Asa Biggs: Senator, Judge, Confederate

One block north of here stood the home of Asa Biggs, a man whose career traced the fracture lines of nineteenth-century America. Born in eighteen eleven, Biggs served in the United States House of Representatives, then in the Senate from eighteen fifty-five until eighteen fifty-eight, when President Buchanan appointed him a federal district judge. Three years later, when North Carolina seceded, he resigned his federal commission and accepted a judgeship in the Confederate court system, serving the rebel government until its collapse.

After the war he relocated to Tarboro and then to Norfolk, where he died in eighteen seventy-eight. Biggs also represented North Carolina at the state constitutional conventions of eighteen thirty-five and eighteen sixty-one, bookending his career at two of the most consequential moments in the state's political history.