The settlers in the mountains region, the wealthy plantation owners and the people living on the coast would have been most likely to support seccession in North Carolina. Yeoman farmers were non-slave farmers, and abolitionists were against slavery.
In 1860, North Carolina was a slave state, with a population of slaves comprising approximately one third of the population, a smaller proportion than many southern states. The state refused to join the Confederate States of America until President Abraham Lincoln insisted that he invade his "brother" state, South Carolina. The state was a place of few battles, but it provided 125,000 soldiers to the Confederate States of America, much more than any other state. About 40,000 of those troops never returned to their homes, some died of illness, because of injuries caused on the battlefield and deprivation. Elected in 1862, Governor Zebulon Baird Vance sought to maintain state autonomy against the President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia.
Even after the secession, some people of North Carolina refused to support the Confederate States. This happened, mainly, in the case of those who did not own slaves for agriculture in the western mountains of the state and the Piedmont region. Some of these farmers remained neutral during the war, while some, undercover, supported the Union during the conflict. Even so, the troops of the Confederate States of America from all over North Carolina served in virtually all the great battles of the Army of Northern Virginia. The biggest battle in North Carolina was in Bentonville, a vain attempt on the part of the Confederate general Joseph Johnston to stop the advance of the general of the Union William Tecumseh Sherman, in the spring of 1865. In April of 1865 Johnston surrendered at Sherman Bennett Place, in what is now Durham. This was the last great army to surrender.
