Biography
Zebulon Baird Vance was Governor of North Carolina during the Civil War and was imprisoned for seven weeks after it ended, without charges and without a trial. A lawyer from Buncombe County who had served in the United States House of Representatives before secession, he opposed leaving the Union until Lincoln's call for troops, then raised a regiment, fought as colonel of the 26th North Carolina at New Bern and Malvern Hill, and was elected governor in 1862 at the age of thirty-two. In office he quarrelled constantly with the Confederate government in Richmond over conscription, habeas corpus and the impressment of supplies, and he ran the state's own blockade-running operation to clothe its troops. On May 13, 1865, his thirty-fifth birthday, General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick arrested him at Statesville. Samuel Wittkowsky, who gave him a wagon ride to the train station, recalled that Vance rode in silence shedding tears, and then, wiping his eyes, spoke of his wife and children, who had no money to live on, and of the indignities he feared North Carolina would suffer in the aftermath of the war. After a short imprisonment at Raleigh he reached the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. on May 20, sharing a small cell with John Letcher, the former Governor of Virginia; each man had an iron bed and a chair, and they paid for meals sent in from a restaurant nearby. Vance applied for parole on June 3, 1865 under President Johnson's amnesty program, and with his wife gravely ill and Johnson's sympathies running toward reuniting the family, the President paroled him on July 6, 1865. He was never tried for anything. Barred from office by federal law, he returned to the practice of law in Charlotte, was elected to the United States Senate in 1870 but denied his seat, won the governorship again in 1876, and served in the Senate from 1879 until his death in Washington on April 14, 1894.
