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Henry Toole Clark was the second of three chief executives to serve North Carolina during the Civil War. The son of Major James W. and Arabella Toole Clark, he was born on February 7, 1808, on his father’s Walnut Creek plantation in Edgecombe County. He was educated in the school of George Phillips in Tarboro and then attended school in Louisburg before entering the University of North Carolina, from which he graduated in 1826. Although he studied law and passed the bar, he never practiced. Instead, he became part of the state’s planter elite, managing his father’s plantation and business interests that extended as far as Alabama and Tennessee. In 1850 Clark married the widow Mary Weeks Hargrave of Tarboro, a cousin; they would have five children.
After brief service as Edgecombe County clerk of court, Clark was elected to the state senate in 1850. He was returned in every election through 1860. Although a Democrat and member of the planter aristocracy, he nevertheless promoted internal improvements, seeking and acquiring an appropriation to build a plank road from Tarboro to Jamesville. Respected by members of both the Democrat and Whig parties, he was elected president of the senate in 1858 and 1860. When Governor John Ellis became seriously ill in June of 1861, it fell upon Clark, as president of the senate, to assume the duties of the chief executive. Clark became governor upon the death of Ellis on July 7.
The Civil War dominated Clark’s administration. He had been a secessionist, and he continued and expanded upon Ellis’s program of raising military units for state and Confederate service. In his first message to the legislature on August 16, he declared the Confederate cause to be just, offering a plan of preparedness for defense of the state, particularly the long, exposed coastline. His suggestions were overridden by the Confederate authorities in Richmond, who had assumed control of all military affairs and turned a deaf ear to the governor’s requests for additional troops to be sent to the state. Subsequently, much of his term was consumed with continuing arguments over the defense of North Carolina with Confederate president Jefferson Davis and the top officials of the Confederate War Department, a forecast of the later and more extensive conflicts between the Davis administration and Clark’s successor, Zebulon Baird Vance. With Union occupation of eastern North Carolina, pro-Confederate citizens unfairly blamed Clark for their problems. He did not run for a full term in 1862.
Clark held some local offices in Edgecombe County after the war but ventured back into the state arena for only one term in the senate in 1866-1867. He retired to his plantation where he died in 1874. He was buried at Calvary Episcopal Church in Tarboro.
References:
John G. Barrett, The Civil War in North Carolina (1963)
Governors’ Papers: Henry Toole Clark, 1861-1862, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, N.C.
Richard W. Iobst, “Clark, Henry T.,” in William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 1:374-375 (1979)
Frontis Johnston and Joe A. Mobley, eds., Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 1843-1865, 3 vols. (1963-2013)
R. Matthew Poteet, Henry Toole Clark: War Governor of North Carolina (2009)
J. Kelly Turner and John L. Bridgers Jr., History of Edgecombe County, North Carolina (1920)
United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 70 volumes in 128 parts (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901)
C. L. Van Noppen Papers, Duke University, Durham
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