Stop the presses! The longest raid is over

Our 'Yankee Clipper' nearly broke DiMaggio's record

BOONE, N.C.

 To appreciate how long Stoneman’s Raid lasted, just try writing about it for 54 consecutive days. The cavalry didn't take a day off from March 21 (when they marched out of Knoxville in a driving rain) until May 13, 1865 (when they first heard the news that Jefferson Davis was in custody).
 They rode well over a thousand miles through enemy territory (over 20 miles per day) in addition to their day jobs of tearing up railroads, burning factories, and fighting rebels. Many still found time to moonlight as looters.
 Stoneman’s Raid was one of the longest cavalry raids in history—four days longer than the simultaneous Wilson’s Raid that caught Davis; and five days longer than Morgan’s Raid, an 1863 Confederate expedition featured in a book titled The Longest Raid of the Civil War.
 Keeping up with all that is enough to wear out an old journalist. And now that the 150th anniversary of the raid is past, I am going to take a few days off and shut down the daily version of The Stoneman Gazette. There will be a few epilogues, including the story of a skirmish May 22 that could have been devastating for Greenville.
 Like the raid itself, The Stoneman Gazette has been an adventure. Right now, I’m bone-tired and glad it’s over. At the same time, I can look back on it with pride. We found some good stories and broke a little news—much more material than I anticipated when I conceived this project back in the winter. I hope you have enjoyed it. 
 Joe DiMaggio’s famous hitting streak in 1941 ran 56 games with 91 hits. The Stoneman Gazette ran 54 consecutive days with 78 stories. And for our little "Yankee clipper," that's enough. 
 Thanks for reading! 

—TOM LAYTON, publisher, proofreader, and paperboy

NEXT➤ Historian's perspective: 'Brilliant but inadequately appreciated'

Solemn graveyard borders N.C.'s first ballpark

Base ball in 1862, drawn by Salisbury prisoner Otto Boetticher

SALISBURY, N.C.

 The Union lost more men at the Salisbury prison than on any battlefield of the Civil War. A monument erected in 1875 at the Salisbury National Cemetery says 11,700 Union soldiers were buried in 18 trenches  during 1864 and 1865. Scholars and historians say the actual death toll was closer to 3,800. 
 The most Union men killed in battle: 3,155 at Gettysburg.
 Salisbury pales in comparison to Andersonville, Ga., where 12,912 Union soldiers perished. Over 5,000 of those died in August and September of 1864, while Gen. George Stoneman himself was a Confederate prisoner. 
 Gen. Stoneman was trying to liberate Andersonville when he was captured July 31, 1864. Southerners respected his rank and held him in homes in Macon and Charleston, rather than dumping him at Andersonville. Gen. Sherman freed Stoneman along with Major Myles Keogh Sept. 30, 1864, by exchanging a captive Confederate, Gen. Daniel C. Govan.
 That was about the time the Union and the Confederacy stopped exchanging prisoners, which was the root of the problem at Salisbury. Sudden overcrowding in the fall of 1864 resulted in over 3,000 deaths that winter as a result of disease, hunger, and exposure.  

    As hard as it is to believe, in 1862 the Salisbury prison was more like a way station. The Union and Confederacy regularly exchanged prisoners, and most were detained just a few months at Salisbury. In 1863, the Salisbury stockade was used more as a jail for Confederate deserters and common criminals. Not until October 1864 did it become a death trap.
    Typical of the early prisoners was Capt. Otto Boetticher, a German immigrant who was captured at Warrenton, Va., in March, 1862 and released six months later. He was renowned as a sketch artist, and one of his illustrations made history.

 Boetticher gave us the earliest image we have of a baseball game when he sketched a game scene from the prison yard as Salisbury. This was the first place that the game of base ball (originally two words) was played in North Carolina.
 Base ball became popular in the New York area in the decade prior to the Civil War, and Union soldiers played it often in camps and prisons. In an 1862 diary entry, Salisbury prisoner Dr. Charles Carroll Gray recorded that the Fourth of July was “celebrated with music, reading of the Declaration of Independence, and sack and foot races in the afternoon, and also a base ball game.”
 Boetticher’s print seems out of scale but otherwise is recognizable as the game we know 150 years later. He captures a dramatic moment as the runner tries to steal second base a split-second before the pitch is thrown. The basepaths look no more than 40 feet, rather than the modern 90, and the crowd is uncomfortably close in the outfield. (The spectators include guards as well as local residents who freely attended the games and often bet on the outcome).
 In the original print at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, you can see many other details that document what was evidently a casual lifestyle in a Confederate prison camp in 1862. 
 One historian lists the Salisbury game among the 100 most important baseball games of the 19th century. 
 Since Stoneman was a New Yorker, I looked for any sign he played base ball, but I found nothing. He knew Gen. Abner Doubleday, who was once credited with inventing baseball in 1839, although Doubleday never claimed that. Doubleday graduated from West Point in 1842, the same year Stoneman entered. At the start of the war, Doubleday was stationed at Fort Sumter, and when the rebels began bombarding the fort, Doubleday fired the first Union shot of the war. 

This 1875 monument says 11,700
 Union soldiers are buried here,
which would make Salisbury
comparable to Andersonville.
The actual total is closer to 3,800.
Mark Wineka of the Salisbury Post
 explored the question in
  a column last July 4.

 Life at Salisbury Prison took a turn for the worse in 1864, after the Union refused to swap any more prisoners. From October 1864 through February 1865, 10,321 prisoners were received into a 16-acre stockade that could house only 2,000. Some of them burrowed into the old base ball field to escape winter weather. Food and firewood were scarce in town and there was almost nothing left to supply the prison.
 According to Confederate records,  3,479 Union prisoners died in the prison and were buried in trenches on the grounds, starting in October 1864. In February, when prisoner exchanges resumed, 3,729 prisoners were transferred to Greensboro and 1,420 to Richmond. When the Union soldiers arrived, they found 200 prisoners who had been too feeble to evacuate.That leaves over 1,500 unaccounted for. So the actual death toll at Salisbury may be close to 5,000.
 "The men we recaptured were emaciated and gaunt-looking," Pennsylvania Capt. Harry Weand wrote. "In the burial ground, attached to the prison pen, thousands of our men sleep."
 Ohio Corp. William Bushong was was horrified by the condition of the survivors and the extent of the burial trenches. "That they did not at once sweep the town from the face of the earth was because they were soldiers actuated by a higher motivation than revenge," he wrote. 
 Conditions at the prison weren't the fault of the local citizens, however. Some tried to help, and many considered the prison a blight on their town. According to Ann Brownlee, "No one was sorry when the Yankees made a bonfire of the evil-smelling empty, dolorous prison, the scene of so much unalleviated suffering and so many deaths.  This chapter could only be appropriately closed in a purification by fire.”
 Prison conditions were abhorrent on both sides. Of the 215,000 rebels held in Union prisons, 26,000 died. Of the 211,000 Yankees in Confederate prisons, 30,000 died.

NEXT➤ The awful burr in Stoneman's saddle

Warhorses: Indispensable yet disposable

The cavalry typically rode four-wide if the road conditions permitted. In this formation, Stoneman's 4,000 cavalrymen would stretch for five miles or more.

 MARTINSVILLE, Va.

Martinsville and Christiansburg are the only markers
in Virginia that mention Stoneman's 1865 raid.

 On the afternoon of April 8, 1865, Stoneman's 1st Brigade arrived in Martinsville after a 65-mile march across the Blue Ridge that had started two nights earlier in Christiansburg. 
 The horses who logged all those miles carrying all those soldiers were the unsung heroes of Stoneman's Raid.
 Most of their names are lost to history. In all the soldiers' reports that I've read, I've seen only two who named their horses: Pennsylvania Capt. Howard Buzby riding Camelback, and Ohio saddler Abe Conger riding Frank.
 Buzby bragged about how Camelback was able to swim the swollen Yadkin River on March 31 at Wilkesboro, when the rest of Stoneman's troops were unable to cross.
 Following the battle of Salisbury on April 12, Buzby wrote, "Camelback was bad when excited, and persisted in trampling the toes of our illustrious Southern brethren after they surrendered. He was a Fifteenth horse, and wanted to show off before the Tenth Michigan horses, and if I had not sawed him with the curb bit, he would have had me into the fort before I was ready. Horses are very intelligent, but when excited, like men, do not know what they are all about."
 By the time Stoneman's Raid reached Salisbury, Buzby had ridden Camelback 500 miles in 23 days. If Camelback had the stamina for the thousand miles to come in the next 40 days, he would be a rare beast indeed. 
 Most of Stoneman's soldiers seem to have treated their horses as disposable. "We seize all the horses as we go along, and get so many that as those in the column become exhausted, a fresh one is at hand, and the exhausted one is abandoned," Capt. Harry Weand wrote in his journal. Of the 900 cavalrymen from Pennsylvania, he said that less than a half-dozen finished the raid on the same horse they began with. Some men used up to 20 horses on the two-month campaign.
 Major William Wagner's detachment commandeered fresh horses before riding over 300 miles during the week of April 5-11. (Gen. Ulysses Grant later called Wagner's march the most significant action of Stoneman's Raid, because it prevented Robert E. Lee from attempting an escape into the mountains.) George Neil, among 220 men who rode with Wagner, recalled that rain was pouring the morning of April 5 when the battalion reached Salem, Va. "The good horses of the farmers, instead of being run off and secreted, were kept in their stables, where we found them, and traded our played-out ones, without the usual dickering that goes along with a horse trade," he said.
 After stirring up a hornets' nest in Lynchburg, Wagner's battalion rode 84 miles in 22 hours April 10-11, stopping for only one hour to rest. 

Capt. Adam Kramer

 Another Pennsylvania outfit under Capt. Adam Kramer rode 52 miles in 12 hours April 11 to burn the Florence Armory near Jamestown, N.C., where thousands of Confederate rifles were being manufactured. 
 The longest one-day ride I've seen was led by Corporal W.E. Reppert, who was ordered to alert the front-line forces about the April 18 truce between Union. Gen. Sherman and Confederate Gen. Johnston. Reppert rode 110 miles in 19 hours on April 22 or 23 and finally had to hand off the correspondence "to be forwarded to Gen. Gillem by fresh horses, as ours were played out."
 In late April, 1865, Capt. Frank Mason of the 12th Ohio Cavalry rode 254 miles across the mountains in six days to deliver orders from Gen. Alvan Gillem in Greeneville, Tenn., to Gen. Simeon Brown in Anderson, S.C. 

 A raider named A.D. Frankenberry from Point Marion, Pa., described seizing a "fine black horse" from a Confederate major in Anderson, S.C., on May 1: "The Major pleaded to retain the horse. He said he had lately bought him for $4000. He further urged that it was Confederate money and belonged to the Quartermaster's Department of the South. I told him, therefore, that as the horse was the real property of the Confederate army and a proper subject of capture, I could not give him up; but, as I was a Yankee, I would "trade" him another horse that was only tired, as I had then ridden him more than 400 miles ; that I would make all the bargain, take the shoes off my horse and give him '$5000 to boot.' So again the cavalry paid for what they got." Frankenberry was carrying Confederate currency and bonds he had discovered April 3, buried in Hillsville, Va. 

 After the capture of Salisbury, Stoneman had enough surplus horses to mount most of his 1,300 prisoners as well as about 1,000 freed slaves, who were following the cavalry for their own protection. On April 13, Stoneman reported, "We are much better mounted than when we left Knoxville."

Dr. Milton Folger

 The opposite was true for the unfortunate Southerners along Stoneman's route. Molly Folger was just six years old when a soldier knocked on the door where she lived in Rockford, N.C., seeking her father, Dr. Milton Folger. A Federal officer had fallen ill and needed treatment. While her father gathered his medical bag, Molly sat on the Union cavalryman's knee and listened to his stories about his own little girl.

 Soon, the doctor and the soldier rode off. When Dr. Folger came home later, he was riding the worn-out Union mount, because his fine horse had been confiscated by the soldier. 
 It didn't matter if the doctor had saved the officer's life. The cavalry didn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

As a saddler for the 12th Ohio Cavalry regiment, Private Abe Conger knew how to take care of Frank, who carried him faithfully through the entire Stoneman's Raid. At regimental reunions, when Frank heard a bugle he would trot to the flag. After Frank died in 1886, grateful veterans buried him under a tombstone engraved: Frank the Warhorse.

In the wrong place at the right time

 The entire 1st Brigade was in Martinsville because of a misunderstood order. Only one of its three regiments was supposed to go that way, while the other two should have followed Stoneman to Taylorsville, Va.

 At dawn on the morning of April 8, the road-weary 10th Michigan Cavalry stumbled into an encampment of 500 Confederate cavalry in a ravine west of the Henry County Courthouse in Martinsville.
 The ensuing skirmish was one of the bloodiest fights of Stoneman's Raid. At least five Union troops and up to 27 rebels were killed. 
 This engagement could have been disastrous for the 10th Michigan Cavalry if they had been alone, as ordered. However, the arrival of the other two regiments—probably about 1,200 men—forced the remaining rebels to retreat from Martinsville.
 The 1st Brigade rested briefly at Martinsville and reunited with Stoneman the following day at Danbury, N.C.

While in Martinsville, let's talk horsepower

 Martinsville is home to the oldest speedway in the top level of NASCAR racing, so this is a good place to talk horsepower. 

 In fact, we can draw some absurd parallels to help put Stoneman's Raid in perspective:

 ► A top-level stock car cranks out close to 900 horsepower. Stoneman's cavalry had 4,000 hp, literally, plus a few mulepower to pull wagons and light artillery.

 ► Two weekends ago, Denny Hamlin raced 263 miles when he won the 500-lap NASCAR race at Martinsville. Back in 1865, Major Wagner's battalion logged 315 miles in the week they went through Martinsville.
 ► Stoneman's cavalry riding four-wide could stretch over five miles. Think 10 laps around Martinsville, or two laps around Daytona.

 ► Racers can wear out their engines because they know they will get a fresh one next week. Likewise, Stoneman didn't have to hold his horses, because the countryside was full of replacements.

NEXT➤ Yosemite bridge may be Stoneman's last stand