Carried Into War
A Soldier's Life
Realities of War
The Home Front
Facing the Grim Reaper
Breaking the Blockade
The Last Campaigns
An Uncertain Future
Acknowledgments
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The end of the war left all North Carolinians facing uncertainty about the future.
No other war in American history has come close to the Civil War in directly affecting so many families across the state. North Carolina's losses alone equaled two-thirds of all United States losses during the Vietnam War. The state furnished approximately 125,000 Confederate soldiers, and as many as 40,000 of them died, leaving mothers, widows, and children behind to care for themselves. In 1865 thousands of surviving soldiers returned home physically and emotionally devastated. For generations after the war, families remained sharply divided between members who had supported the Confederacy and those who had opposed it. Newly liberated African Americans rejoiced in their freedom but faced a future with no guarantee of food, shelter, work, or acceptance in Southern white society.
A Changed Landscape
No house except the blacksmith shop was burned, but into the flames they threw every tool, plow, etc. that was on the place.
—Janie Smith, Harnett County, April 12, 1865
Former Confederate servicemen returned home to begin the seasonal life of farmers once more. Many found their homes in great disrepair and their fields neglected and overgrown with weeds. Much livestock had been killed or taken, along with other possessions, by both Confederate and Federal soldiers. Few families had money to buy seed for planting or to procure replacement tools for farming. Before the war, planters had counted slaves as their greatest single economic asset. But emancipation meant the loss of that wealth and of slave labor to work the land.
Stephen Dodson Ramseur
Stephen Dodson Ramseur served with distinction in 1862 and 1863, received a promotion to brigadier general, and suffered wounds three times. He also fell in love with his cousin Ellen Richmond of Caswell County, and they married in October 1863. During their months of separation, the couple wrote many loving letters to each other. Ramseur earned a promotion to major general for leading an attack that saved the Confederate army at Spotsylvania Courthouse in May 1864. While he was fighting in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in the summer and fall of 1864, Ellen was at home awaiting the birth of their first child. On October 16, Ramseur received news that his wife had given birth and that all was well. But the message did not say whether the baby was a boy or a girl. Three days later, Ramseur was mortally wounded in the Battle of Cedar Creek, without knowing that he had a daughter.
Spencer R. O'Brian
A Granville County farmer, Spencer R. O'Brian enlisted in Company E (Granville Targetters), Twenty-third Regiment North Carolina Troops (Thirteenth Regiment North Carolina Volunteers) on June 5, 1861, at the age of twenty-one. He was wounded once in both 1862 and 1863 and twice in 1864. The final wound, sustained at Cedar Creek on October 19, 1864, resulted in the amputation of his left leg. Released from active service, O'Brian returned to his family farm in late 1864.
James L. Phifer
An eighteen-year-old clerk in Cabarrus County, James L. Phifer enlisted in Company A (Cabarrus Guards), Twentieth Regiment North Carolina Troops (Tenth Regiment North Carolina Volunteers) on June 7, 1861. In March 1862, Phifer was promoted to ordnance sergeant. He surrendered with his regiment at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865.
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Free at Last
Bottom rung now on top.
—Freedman expression, ca. 1865
With the Northern victory, enslaved African Americans became free. No longer did they need to worry that their owners might separate family members by selling them, or whip them as "unruly" slaves. The freed people rejoiced in their new liberty. But freedom meant that they suddenly had the responsibility of feeding, clothing, and housing themselves amid strong racism. As they entered a new life, African Americans faced with apprehension their reception and treatment by the defeated white majority.
Union victory over the Confederacy left North Carolina and the South devastated. Defeat ended slavery and brought an uncertain future for everyone. Read here to find out what happened to some of the people you met in North Carolina and the Civil War. You can also explore each person's complete story in the They Were There section.
Walker Brothers
Both Walker brothers, missing their left legs from war wounds, returned to Mecklenburg County and began to rise in social status. Henry married Catherine E. Berryhill on June 23, 1864, shortly after his release from the Federal prison at Johnson's Island. He became a schoolteacher, living with his wife and children in the same community as his parents. At some point after 1870, Henry obtained a medical degree from New York Medical College (now part of Columbia University). He practiced medicine for more than forty years in Huntersville, Mecklenburg County, where he also owned a drug- and general merchandise store. He served as Mecklenburg County treasurer for several years. Henry and Catherine had seven children, five of whom survived until adulthood. Henry died at age ninety-three on November 15, 1928.
Shortly after the war ended, Levi married Lenora Montgomery. Before the wedding, Levi had an accident and broke his cork prosthetic leg. He borrowed his brother Henry's leg to stand on during the marriage ceremony. Levi became a merchant and lived with his wife and daughter in Charlotte's Fourth Ward area. At various times during his life, he owned a general store, a retail and wholesale grocery store, and a drugstore. Levi retired in 1897 and afterward lived with his daughter and her husband in the family home on Poplar Street.
John Wesley Armsworthy
Sergeant John Wesley Armsworthy died of his battle wounds as a Union prisoner on January 15, 1864. He is buried in present-day Arlington National Cemetery in a numbered but unmarked grave. Armsworthy's death left his wife, Edna, and three small children destitute in Yadkin County. Then the youngest child, three-year-old Matthew, died. Edna moved with her two surviving children to her uncle's family home in Davie County, where she remained after the war. She never remarried. In 1909, at the age of seventy-two, Edna Armsworthy applied for a pension based on her late husband's Confederate service, stating in part: "[T]hink what I have lost in doing with out my Husband all theas years. Now I am old [and] need some thing more than I have got, to be cared for like he would have done." She died on March 3, 1910.
Alfred May
Alfred May returned home determined to prosper in postwar North Carolina, despite the loss of much of his family's wealth through the emancipation of their slaves. Gradually Alfred acquired land that had passed to other family members and consolidated the May holdings. On October 12, 1875, he married Ida Eugenia Wooten, and eventually they had eight children. When he died on March 29, 1906, Alfred was buried in the family cemetery, just a few hundred feet from his place of birth. The objects that Alfred May brought home from the Civil War passed down first to his children and then to his grandchildren as family treasures. They were displayed during family gatherings on special occasions, and the story of Alfred's war service was told. The May farm in Pitt County still remains in family hands today. In the early 1990s, Alfred May's grandchildren donated his Civil War artifacts to the North Carolina Museum of History.
Abraham H. Galloway
Already established as one of the principal African American leaders in eastern North Carolina, Abraham H. Galloway prepared to play a substantial role in Reconstruction politics after the Union victory in April 1865. He gave the keynote address to more than 2,000 former slaves at a July 4, 1865, rally in Beaufort. He also traveled across North Carolina and spoke before black audiences on equal rights for African Americans and on women's suffrage. In one speech, Galloway declared that "if the Negro knows how to use the cartridge box, he knows how to use the ballot box." Galloway helped organize a Freedman's Convention in Raleigh during September and October 1865, as well as the North Carolina Republican Party. He served as a delegate from New Hanover County to the state constitutional convention in Raleigh in January 1868 and was elected state senator in April 1868 and again in 1870. Galloway was a renowned orator, even though apparently he could neither read nor write. Galloway died unexpectedly in Wilmington at the age of thirty-three on September 1, 1870. An estimated 6,000 people attended the funeral of the former slave two days later.
Peter
After the funeral of his master, General James Johnston Pettigrew, in July 1863, Peter was hired out as a servant to Major Henry E. Young of General Robert E. Lee's staff. Information about Peter's service in the last years of the war is lacking, but if he remained with Major Young, he experienced most of the 1864 battles in Virginia and was present at the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865. After the war, Peter took the surname Johnson (possibly meant to be Johnston, in memory of his former master and friend). He rejoined his family and moved to Elizabeth City. The 1870 census listed him there, with his wife, seven children, and two grandchildren. The last recorded mention of Peter came in 1872 in Elizabeth City. A newspaper editor wrote to the Pettigrew family that Peter had visited on several occasions to look at a portrait of General Pettigrew and had once tearfully stated that "there wasn't no better man in the world."
John Thomas Jones
John Thomas Jones was mortally wounded while commanding his regiment during the Battle of the Wilderness on May 6, 1864. He died the next morning. A telegram with the sad news reached his father, Edmund W. Jones, in Caldwell County. In response, sixteen-year-old Edmund Jones Jr., the youngest son, left his studies at the University of North Carolina and enlisted in the army. He was reported killed in April 1865 but arrived home in May unharmed. All four sons of Edmund W. Jones served in the war, and two were killed. Eventually he managed to retrieve the bodies of those two and bring them home. With Confederate defeat, the Joneses lost their slaves and most of their wealth, but Edmund W. Jones saved the farm. On August 8, 1865, he received a pardon from President Andrew Johnson for his role as a secession delegate and his support of the Confederacy.
Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston
Catherine Edmondston never reconciled her ardent devotion to the Confederacy with the South's defeat and Reconstruction. On July 28, 1865, she vented her frustrations in her diary, writing: "Since Monday a new element of bitterness has been infused into our daily lives. On that day Father and Mr Edmondston were forced in order to protect themselves against Yankee & negro insolence & to preserve the remnant of our property, to go to Halifax & to take the hated oath of Allegiance to that loathed Yankee Government!" The war greatly decreased the Edmondstons' financial status. Patrick died suddenly in 1871, and his death devastated Catherine. She wrote to her nephew on September 10, 1871, "I am so weak in mind-almost as powerless as a little child! I am utterly incapable of any extended process of thought for every power & energy of my intellectual being seems numbed." In 1872 Edmondston rallied herself and anonymously published a pamphlet entitled The Morte D'Arthur: Its Influence on the Spirit and Manners of the Nineteenth Century. Her writing was filled with bitterness against the "barbaric" North and praise for the "chivalry and good manners" of the men who had served in the Confederate army. Catherine Edmondston died at age fifty-one on January 3, 1875, in Raleigh.
Sophia Partridge
Sophia Partridge closed her school after the 1865 winter session. In May 1866, she joined several other prominent Raleigh women to form the Wake County Memorial Association for the purpose of tending Confederate graves and providing "a suitable and permanent resting place for the heroes of crushed hopes." Partridge served as secretary for the association. Minutes from the early meetings noted that many Confederate graves in Raleigh were "surrounded by graves of Federal Soldiers" and that some graves were in areas "Selected by Federal Army Officers" as burial places for their own dead. The association concluded that "it would be better, if practicable, to remove the Confederates to another spot." According to an 1889 issue of the Raleigh Daily Call, Sophia Partridge "first conceived the idea of having a collective place of interment for the dead boys in gray, and to her belongs the credit of suggesting and mainly organizing the first Confederate cemetery." This area now forms part of Raleigh's Oakwood Cemetery. After suffering from a respiratory disease for many years, Partridge died on March 4, 1881, and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery.
Jesse Virgil Dobbins
Jesse Virgil Dobbins received an honorable discharge from the United States Army and returned home in the summer of 1865. He found that local citizens had not forgotten his part in the 1863 Bond Schoolhouse shoot-out. Dobbins faced charges for the murders of the Home Guard captain James West and of John Williams. He escaped arrest by his own cousin, Sheriff Vet Speer, and rode sixty miles to Salisbury, where he found Federal soldiers. They returned to Yadkin County with Dobbins, confronted local court officials, and had the murder charges dropped. Jesse Dobbins went on to help found the county's Republican Party. By 1880 he had become a prosperous farmer and miller and lived with his wife and eight children on a 595-acre farm. Dobbins died of a heart attack at his mill on May 10, 1883, at the age of fifty-three.
Bartlett Yancy Clark
After the war, Bartlett Yancy Clark returned to his native Guilford County and settled near his parents and his brother Christopher (Cristerfer) in Deep River Township, where he became a farmer. The value of his personal properly doubled between 1860 and 1870, and his family grew in number as well. By 1870, he and his wife, Emily, had five children-two boys, Jonathan and Emory, and three girls, Hannah, Aseneth, and Elizabeth, who ranged in age from twelve years to five months. The 1880 census listed Clark as a wagon maker, though his family still owned their farm. In 1900 he was listed as a mechanic living with his wife; his eldest daughter, Hannah; and a nine-year-old grandson, Emory. Bartlett Yancy died in 1913, and his wife died in 1915.
Parker D. Robbins
Following his discharge from the Second United States Colored Cavalry in 1866, Parker D. Robbins returned home to Bertie County. In 1868 he became one of fifteen African Americans elected to the constitutional convention to write a new state constitution. A year later, he was elected to serve in the state house of representatives for the 1869-1870 session. The 1870 census gave Robbins's occupation as farmer. During Reconstruction he served as postmaster for the town of Harrellsville, Hertford County, and obtained several agriculture-related patents. In 1877, with the end of Reconstruction, Robbins resigned as postmaster and moved to Duplin County, where he owned a sawmill and cotton gin. There he built and operated the steamboat Saint Peter on the Cape Fear River. He also used his building skills to construct homes in the community of Magnolia. He died on November 1, 1917, and was buried in Duplin County. Recently, individuals there have worked to bring state and national recognition to Robbins.
John Newland Maffitt
After a stint as commander of the CSS Albemarle in Plymouth in 1864, John Newland Maffitt accepted his last position in the Confederate navy, commander of the blockade-runner Owl, on September 9, 1864. When the war ended, Maffitt refused to surrender the ship to Federal authorities and instead sailed to Britain to relinquish command. During his Confederate service, Maffitt captured and destroyed more than seventy ships, with cargoes valued at between $10 million and $15 million. Maffitt apparently had no desire to go back to a defeated South and so remained in England. However, in 1868 he returned to North Carolina and settled on a farm he called the Moorings, located on the sound at Wrightsville Beach, New Hanover County. He married his third wife, Emma Martin, in Wilmington on November 23, 1870. The couple had three children, Mary Read, Clarence Dudly, and Robert Strange Maffitt. Emma helped her husband write several magazine articles and a novel entitled Nautilus; or, Cruising under Canvas. Published in 1871, it described three years of Maffitt's early life in the United States Navy. Maffitt died of liver disease on May 15, 1886, and was buried in Wilmington's Oakdale Cemetery.
William Holland Thomas
Thomas's Legion surrendered at Waynesville on May 9, 1865, several weeks after the capitulation of Confederate forces at Appomattox and near Durham. Its men were the last Confederates to surrender in North Carolina. William Holland Thomas went home to his wife, their three children, and those Cherokees who still looked to him as chief. He received a pardon from President Andrew Johnson in 1866 and hoped to reenter politics and business. Thomas's mental condition continued to deteriorate, however, and he soon found himself hopelessly in debt. Compounding his worries was the responsibility to care for his beloved Cherokee, who faced a devastating smallpox epidemic after the war. In March 1867, Thomas was declared insane and placed in a state institution in Raleigh. From then until the end of his life, Thomas lived in and out of mental hospitals. In 1887 Thomas assisted Smithsonian Institution ethnologist James Mooney when he went to western North Carolina to gather information on the Cherokee. William Holland Thomas died in the state mental hospital in Morganton, Burke County, on May 10, 1893. He is remembered today in the outdoor drama Unto These Hills, and the Museum of the Cherokee Indian displays the battle flag of Thomas's Legion as part of the Cherokee heritage.
Stephen Dodson Ramseur
Stephen Dodson Ramseur died of battle wounds on October 20, 1864, after sending his love to his family and requesting that a lock of his hair go to his wife. Federal troops returned his body to a boyhood friend, Confederate major general Robert F. Hoke. Ramseur's body lay in state briefly in the capitol at Richmond, then went by train home to Lincolnton. Ramseur's family was crushed by the news of his death. His widow, Ellen, and three-week-old daughter, Mary, could not travel from Caswell County for the funeral. Ellen Ramseur never remarried and wore black mourning clothing for the rest of her life. She remained with her family in Caswell County until she died in 1900 at the age of fifty-nine. Mary Ramseur never married and died at the age of seventy-one in 1935.
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North Carolina War Dead
| Civil War |
992,622 (1860) |
40,275 (CSA) |
| World War I |
2,206,287 (1910) |
2,375 |
| World War II |
3,571,623 (1940) |
7,000 |
| Korean War |
4,061,929 (1950) |
876 |
| Vietnam War |
4,556,155 (1960) |
1,572 |
Continue to the next section: Acknowledgments >>
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