Representative John Adams Gilmer

John Adams Gilmer (November 4, 1805 – May 14, 1868) was a Congressional Representative from North Carolina whose political career spanned the turbulent decades before and during the American Civil War. He was born near Alamance Church in Greensboro, Guilford County, North Carolina, to Anne (née Forbes) and Robert Shaw Gilmer, who had emigrated from Ireland to North Carolina by way of Pennsylvania. His father worked as a farmer and wheelwright, and the family’s modest circumstances shaped Gilmer’s early life in the rural Piedmont region.

Gilmer attended local public schools and later an academy in Greensboro. At the age of seventeen he began teaching school, an occupation he pursued for several years while continuing his own education. When he was nineteen, he entered the Eli W. Caruthers Academy in Greensboro, where he studied for two years. Afterward he taught at a grammar school in Laurens County, further consolidating his experience as an educator. He then turned to the study of law under the tutelage of prominent North Carolina jurist Archibald Murphey and was admitted to the bar in 1832. On January 3, 1832, he married Juliana Paisley; the couple would have at least one son, John Alexander Gilmer, who later served as a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army and became a judge.

Following his admission to the bar, Gilmer established a law practice in Greensboro. His legal work, combined with his wife’s inheritance, enabled him to acquire land, other property, and enslaved people, and by the 1860 Federal census he was listed as engaged in both law and agriculture and recorded as the owner of fifty-three slaves. He became an influential figure in local affairs, serving as chairman of the town board of Greensboro and as solicitor of Guilford County. A defender of chattel slavery, he used his legal skills and political influence to uphold the institution; notably, in 1850–1851 he led the prosecution of two Wesleyan Methodist preachers accused of disseminating abolitionist propaganda, securing their conviction and removal from the state.

Gilmer’s formal political career began in the North Carolina General Assembly. He was elected as a Whig to the North Carolina State Senate in 1846 and served there for a decade, remaining in the body until 1856. During this period he emerged as a leading Whig voice in the state, advocating conservative, pro-slavery positions while navigating the sectional tensions that increasingly divided national politics. In 1856 he was the Whig candidate for Governor of North Carolina, but he was defeated in that bid, reflecting both the decline of the Whig Party and the shifting political landscape in the South.

At the national level, Gilmer’s congressional service occurred during a significant period in American history. He was elected as the candidate of the American Party to the Thirty-fifth Congress and reelected as a candidate of the Opposition Party to the Thirty-sixth Congress, serving two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from March 4, 1857, to March 3, 1861, representing North Carolina. Although his affiliations were with the American and Opposition parties, he was also described as a member of the Independent Party representing North Carolina, reflecting the fluid and fragmented party alignments of the late 1850s. In Congress he participated in the legislative process at a time of escalating sectional crisis and served as chairman of the Committee on Elections during the Thirty-sixth Congress, a position that placed him at the center of disputes over the legitimacy of contested seats and the broader political tensions of the era. His work in Congress involved representing the interests of his North Carolina constituents while attempting, at least initially, to find a conservative Unionist path amid growing talk of secession.

As the secession crisis deepened in 1860–1861, Gilmer briefly came under consideration for national executive office. In January 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln, seeking to reassure Southern Unionists and avert disunion, considered appointing Gilmer to his incoming cabinet. Secretary of State-designate William H. Seward sounded Gilmer out on the possibility, but Gilmer temporized and never firmly accepted, and the idea was ultimately dropped. His subsequent correspondence revealed how far he had moved from any spirit of compromise. On April 17, 1861, after the outbreak of hostilities, he wrote to Senator Stephen A. Douglas, denouncing Lincoln and his administration in vehement terms and declaring, “may the God of battles crush to the earth and consign to eternal perdition, Mr. Lincoln, his cabinet and ‘aiders and abettors,’ in this cruel, needless, corrupt betrayal [of] conservative men of the South. We would have saved the country, but for the fatuity and cowardice of this infernal Administration . . . . I hope you will not aid or countenance so detestable a parvenue.”

During the Civil War, Gilmer aligned himself with the Confederacy. He served as a member of the Second Confederate Congress in 1864, representing North Carolina in the legislature of the Confederate States of America. Even as the Confederacy’s fortunes waned, he engaged in efforts to shape the terms of peace and reconstruction. In February 1865, he proposed a peace and reconstruction plan that would have allowed both the Union and the Confederacy to retain separate identities while sending representatives, an idea reflecting his complex blend of Southern nationalism and a desire for some form of political accommodation. After the collapse of the Confederacy, Gilmer reentered national political life as a Southern Unionist delegate to the Union National Convention held in Philadelphia in 1866, which sought to rally support for President Andrew Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction policies and promote reconciliation between North and South.

In his later years, Gilmer remained a prominent, if controversial, figure in North Carolina, known for his long public career, his defense of slavery, and his shifting stance from conditional Unionism to Confederate service and postwar Unionist reconciliation. He died on May 14, 1868, in Greensboro, North Carolina. John Adams Gilmer was interred in the Old First Presbyterian Church Cemetery, now part of the Greensboro Historical Museum, leaving a legacy closely intertwined with the political and moral conflicts that defined mid-nineteenth-century America.