As one family member put it, she got the job because she was the only literate white person [the Republicans] could find who hadn’t given aid or comfort to the Confederacy.³⁰

Willie Daniel’s support was more than nominal. Since the postmasters and postmistresses handled federal monies with no direct oversight, they were required to post a bond to protect the post office against any financial loss resulting from their malfeasance. Wilson had no bonding companies at the time, so Daniel would also have to sign Mary Cleaves’s bond, essentially agreeing to repay any monies lost through her mismanagement of the post office. He generously did so. With the town’s subsequent growth, the job of postmistress would prove to be a remunerative one for Mary Cleaves. Among other things, it allowed her to move one block northeast of her sister’s home into a rented house on Tarboro Street. There she kept the Wilson Post Office in the front room, where it stayed for the next sixteen years. It soon became a local gathering place, and the time young Josephus spent in the post office would influence him mightily for the rest of his life.

Mary Cleaves’s sons always maintained that she was the most dutiful of mothers. Of her struggles during the family’s Wilson days, Daniels wrote, If I could worship at the shrine of any mortal, my devotions would be at an altar erected to my mother.³¹ Given Mary Cleaves’s long hours as a seamstress and, later, as postmistress, the boys’ care would have undoubtedly suffered despite their mother’s devotion were it not for the presence of Sallie Daniels, the younger half-sister of the deceased Jody Daniels. Over the years, Jody had remained in touch with, though not particularly close to, his family in Bayboro. Jody’s oldest son, Frank, recalled visiting his relatives there on only one occasion during these years.³² However, Sallie was the oldest child from Clifford Daniels’s second marriage, and for whatever reason, she and Jody remained close. Thus when Mary Cleaves and the boys moved to the rented house on Tarboro Street, Sallie, who was unmarried, came to live with the family, taking care of its quotidian needs. Josephus Daniels and his brothers were absolutely devoted to their paternal aunt, but after several years of caring for them, Sallie married. The boys mourned that day, and her absence strained Mary Cleaves even further.³³

Adding to Mary Cleaves’s stress was the presence of the widowed Mrs. Farrow. Josephus Daniels referred to her as his foster grandmother, and she would live with the family for the rest of her life. In Sallie’s absence Mary Cleaves was soon forced to hire a live-in cook, a former slave known only as Dora. Mrs. Farrow’s arrival was not entirely without benefit; in return for Mary Cleaves’s generosity, Mrs. Farrow turned over the deed to the remaining Farrow property in Washington. Through the sale of this land (for roughly $500), combined with the sale of Mary Cleaves’s own home in Washington (for less than $250), and, finally, her family land in Hyde County (which yielded roughly $1,250), Mary Cleaves was able to purchase for $2,000 the home she had been renting on Tarboro Street.³⁴ That $2,000 proved to be all the money she had access to at the time, and so the house represented all of the family’s wealth. Although only slightly above modest, the wood-framed, two-story house bordered what was rapidly becoming Wilson’s fashionable residential neighborhood, and it stood just off the town’s central intersection and business district. It proved to be a good location and a good investment.³⁵

Wilson served as the county’s economic hub. As such, it was typical of small towns all over America: The buildings that lined the main streets of such places contained general stores, grocers, hardware dealers, dry goods merchants, and taverns, all selling their wares entirely to retail customers.³⁶ The post office served as the center of that hub.³⁷ Because Wilson was also the county seat, and because the courthouse was literally in Mary Cleaves’s backyard, the post office also served as a political hub. In short, it was a combination of coffee shop, bourse, and general meeting place. Each day the town’s leading citizens gathered to collect their personal and business correspondence, discuss any information they might have received via post or gossip, and generally conduct whatever business or social intercourse they had with one another. There was no residential postal delivery service in those days, and so those who owned agricultural land beyond the town’s edge would take a buggy into town, often daily. Those who lived farther out might come to town once a week or so. The big-city newspapers, which for Wilson readers came primarily from Raleigh and Wilmington, arrived by train in the mid-morning, and they were distributed at the post office later in the morning. The early to mid-morning period, when the locals gathered in anticipation of the arrival of the mail, witnessed the peak of the day’s activity. Except for the time that Josephus spent in school or working elsewhere, he tried to never miss a morning in the post office. For him it proved to be a vocational school.

Mary Cleaves served as Wilson’s postmistress from December 1866 to early March 1883. The position paid reasonably well, though she certainly did not get rich. In those days, the local postmaster or postmistress received a strict piece rate in the form of a flat percentage of the stamps canceled in the office. In 1867, her first full year on the job, she earned $420. By 1881, with Wilson’s growth, she earned $1,300 annually, a very good salary at the time. Josephus was the only one of her sons to work regularly in the post office, or at least he was the only one to be officially remunerated for such work. After he ended his formal education in Wilson at age eighteen, his mother carried him on the books as a postal clerk, and he earned $90 a year. Before that he had run a small retail book and sporting goods store out of one corner of the post office. Wilson had no bookstore at the time, and, displaying his father’s entrepreneurial streak, Josephus attempted to capitalize on the opportunity. Apparently it was not much of a moneymaker. His own amateur baseball team, which he organized and captained, consumed most of the sporting goods, and he and his bookish brother Frank consumed most of the reading material.

Even though Josephus did not receive explicit compensation for his work in the post office until he was eighteen years old, he had worked there regularly since he was old enough to read, and the job of sorting the mail generally fell to him. He loved it. He especially enjoyed having a first look at the out-of-town newspapers when they arrived each morning. On a typical day, after waking before dawn, he would gather and split wood for the day’s heating and cooking and then haul water from the community well, chores he shared with his brothers. He ate breakfast, and then, on the days he did not go to school or work picking strawberries (in the spring) or cotton (in the late summer or early fall), he helped his mother in the post office. From his Uncle Griffin, Josephus acquired the habit of reading the morning papers while sitting on the back step of his mother’s house. He usually had to read quickly before the patrons came to collect their mail. As the local merchants, lawyers, planters, and politicos gathered in his mother’s front room each morning, the curious boy observed their dress, habits, demeanor, and transactions. He could see who looked up to whom, and he tried to figure out why the hierarchy was as it was. He learned who had money to lend and who needed to borrow, who had cotton futures to buy or sell, and who had business or political connections beyond Wilson. As Daniels recalled, The leading men gathered daily at the post office, and I listened and came to share the feeling and views of the best thought of the town.³⁸

This professional crowd was overwhelmingly composed of white men who were almost all part of the Protestant mainstream—Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians. As the product of a devout Methodist household, Daniels generally classified acquaintances by religious affiliation, and he made a point of noting his occasional association with a Catholic or a Jew, but these were conspicuous by their small numbers. Being an openly hard-core Methodist, Daniels had no place in his religious beliefs for predestination, popery, or Talmudic doctrine; but he was no proselytizer, and he more often displayed his faith in his actions than in his words. As one of his sons remembered, There was no piety flung around our house.³⁹ Overall, Daniels took a generally good natured, if dismissive, view of other religious groups, but he always drew a well-defined line around them. To Daniels, the differences between Protestant sects represented important theological points. Years later, after he married into a prominent Raleigh Presbyterian family, Daniels remarked that he always believed wholeheartedly in his wife—minus predestination.⁴⁰

Although Daniels was destined for a life of commerce, his soon-to-be-chosen field—the newspaper business—was never far from politics, and he was always a politician even if he never ran for office. Thus, not surprisingly, the topics that he followed most closely at the post office were those surrounding the local political scene. After Reconstruction, the Democratic Party controlled Wilson, but there and elsewhere in the state, the party had at least two factions—a diehard unreconstructed or Bourbon wing and a more progressive or New South wing. Although the terms Bourbon and New South could mean different things to different observers, from Daniels’s perspective, the Bourbons primarily represented what remained of the planter aristocracy of the Old South. In the Bourbon world, farmland and cheap docile labor (primarily, though not always, black labor) to work it were the keys to economic wealth. In contrast, progressives like Daniels envisioned a New South in which economic growth was town based and driven by industry. The creation of a New South industrial dynamo required two things: modernization in the agricultural sector to free farm labor for the factories and northern capital to build them. During Daniels’s boyhood the South had little of either.

From a young age, Daniels felt equal parts respect and animosity for the Bourbons. Part of this was class consciousness. Despite his own protestations to the contrary, Daniels never rose above making well-defined class distinctions. As one historian put it, The hostility to their betters among the bourgeoisie is sometimes matched by a contempt for their inferiors.⁴¹ And so it was with Daniels, whose betters among the haughty Bourbons tended to look down on him, while at the same time he cultivated a well-honed sense of superiority over the poor whites further down the socioeconomic ladder. A later observer of the southern social scene explained: Those who stand closest to the line on which a distinction is drawn are those who insist upon it most hotly.⁴² Daniels drew such lines, and though he would never have admitted it, he condescended to those below him. But his condescension was for classes, not individuals. Daniels always treated individuals, whether they were black sharecroppers or wealthy white industrialists, with the same personal respect, as long as they obeyed the social customs of their class. At the same time, as the product of an aspiring, upwardly mobile professional class whose members earned their living from what they knew, not what they owned, Daniels did not like being looked down upon by anyone, and the fatherless boy who swept out the post office in his brother’s hand-me-downs was looked down upon by local Bourbons on more than one occasion.

An example of the type of social slight that annoyed young Daniels involved a local member of the