Zebulon Baird Vance (13 May 1830-14 April 1894) was a member of the US House of Representatives (D-NC 8) from 7 December 1858 to 3 March 1861 (succeeding Thomas Lanier Clingman and preceding Robert B. Vance), Governor of North Carolina from 8 September 1862 to 29 May 1865 (succeeding Henry Toole Clark and preceding William Woods Holden) and from 1 January 1877 to 5 February 1879 (succeeding Curtis Hooks Brogden and preceding Thomas Jordan Jarvis), and a US Senator from 4 March 1879 to 14 April 1894 (succeeding Augustus Summerfield Merrimon and preceding Thomas Jordan Jarvis).
Biography[]
Zebulon Baird Vance was born near Weaverville, North Carolina in 1830, the nephew of Robert Brank Vance and the brother of Robert B. Vance. He became a lawyer in Asheville in 1852, and he served as a Whig State Senator from 1854 to 1856, failed in his 1856 bid for the State Senate as a Know Nothing, and served as a pro-slavery Democratic congressman from 1858 to 1861, as Colonel of the 26th North Carolina Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War, as Governor from 1862 to 1865 (as an anti-secession "Conservative"), and as the Democratic Governor from 1877 to 1879 and as a US Senator from 1879 until his death in 1894. He proposed agricultural reforms, the expansion of teacher training through normal schools, and the addition of more public schools, including separate but equal access for African-Americans, and he was also supportive of the conservative Democratic president Grover Cleveland. In spite of his racially progressive views, he was said to have been Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina; the Klan had been supportive of his Conservative Party. He died in 1894.