This thesis examines the life and political career of Henry Toole Clark, the second of North Carolina's three Civil War governors. Clark served one term as the state's chief executive from July 1861 to September 1862, a crucial period in which North Carolina established itself as a constituent member of the Confederate States and first suffered the hardships of war. As the leader of the state in that formative period, he mobilized thousands of troops for the Southern cause, established the first, and only, Confederate prison in North Carolina, arranged the production of salt for the war effort, created European purchasing connections, and built a successful and important gunpowder mill. Clark, however, found more success as an administrator than as a political figure. The Edgecombe County planter devoted over twenty years to the service of the Democratic Party at the local, state, and national levels, and over ten years as a state senator. As governor, he was unable to maneuver in the new political world ushered in by the Civil War, and he retired abruptly from public service at the end of his term. Clark's life and career offer insight into the larger world of the antebellum planter-politician, that dominant group of southern leaders who led the region into dependence upon slavery and, ultimately, to war. Though the planter class was diverted from power for a brief time during Reconstruction, the political and racial ideology of that class would shape conservative white southern thought for the next hundred years.