Stories from the Civil War

These stories of North Carolinians are unveiled throughout the workshop, but appear here together for ease of reference and printing.

Walker Brothers

Brothers Henry J. and Levi Jasper Walker rushed to volunteer for the Confederate States Army on the very day that North Carolina seceded from the Union-May 20, 1861. They joined Company B (Ranaleburg Riflemen), Thirteenth Regiment North Carolina Troops (Third Regiment North Carolina Volunteers). In 1861 twenty-four-year-old Henry and nineteen-year-old Levi lived with their parents, Thomas Jefferson and Jane Walker, and three younger siblings, Rufus, Thomas, and Frances Walker. The Walkers were Presbyterians who resided in the Steele Creek area of northern Mecklenburg County. Before the war, Henry, Levi, and their father worked in a local woolen mill.

Because both Henry J. and Levi J. Walker rushed to volunteer for the Confederate army in May 1861, they were hardened veterans by the time each lost his left leg during the Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, campaign in July 1863.

On July 1, as Levi carried the regimental flag during a charge on Federal lines at Seminary Ridge, he was shot in the left leg, making him the fifth flag bearer in his unit to fall that day. At a field hospital, doctors amputated his leg below the knee. Because of his wound, Levi was left behind as the Confederates retreated. He was captured and sent to the Federal prison hospital at Davids Island, New York. He was paroled and exchanged in October 1863, then assigned to the Invalid Corps on May 2, 1864.

Henry, who had become a third lieutenant, avoided injury at Gettysburg but was shot during a skirmish near Hagerstown, Maryland, on July 13, 1863, as the army retreated south. Henry also had his left leg amputated below the knee. He was captured and imprisoned at Johnson's Island, Ohio, until he was exchanged on May 8, 1864.

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

John Wesley Armsworthy was thirty-one years old when the war broke out in 1861. He and his wife, Edna, aged twenty-six, had three children under five years old-Branch, Ella, and Matthew. Armsworthy owned a 270-acre farm in Yadkin County, where he and his young family lived. He raised all the food the family needed, including wheat, corn, oats, and potatoes. He had two cows to provide milk and butter, and fifteen hogs for meat. Armsworthy had one mule to help him work the fields but did not raise any cash crops, such as tobacco or cotton, nor did he own any slaves. He and his family were Methodists. Armsworthy was a Democrat, although, like most North Carolinians, he probably did not favor secession before the war. But ultimately he supported the state's decision to leave the Union and join the Confederacy.

John Wesley Armsworthy enlisted in the Confederate army in April 1862. He joined Company H (Western Rangers), Fifty-fourth Regiment North Carolina Troops as a private. Armsworthy wrote many letters home to his wife, all of them giving some news about the war, offering advice on the management of the farm, and expressing his love and concerns for his wife and children. He fought in several battles, was captured and exchanged in May 1863, and received a promotion to sergeant later that summer. On November 15, 1863, Armsworthy was wounded in the right arm and captured in battle at Rappahannock Station, Virginia. At a hospital in Washington City, he wrote to his family on December 8, told them of his unfortunate circumstance, expressed hope that he would soon recover, and sent his love to his wife and children. It was his last letter home.

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, one of nine children of John and Elizabeth Tyson May, was born in Pitt County on March 24, 1843, in a home built by his father and the family slaves. The May land had been in family hands since before the American Revolution, and John had achieved success as a prosperous landholder. To work the land, he used both family and slave labor. The 1860 census indicated that John May owned twenty-eight slaves who ranged in age from four to fifty years. The census also listed Alfred, the youngest male in the family, as a student. No doubt John and Elizabeth May followed the secession crisis with close attention and concern, since they had sons of military age. John May died on May 25, 1861, just five days after North Carolina left the Union. Perhaps because of their father's death, the sons felt obligated to stay at home and care for their mother and sisters. However, in 1862 the war took the boys from the farm into Confederate service. First Robert enlisted on April 7, then Benjamin on May 6, and finally Alfred on August 25.

Alfred May left his Pitt County home in the summer of 1862 and traveled to Wilmington, where on August 25 he enlisted in Company F (Trio Guards), Sixty-first Regiment North Carolina Troops. He served in the same unit as his older brothers Robert and Benjamin May. The regiment fought in eastern North Carolina in 1862, and in 1863 it saw combat at Battery Wagner near Charleston. The following year, the Sixty-first North Carolina fought in several battles around Richmond. Benjamin suffered a wound to the head at Petersburg in July 1864, and Robert died in a Richmond hospital of unrecorded causes in October. The regiment participated in the last major battle of the war at Bentonville in March 1865. At some point in the war's final days or after the Confederate surrender, Alfred returned home and carefully put away his uniform, rifle, cartridge box, pistol, and many other items, including objects that he apparently carried home as battlefield souvenirs. The grouping of artifacts displayed here is unique. It is the largest extant collection of objects associated with a North Carolina Confederate enlisted soldier.

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

Abraham H. Galloway was born into slavery on February 13, 1837, in Smithville (later renamed Southport), Brunswick County. His mother was a seventeen-year-old slave, and his white father, John Wesley Galloway, was the son of a wealthy Brunswick County planter. Marsden Milton Hankins, a railroad mechanic (skilled artisan) and prosperous citizen of Wilmington, owned Abraham Galloway from infancy. Galloway received training as a brick mason and was allowed to work independently, as long as he earned enough to give his owner fifteen dollars each month. Craving freedom, Galloway escaped from Wilmington on a ship going north and arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in June 1857. From there he journeyed to the safety of Ontario, Canada, and became a spokesman for abolition. He maintained close contacts with abolitionists in Massachusetts and probably helped other fugitive slaves reach the safety of Canada. After the outbreak of war, Galloway returned to North Carolina to work for the liberation of African Americans.

Fugitive slave and abolitionist Abraham H. Galloway returned to North Carolina in 1862 or 1863. He worked as an intelligence agent for General Benjamin F. Butler and other Union officers and may have been the chief African American spy in North Carolina. Galloway probably identified coastal landing sites for the Federal army and supplied information on the location and strength of Confederate forces. He also used his influence to encourage free blacks and former slaves to enlist in North Carolina African American Union regiments or to work as laborers for Federal forces. By early 1863, Galloway had become eastern North Carolina's most important spokesman for African American rights. He envisioned a life in which blacks and whites enjoyed legal and social equality. In the spring of 1864, Galloway joined a delegation of black leaders who met with President Abraham Lincoln on the issue of African American suffrage. In the fall, he attended the National Convention of the Colored Citizens of the United States in Syracuse, New York.

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

Peter was one of 158 slaves owned by Charles L. Pettigrew of Tyrrell County in 1860. As a slave, Peter did not have a last name. He was a mulatto, a person of mixed race, with a wife and at least six children. Peter and his family lived on the Pettigrew plantation Bonarva, located on the northeastern shore of Lake Scuppernong (later renamed Lake Phelps). The Pettigrews had owned Bonarva since the 1780s. They had also held slaves since that time, so it is possible that Peter's family had been Pettigrew property for several generations. In 1860 Bonarva had a value of $58,000, with an additional $120,240 invested in personal property, including the slaves. After 1858, however, Charles Pettigrew fell deeply into debt because of a business failure. This debt and the coming war left the Pettigrews anxious about future. When the war began, Peter's life changed in ways that he could have never have anticipated.

In October 1861, Charles L. Pettigrew sent Peter to the Confederate army to serve Brigadier General James Johnston Pettigrew, Charles's brother. Charles wrote: "Peter is well acquainted with horses, is a capable servant in many respects; he can make clothes and is a first rate nurse." Peter had the responsibility for managing General Pettigrew's personal belongings and welfare. In June 1862, when Pettigrew was reported as killed in battle, a fellow officer wrote to the family: "Peter shall be as well cared for as if the General were alive. His grief at the loss of the General is most touching and draws out the sympathies of all of us." But Pettigrew survived. When the general returned to the army, Peter helped him recover from three wounds. In July 1863, Peter accompanied General Pettigrew at the Battle of Gettysburg. After the battle, Peter cared for Pettigrew, who had sustained injury again. Days later, Peter saw his master mortally wounded in another fight and helped carry him from the field. He remained by Pettigrew's side for three days, until the general died. Peter then returned to North Carolina with the body of his master.

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 a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of North Carolina when the secession crisis came in 1861. He grew up in a Caldwell County slaveholding family that got its wealth by growing wheat and corn as cash crops on a 2,720-acre plantation. Jones, an Episcopalian, was known in the community as Knock because of the way he often settled disputes. John's father, Edmund W. Jones, was a pro-Union delegate to the state secession convention. John sent letters home from the university trying to convince his father to support North Carolina's secession movement and the formation of the Confederacy. Before the state seceded, John joined the Orange Light Infantry Company as a private on April 6, 1861. His company was assigned to the First Regiment North Carolina Volunteers and in June fought at the Battle of Bethel in Virginia.

John Thomas Jones transferred to the Twenty-sixth Regiment North Carolina Troops in July 1861 and became a major in 1862. In May 1863, the regiment left North Carolina to join the Army of Northern Virginia. During the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1, the regiment was nearly destroyed. Jones was wounded but refused to leave his men. As the regiment's only remaining officer, he was placed in command. On July 3, Jones led the regiment in the last unsuccessful charge, when he suffered a second wound. His younger brother Walter Jones was mortally wounded at Gettysburg and left behind when the army retreated, to await capture and death. Shaken but not demoralized, John Thomas Jones recovered from his wounds and was promoted to lieutenant colonel. As 1863 ended, he felt confident that General Robert E. Lee's army would ultimately win the war.

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

In 1860 Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston and her husband, Patrick Muir Edmondston, lived in Halifax County on Looking Glass plantation and operated a smaller plantation, Hascosea, nearby. The Edmondstons owned eighty-eight slaves. Their total estate comprised 1,894 acres and had a value of $19,600. Both Catherine and Patrick were staunch secessionists. Catherine filled her diary, which she began keeping consistently in 1860 at the age of thirty-six, with praise for the Southern cause and Southerners in general, as well as scathing references to the "Yankees," whom she despised. The March 4, 1861, entry clearly expressed her opinion of the new Republican president: "Today was inaugurated that wretch Abraham Lincoln President of the US. We are told not to speak evil of Dignities, but it is hard to realize he is a Dignity. Ah! would that Jefferson Davis was our President. He is a man to whom a gentleman could look at without mortification as cheif of his nation."

Catherine Edmondston noted on January 23, 1863, that she felt "truly blessed" because shortages brought on by the war had affected life at Looking Glass plantation very little, except for the necessity of adding blackberry leaves to the stock of tea, and "the cessation of all desserts but baked Apples." But by the end of the year, her situation had worsened, although the self-sufficiency of the plantation alleviated conditions somewhat. On December 3, 1863, she wrote: "Very busy dying warp for Mr E's & my own clothes. So we have come to it & are to wear our own homespun! In fact I find that most articles of prime neccessity except salt, iron, & paper can be produced at home by us. This ink, for instance, is of my own manufacture & I do not see why it is not as good as the 'boughten' article." Edmondston acknowledged the rapidly deteriorating economic situation in an entry ten days later. She wrote that an acquaintance had paid $750 for a barrel of sugar in Virginia and that her own husband had spent $60 to buy her a pair of French boots, adding, "I consoled myself for the seeming extravagance by resolving to send 12 or 14 lbs of butter to Petersburg where it is from 4 to 5 [dollars] per lb."

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 operated the Select School for Young Ladies at her home on East Hargett Street in Raleigh, Wake County, from 1846 until 1851 and again after 1858. Partridge offered academic subjects, including French and Latin, but was perhaps best known for her artistic talents. Her classes in drawing, watercolor and oil painting, and music were quite popular. Partridge, born May 15, 1817, in Vienna, New York, originally came to North Carolina to help nurse an ill sister. She adopted the state as her home and lived here for the remainder of her life. She became an ardent Confederate and actively supported the war, creating a painted flag for Company I (Cedar Fork Rifles), Sixth Regiment North Carolina State Troops and serving in the local aid society.

Sophia Partridge continued to conduct her school for girls in Raleigh during the war. She directed her students as they gathered items such as jelly, pillows, glass, china, and socks to send to local military hospitals, and she spent time herself sewing and making supplies for sick and wounded soldiers. In a letter written to a friend in late 1861, she described a box of items recently sent by her church to Virginia and continued: "Don't you feel sorry for the sick ones. . . . Does not this war seem a strange thing yet, so unnatural, so barbarous, and uncalled for, and useless, on the part of the Federals. Sometimes I almost forget where I am, thinking upon the future, when the war will close. I begin to think there will be no peace, as long as the Dictator at Washington can get any money to carry it on." As the war progressed, Partridge tried to keep high spirits and a positive attitude, writing in January 1864, "When I begin to feel a little doleful about the state of affairs generally, I go right to the History of the first revolution, and find that we are not in half so bad a condition as our forefathers were, and it brightens everything. You know I am one of the hopeful ones. Hope is strong, and though all is dark around I keep my eye on a bright light in the distance."

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 was a thirty-one-year-old farmer in Yadkin County in 1861. He owned a 225-acre farm, where he lived with his wife, Sarah, aged twenty-one, and his one-year-old son, Daniel. Dobbins raised all his family needed to eat, including wheat, corn, oats, and potatoes, and had three cows for milk and butter, as well as two pigs. Dobbins also produced molasses and honey on his farm. He grew hay as food for the animals and flax to make linen for clothing. He did not raise the cash crops cotton and tobacco. His farm size and property ranked Dobbins as a typical farmer in his county. A member of the Society of Friends (Quakers), he opposed slavery and probably was a Whig before the war. Dobbins, a unionist, strongly opposed secession, which put him at odds with many North Carolina citizens, including members of his own family and community.

Jesse Virgil Dobbins did not join the Confederate army when the war broke out in 1861. Nor did he enlist after the draft went into effect in August 1862. Dobbins's Quaker religious beliefs and political feelings did not allow him to support the Confederate war effort. Some people considered Jesse a ringleader of unionist activities in Yadkin County. Fearing arrest by Confederate authorities, Jesse Dobbins, his brother William, and several others decided to leave and join the Union army. They met at the Bond Schoolhouse in February 1863 and engaged in a shoot-out with the Home Guard that left four men dead. Jesse and William fled to Tennessee, where they enlisted in the Federal army. William died of illness in 1864, but Jesse survived and served the remainder of the war in a blue uniform.

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

The 1860 census listed Bartlett Yancy Clark as a twenty-seven-year-old mechanic living in Guilford County with his wife, Emily Stephenson Clark. The couple, who married on April 19, 1853, had two young sons, Greenville S. and Jonathan A. Clark. The Clarks were members of the Society of Friends, a religious group that believed in pacifism and opposed slavery. Presumably Clark, as a Quaker, did not support the war, which might explain why he did not volunteer for military service. However, service records indicate that his brothers Christopher (or Cristerfer) and John may have enlisted in the Confederate army as early as May 23, 1861.

The Confederate army conscripted Bartlett Yancy Clark into service in Company H (Stanly Marksmen), Fourteenth Regiment North Carolina Troops on October 1, 1863. As a Quaker, Clark opposed the war and deserted after only a few days. He was reported absent without leave on October 20, 1863, and had been arrested by October 30. Clark was court-martialed on or about January 8, 1864, and subsequently confined at Salisbury Prison. According to family tradition, he served out his sentence as an orderly in the prison hospital, where he became known as a man who showed great compassion to his guards and all prisoners, Confederates and Federals alike.

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

In 1860 Parker D. Robbins was one of more than 30,000 free African Americans living in North Carolina. He was born in Bertie County in 1834, the son of John A. Robbins and a woman whose name is not known. Apparently Parker was a mulatto with Chowan Indian ancestors. Even though antebellum North Carolina law forbade the education of blacks, Parker was a literate man. He owned a 102-acre farm and supported himself as a successful carpenter and mechanic. Despite having his freedom and holding property, Robbins faced rigid social and legal restrictions as an African American. But events would soon present the opportunity for him to use his knowledge and talents in both war and peace.

Like many other North Carolina African American men, Parker D. Robbins enlisted in the Union army to help end slavery and win equal rights for his kinsmen. In 1863 he went to Norfolk, Virginia, and enlisted in the Second United States Colored Cavalry. Apparently a natural leader, Robbins reached the rank of sergeant major. Little else is known about his military career. Robbins was discharged from service in 1866 because of illness.

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

Future Confederate naval commander John Newland Maffitt was, rather aptly, born at sea as his parents emigrated from Ireland to America in 1819. His uncle, Dr. William Maffitt, adopted him at age five, and John moved to Ellerslie, outside Fayetteville, Cumberland County. By the time he was thirteen, Maffitt had a commission as midshipman in the United States Navy. He held various positions, including the command of several ships. In 1842 the navy assigned him to the United States Coast Survey. The superintendent of the survey said that, as a surveying officer, Maffitt had "not been excelled by any one with whom I have come in contact." Maffitt spent fourteen years mapping and charting coastal areas, plotting depths, locating shoals and sandbars, and determining the velocity of currents-learning many skills that would serve him well in his future career commanding blockade-runners for the Confederacy.

Upon the outbreak of war, John Newland Maffitt resigned from the United States Navy. He assumed command first of the blockade-runner Cecile and then of the gunboat CSS Florida. Maffitt could not begin attacking Union vessels with the Florida, however, because its guns were inoperable, and yellow fever incapacitated its crew. Maffitt's stepson died from the fever, and Maffitt himself was unconscious for several days. After his recovery, Maffitt sailed for the Confederate port at Mobile. Four Federal ships blockaded the harbor, but on September 3, 1862, Maffitt charged straight into the port at full steam. He later wrote, "The loud explosions, roar of shot, crashing spars and rigging, mingling with the moans of the sick and wounded, instead of intimidating, only increased our determination to enter the destined harbor." Maffitt cleverly steered straight toward the Federal ship Oneida, which backed up to avoid a collision, giving the Florida "a momentary advantage." He also maneuvered the Florida between two Union gunboats, forcing them to cease fire temporarily in order to avoid shelling each other. Thus the Florida slipped into Mobile Bay in one of the most daring naval exploits of the war. The Florida had orders to "cruise at discretion," doing "the enemy's commerce the greatest injury in the shortest time." As captain of the Florida, Maffitt carried out these instructions admirably, capturing twenty-four ships.

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

William Holland Thomas was born to Temperance Calvert Thomas on February 5, 1805, in rural Haywood County. He entered the world an orphan, as his father had drowned in the fall of 1804. An extremely intelligent boy, William worked in a trading store in the Cherokee territory of western North Carolina. There he learned the Cherokee language and was adopted into the clan of the chief Yonaguska. Thomas acquired property and became a respected businessman. A self-taught attorney, he represented the North Carolina Cherokee on many occasions and helped them secure the right to remain on their land during the Cherokee removal in 1838. In April 1839, the dying Yonaguska made William Holland Thomas the new Cherokee chief. Ambitious and successful, Thomas entered politics and served in the state senate from 1849 to 1861. A strong supporter of states' rights, he voted for secession at the May 1861 state convention and publicly denounced President Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant.

From the beginning of the war, William Holland Thomas openly promoted the idea of North Carolina Cherokee fighting for the Confederacy. In 1862 he entered the army and organized a military unit known as Thomas's Legion, which included Cherokee fiercely loyal to him. These soldiers spent much of the war in western North Carolina preventing Union forces in eastern Tennessee from entering the Tar Heel State. Thomas's men remained loyal to him throughout the war and fought until the end. Even so, Thomas was past his middle fifties when he entered the army, and the strain of active military service took a toll on his physical and mental health. Adding to the stress were his responsibilities as leader of the North Carolina Cherokee.

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 graduated from West Point at age twenty-three in June 1860. He came from a slaveholding family in Lincoln County and was a devout Presbyterian and staunch Democrat. By 1860 Ramseur believed that secession was inevitable and justified. He resigned from the United States Army in April 1861, after seven southern states had seceded, and offered his services to the Confederacy. He returned to North Carolina to take command of the Ellis Light Artillery. On May 20, 1861, Ramseur's artillery was posted on the State Capitol grounds during North Carolina's secession debate. When the convention approved secession, Ramseur's battery announced the historic moment by firing its cannons.

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.

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.