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North Carolina's Governors
Henry Toole Clark (1808-1874) was the second of three chief executives to serve North Carolina during the Civil War. Born in Edgecombe County, he studied in local school in Tarboro and Louisburg and at the University of North Carolina. Although he read law and passed the bar, he never practiced. Instead, he returned home to manage his father's plantation and business interests. After brief service as the Edgecombe County clerk of court, his fellow citizens elected Clark to the state senate in 1850. He was returned through 1860. He promoted internal improvements, seeking and acquiring an appropriation to build a plank road from Tarboro to Jamesville. When Governor John Ellis became seriously ill in June 1861, it fell upon Clark, as president of the senate, to assume the duties of the chief executive. The position was made official by the death of Ellis on July 7. The war dominated Clark's administration. He had been a secessionist, and in his first message to the legislature on August 16, he declared the cause of the Confederacy to be just, offering a plan of preparedness for defense of the state, particularly the coastline. His suggestions, however, 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 request for assistance. With Union occupation of northeastern North Carolina, the citizens unfairly blamed Clark for their problems. A man of modest political talent, the governor was unable to boost morale or rally the people to the Confederate cause. He did not run for a full term in 1862. Clark held 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 in the yard of Calvary Episcopal Church in Tarboro.
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