Penning heads on Civil War tales

 They don't make headlines like they used to.
 As dying newspapers lay off the ink-stained wretches on the copy desks, we may never see another headline quite like this verbless wonder written by Vincent Musetto for the New York Post in 1983—the most unforgettable head in the history of journalism.

 Headline writing is an art. It may be a dying art—a victim of malnewstrition—but the American Copy Editors Society (ACES) still has a #HeadlineoftheYear contest to recognize the finest examples. If you are curious about the state of the art, here are the winners for 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015. 
 At The Stoneman Gazette, we take pride in our headlines and have never laid off a copy editor. If ACES ever adds a prize category for anachronistic online newspapers, here are a few of our favorites we'd like to nominate.
 If you feel enticed to click on any of these blue links, go hug a headline writer. 

From Concord to Conquered: Two Revolutions

This headline works best in a Boston accent, where Concord rhymes with conquered.

Rebels and their bridge fall for Yankee-pranky

If you're ever caught in a headline fight, remember that the pun is mightier than the sword. This story describes a ruse involving a Union captain (a 27-year-old teacher with the eminently punable name of Erastus Cratty Moderwell) who impersonated 43-year-old Gen. George Stoneman to fool and intimidate Confederate forces who had him outnumbered. The rebels unwittingly surrendered the Nation Ford railroad trestle connecting the Carolinas, and the Yankees burned it down before Jefferson Davis could cross it.

Headquarters on Caesars Head

Here's my double-headed homage to Vincent Musetto (who died four weeks after we ended the daily run of The Stoneman Gazette). When the Yankees headed south out of Asheville and crossed the Blue Ridge at Caesars Head, they looked down on rebellious South Carolina in more ways than one. While they were descending, they were also condescending. (And don't blame me for the genitive apostrophe missing from Caesars Head. That's the style established by the U.S. Bureau of Geographic Names, page 30.) 

Your taxes are still paying for Stoneman's Raid

If a headline can't be cute, it needs to be profound. It should make the reader feel personally invested in the story. In this case, we thought our fellow Americans would want to know that until 2020, Uncle Sam was still paying for the Civil War—and the monthly checks are being cashed by the daughter of one of Stoneman's veterans. In a different era, this 1938 Gettysburg headline about her father also did a good job of enticing readers:

The longest raid begins with a single debt

Headline writers often start with a familiar phrase and then twist it like one of Sherman's neckties. You can understand why we wrote raid instead of journey, and here's why we changed step to debt: After rebels captured Gen. Stoneman in 1864, he became the highest-ranked prisoner in the South and a laughingstock in some parts of the North. So when he got a chance to vindicate himself with a thousand-mile raid in 1865, he declared, "I owe the Southern Confederacy a debt I am anxious to liquidate."

Myles to go: Stoneman's rock star

The story includes a quote about s-e-x from Myles Keogh, a debonair Yankee officer and international man of mystery. We resisted the temptation to use that cheap clickbait in our headline, because it would have been beneath our dignity. Instead, we'll tease you with it here—underskirting our headline.

Twin fiddling: Tom Dooley and Gilliam Grayson

The Kingston Trio and Doc Watson were also part of this story, but the title characters were both fiddlers, and young Tom fiddled around in more ways than one. In fact, he had a harem of cousins. For headline writers, a double entendre is the triple crown. 

Pyres in Salisbury, but a pyrrhic victory for rebs

It's a rare headline that can pair two pyr-words. It almost makes me want to go back and rewrite the story in inverted pyramid. Almost.

Four days in a den of Yankee lions

I like to include Bible allusions in my headlines. With Stoneman's cavalry fast approaching the Carson House, Miss Emma Rankin wrote that she still made it to church on Easter Sunday, "and our blessed old pastor gave us all the hope and strength he could gather from the Bible, reminding us that there were lions in the way, but God could shut the lions' mouths."

'Destroy Charlotte!' 'Will Asheville do?'

"If it's a good headline, we'll make it fit," Phil Batson used to say. But blogs, like newspapers, have fixed widths for columns and pages, and the challenge is to say a lot in a few words (in this case: 34 counts). This headline sums up a flurry of messages between Gen. Stoneman in Knoxville and two of his cavalry brigades in the North Carolina mountains.

How to stop the U.S. Cavalry? With a winefest

The purpose of a headline is to get you to stop and read the story. Clickbait, they call it nowadays. I think this one clicks. The bacchanalian story comes from my hometown of Anderson, S.C.

Scoop! Sly Stoneman chides rebel church

The little story behind this headline was lost to history until The Stoneman Gazette dredged it out of the The New York Times digital archives. "Chides" is such a fine word that it is usually reserved for headlines. Otherwise, our headline might have been Education of black children vs. edification of white Presbyterians. Sly readers of my generation may read something else into that headline.

Greenville mule gets Yankee's goat
The raiders quickly wore out their horses, and one Yankee regretted the day he swiped a mule from the plantation of a Revolutionary war hero.

Tell Mama! The War is Finally Over
A month after Lee's surrender, the war and the raid were still dragging on. So was the daily run of The Stoneman Gazette. We needed a way to finish strong, and I think we found it in our Mothers Day issue, which featured heartfelt quotes from the likes of Abe Lincoln, Stonewall Jackson's mother, and Mark Twain. Some newspapers don't like exclamations in headlines, but we're different, and moms are special.

Sounding 'Taps' for Stoneman's last veteran

Spanish American War veteran William Harbottle
plays taps in 1953 for Sgt. William Magee.
(Los Angeles Times photo)

Magee with his medals

  On August 19, 1952, William Magee celebrated his 106th birthday at the home of his daughter in Van Nuys, California. His family invited a reporter to interview him, because he was the last Civil War veteran living on the West Coast.
 As Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was campaigning for President, Magee was in a patriotic mood. "Our beloved United States has never been licked in war and we never shall be licked," he told the reporter. "They just can't lick her, because we have the power. We have real power—and we have real men." 
 Magee (1846-1953) was raised in a cabin near Lancaster, Ohio, the same hometown as Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891). He told the reporter that he took part in Sherman's 1864 March to the Sea, but it appears he confused Sherman with Stoneman. His unit, the 12th Ohio Cavalry, spent the last year of the war on Gen. George Stoneman's raids.

 There is a Sgt. William McGee brashley quoted in Chris Hartley's history of Stoneman's Raid. Could it be the same man?  
 Magee was 17 when he ran away from home to enlist in Company M of the 12th Ohio Cavalry as a bugler. (Musicians often served as field medics. Another William Magee, a 14-year-old drummer in the 33rd New Jersey Infantry, was awarded the Medal of Honor for capturing Confederate artillery in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 1864.)
 Magee made the Army his career, became a Master Sergeant, and fought in the Indian Wars and the Spanish American War. He retired in 1898 after 35 years in the Army and drew a $200 monthly pension. At some point, he served alongside Buffalo Bill Cody (1846-1917). "Buffalo Bill was the best-looking man I ever saw," he told the reporter, "and I'm in second place right behind him." (Take that, Myles Keogh!)
 The 12th Ohio Cavalry was one of Stoneman's most dependable regiments. They were involved in the liberation of the Salisbury prison, the daring capture of the Nation Ford bridge near Charlotte, and the publication of the Yankee Raider newspaper in Athens, Ga. Capt. Frank Mason (later an aide to President Garfield) wrote the regimental history as well as this perspective on Stoneman's Raid. 
 Mason's book tells us that as the war was ending, Magee's band, "dusty and battered from its long and tuneless wanderings," had the opportunity to play Dixie and serenade Southern belles at the Young Ladies Seminary in Athens.

 After he retired from the Army, Magee settled in California. He had two daughters in the Los Angeles area and another in Chicago, as well as seven grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren. 
 Asked the secret of his long life, Magee said, "Haven't had a drink of liquor for the past 50 years. And when I did drink, it was pure corn whiskey that the mountaineers made. It was good for a man. Today, the young men mix their drinks. That is what shortens their lives." As for the episode with the mountaineers, the regimental history of the 15th Pennsylvania Calvary has a vivid account of a rainy night in Wilkes County, North Carolina, when Stoneman's troops succumbed to the temptations of freshly distilled moonshine. 

 Magee remained in relatively good health until the following January, when he suffered a stroke and died three weeks later. He was buried with a 21-gun salute at the Los Angeles National Cemetery. The military band played two of his favorite tunes: Tenting Tonight on the Old Campground and The Battle Hymn of the Republic.  (I'm fond of this version, featuring William Lee Golden and Jimmy Fulbright of the Oak Ridge Boys, Jimmy Fortune of the Statler Brothers, and Tim Duncan singing bass on a refrain that seems to speak for Magee: "He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat.") 

A SMALL-WORLD NOTE: My career has crossed paths with two Tim Duncans, the Wake Forest basketball player when I covered the ACC and the bass singer I met at an Operation Christmas Child event in Johannesburg, South Africa. "Stand by me!"

 Father William Lundy gave the eulogy: "He had a distinct privilege. His God permitted him to live long enough to see the ideals for which he fought fully realized. One nation, indivisible, with unity and freedom for all. His death marks the passing of a link in American history."
 The only Civil War combat veteran who outlived Magee was James Hard of Rochester, New York, an infantryman in the first Battle of Bull Run, who died at age 111 on March 12, 1953—48 days after Magee. Albert Woolson of Duluth, Minnesota, a drummer who never saw military action, lived until Aug. 2, 1956, at age 106. The last Confederate soldier, Pleasant Crump of Talladega, Alabama, died at 104 in 1951. 

A stereographic image of a Union band

The roster of the 12th Ohio Cavalry band, listed  with the place  and date they enlisted.

The ghost of Della Barnes

Della Barnes' truncated statue

PADUCAH, Ky.

 Della Barnes was a heartbreaker. One man gave her an expensive engagement ring, but she chose to marry another. The jilted man was so enraged that he cut off Della's ring finger, and she bled to death. 
 Or so the legend goes.
 The true story of Della's demise, as reported in the Paducah Daily Sun, is just as haunting. One summer night in 1897, Della told a friend that she didn't feel well and was going to take a dose of calomel, a mercury compound that is now known to be toxic but back then was used to treat various ailments. By accident, she swallowed morphine instead. Della went to bed and never woke up.
 The heartbroken man in this real-life tragedy was her father, Major George Barnes. A Tennessee native who remained loyal to the Union throughout the Civil War, he rode with the 12th Kentucky Cavalry in Stoneman's Raid and was mentioned in the New York Times for his leadership in the invasion of Boone, N.C. He was also entrusted with the destruction of the Confederate armory at Salisbury.
 After the war, Maj. Barnes married 17-year-old Anna Robinson and became a successful coal merchant and city councilman in Paducah, a city on the lower Ohio River across from Illinois.

Della's original monument

 Della was born in 1874, when her father was 38. He had three other daughters (two grew up to marry and one died at age five), but Della was his darling, and after she died on June 27, 1897, he never got over it. To mark her grave, he commissioned an Italian sculptor to carve a life-sized statue of Della holding a rose over her heart.
 Over the next year, he was engulfed by grief, his business failed, and his debts mounted.
 On November 3, 1898, Barnes bought 30 grains of morphine—the same drug that had killed Della. That's enough to kill 10 men. To get so much, he had to go to two apothecaries, and he told one of them he needed it for a sick horse. Instead, he swallowed it all with a bottle of whiskey. Hours later when his family found him, they called the same doctor who had tried to revive Della, but it was too late.
 Barnes, 62, left a note written on paper that had wrapped the morphine, explaining that he had no domestic trouble, but that he took his life because of financial embarrassment and his grief over Della's death. He asked God to have mercy on his soul and take care of his little grandson.
 According to his obituary:

The deceased was a good, conscientious man, and highly esteemed by all who knew him. His friends were numbered by the hundred, and among them are not only his old comrades at arms in the Union army, but the men who fought on the other side as well, and for whom he always showed the highest regard and friendship.

 Major Barnes was buried in an unmarked grave next to Della in Paducah's Oak Grove cemetery.
 Today, Della's grave is barely recognizable. Her monument has disappeared, piece by piece. After vandals broke off her ring finger, people swore they saw the statue bleeding or crying. Then her head and torso disappeared. Now, all that remains is the marble foundation, decorated by flowers.
 But some people say ... if you dare to visit the cemetery at night on the anniversary of her death, you just might see Della's pale ghost walking the darkened paths through the old oak grove, clutching a blood-red rose over her heart.

NEXT➤ Vet's dilemma: Which side would he fight for?

Paducah Daily Sun, June 28, 1897

Paducah Daily Sun, Nov. 5, 1898

Greenville: 'Prepare to Meet Your God'

A noble Yankee from Tennessee:
Union Capt. Isaac Taylor

 

GREENVILLE, S.C.

 The Stoneman Gazette has unearthed more information about the skirmish in Greenville, S.C., in May, 1865, that I believe was the last Civil War clash east of the Mississippi.

National Tribune, Sept. 5, 1889

 This clipping was published July 18, 1889, in the National Tribune, a weekly newspaper catering to Union veterans. I found it reprinted Sept. 5, 1889, in the Anderson Intelligencer.

 It is a letter written by Isaac Taylor, a Union captain from Tennessee who was ordered to execute four Confederates accused of mistreating and robbing some of Stoneman's sick and wounded soldiers as they were being evacuated to Knoxville.
 Convinced that the rebels were innocent, Capt. Taylor defied his orders and made a noble last-minute decision to spare their lives.
 I believe that Taylor is describing the same incident that was documented in 2002 by Greenville historian John McLeod, though there are some discrepancies in their stories, and it is possible there were two similar incidents.
 Taylor gives the date as May 24 (rather than May 22 or 23) and the location as 25 miles from Greenville at the foot of the Blue Ridge (not Crescent Ridge near downtown Greenville). He says there were four Confederates (rather than three) facing the firing squad. The 1903 history of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry says it was Lt. T.C. White (rather than Capt. Taylor) who was ordered to carry out the executions.
 Capt. Taylor vividly described the scene as the rebels awaited their fate:

They were informed of the order and given 10 minutes in which to prepare to meet their God. I had passed through many battles and trials, but this was the most trying ordeal of my life. The utter despair depicted on their countenances, while great rivers of perspiration ran down their pallid faces, makes me shudder yet when I think of how near four innocent men were to being murdered by the command "fire" given from my lips.

 Then the surgeon (Dr. James Cameron) recognized a gesture from one of the rebels as the Masons' "Grand-Hailing Sign of Distress." Dr. Cameron was a Mason, and so was Col. Miller, the brigade commander who had ordered the executions.  This made Miller reconsider the charges, and he set the captives free.
 The Civil War is full of stories like this where lives were spared after enemies discovered they were brothers in the secret society of the Masons. In fact, there is a Masonic Memorial at Gettysburg called "Friend to Friend" (pictured below) that honors these traditions. Several similar accounts are found in the annals of Stoneman's Raid. No doubt some are apocryphal, but I think this one is credible, since it is reported by both sides. 

Emporia (Kan.) News, Jan. 24, 1884

 Capt. Taylor (1843-1892) grew up in eastern Tennessee, which was predominantly pro-Union and opposed to secession. When the war began, he enlisted with an Illinois regiment. In 1863 he joined the Union's 13th Tennessee Cavalry, commanding Company B and serving as Acting Assistant Adjutant General under Col. John Miller. The 13th Tennessee was one of eight Yankee regiments that marched with Stoneman's Raid in the spring of 1865. They fought at Wytheville and the Yadkin River bridge and were involved in the pursuit of Jefferson Davis.
 According to this 1884 newspaper tribute, he was the first man in Carter County, Tennessee, to make a stand for Negro suffrage, and he was among the first Republicans elected to the Tennessee legislature. 
 Republicans fell out of favor at the end of Reconstruction, so Capt. Taylor moved to Hartford, Kan., where he built a mill, became president of the local bank, and served as an Indian agent.
 He wrote to the National Tribune in 1889 hoping to make contact with his forgiven enemies:

I disobeyed orders, turned them over to the brigade commander at noon with a full statement of what had occurred, and he discharged them. They were happy, but I cannot believe that they were more so than I was. A Masonic sign saved their lives, and no doubt, saved me from great remorse. If those four ex-Confederates, or any of them, are living, I would be very happy indeed to hear from them.

 Earlier in 1889, Taylor had written to the National Tribune in another attempt to reconcile with the enemy. He said he was seeking to find the rightful owner of a Virginia regimental banner "he captured from the rebels in South Carolina in the spring of 1865." The 13th Tennessee passed through the northwest corner of South Carolina twice during Stoneman's Raid, but I am not aware of any fights they had there with Virginians.

 Taylor died three years later at age 49, and I don't know if he ever heard from any of those rebels. Although he was not familiar with Masonic rites during the war, he evidently apprenticed later, because his obituary says his funeral was conducted by the Knights Templar with Masonic honors.
 According to a biographical sketch in the History of the 13th Regiment, Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry: 

Captain Taylor was an officer of the highest courage, never evading any duty or danger, but was always among the first to reach the danger line when there was fighting to be done. He possessed fine social qualities and a high sense of honor that endeared him to all who knew him.

The Masonic Memorial at Gettysburg portrays Union Capt. Henry Bingham
comforting Confederate Gen. Lewis Armistead, who was
 mortally wounded during Pickett's Charge.

 

 

The fallen Gen. Armistead is portrayed in this Gettysburg scene, painted by James Walker and displayed in the Johnson Collection at the Spartanburg County Library in S.C. 

New York Times, Feb. 20, 1870

NEXT➤ The ghost of Della Barnes

1865 Boone raid made The New York Times

     The New York Times has been expanding its digital library, and today I discovered it now includes a little story on Stoneman's Raid in Boone.
     The invasion of Boone was on the front page April 3, 1865, but was overshadowed by the fall of Richmond and Petersburg. The "VICTORY!" headline foreshadowed Robert E. Lee's surrender April 9. In the same triumphant spirit, The Times wrote, "Gen. Stoneman's command is now well into North Carolina and will be heard of soon in the heart of rebeldom."

     The Times' primary source was the report Gen. Stoneman sent back to his Knoxville headquarters from Boone. (There were no reporters embedded with the raid.) This story says the Union cavalry captured Boone on March 27, instead of the March 28 date that has been accepted by historians. It also overstates the casualties (Stoneman reported nine killed, but researchers have found only one Confederate soldier and two civilians who died.)

     If you would like to revisit The Stoneman Gazette's coverage of the Boone skirmish, start here, or type Boone in the searchbar at right, or explore the links at the bottom of this post.
     The Times also included information relayed from two Virginia newspapers, the March 29 Lynchburg Virginian and the March 31 Richmond Whig (which had grown "disgusted with the Confederate habit of lying.") These describe Stoneman's previous movements in eastern Tennessee from a Confederate perspective. 
     The reference to the evacuation of Bristol is interesting, because Stoneman feinted in that direction before turning south and crossing the mountains toward Boone. He wanted to force the Confederates to commit their troops to defend the Tennessee valley, and this story shows his ploy worked. This news would have reached Lynchburg via train or telegraph along the Virgina & Tennessee Railroad. On April 5, Stoneman cut that lifeline.
     (The town described as Taylorsville is now known as Mountain City. The commander mentioned is Major Myles Keogh, Stoneman's Aide-de-Camp. The Kentucky officer is Major George F. Barnes, whose story I will save for Halloween.)
     Here's an easier-to-read digital transcript of the clipping above:

NEXT➤ Memorial Day: Stoneman's toll

 RELATED BOONE & WATAUGA COUNTY STORIES

Jan. 25: The month they drove old Dixie down

Feb. 1: Abraham Lincoln and the Horn of Freedom

March 23: Stabbing the Confederacy in the back

March 26: 'A Yankee gentleman can steal butter'

March 27: Stoneman's midnight ride takes a wrong turn

March 27: Rallying the Home Guard to fight the Yankees

March 28: Blink and you'll miss the 'battle' of Boone

April 6: Meanwhile, back in Boone

April 17: Historical marker finally finds its way home

'Wading through the blood of our children'

Capt. Charles Connor's grave at Rehobeth Methodist Church in Catawba County N.C.

NEWTON, N.C.

Newton had to replace its marker
after it was removed by the state

 Major Henry Connor was campaigning in 1839 for his 10th term in the U.S. House of Representatives when he warned North Carolina voters about the rising militance of abolitionists in Congress.
 In a speech that specifically criticized John Quincy Adams (the former president who was crusading against slavery), Connor declared: "There is reason to believe they will not be particular as to the mode of carrying out their plans, whether peacefully or by wading through blood of our men, women, and children."
 Major Connor's speech was driven both by political hype and personal stakes, considering that by 1850 he owned more slaves than anyone else in Catawba County. But his words were also terribly prophetic. His first-born son Charles would be one of the last to shed his blood for the Southern cause—shot and killed during Stoneman's Raid in Newton, N.C., on April 17, 1865.
 That was eight days after Robert E. Lee's surrender in Virginia. Some accounts say that Charles Connor was with Lee at Appomattox and had just returned home to Catawba County when he was slain. Others indicate that he left the army two years earlier.
 According to a 1911 book called The Catawba Soldier of the Civil War, Connor was just trying to avoid trouble when the Yankees invaded Newton:

     He served with his command along the Roanoke River in North Carolina and Virginia—a very important line between the two armies—but when the end came he was at home.
     A very sad thing occurred in connection with young Connor. Just as the war was closing in 1865, he went to Newton to have a settlement with Mr. Moses, a Jew living there at the time. While there, the Federal troops came into Newton, and Connor and many others fled to keep from being captured, and poor Connor was shot at long range and killed. He was a fine man and but few, if any enemies.

 But another tradition says Connor was single-handedly trying to drive the U.S. Cavalry out of town. Just this past Christmas, newspaper columnist Sylvia K. Ray advocated a mural in downtown Newton: 

     I think it ought to show the spring day in 1865 when the Union Army’s Stoneman’s Raiders came to town and were chased westward along what became West A Street by infuriated Confederate Captain Charles F. Connor in a one-man-versus-several-hundred incident. That was the only time that actual warfare took place in what is Catawba County. Yes, the gallant Confederate soldier from Terrell was shot down by the Yankee fighters as he defended the county seat town.

 As hard as it is to reconcile those stories, it's even harder to positively identify Newton's Confederate martyr. Because it seems there were two Charles Connors.
 They were cousins, they were both Confederate officers, and some historians have gotten them confused.
 Gravestones indicate that Lt. Charles T. Connor was killed in 1865, while his cousin Capt. C.F. Connor lived until 1901. (C.F. may have been known as Charles, though his name was Cornelius Fulton. He was captured April 1, 1865, during the fall of Richmond and was in a Yankee prison at Johnson Island, Ohio, when Stoneman's troops raided Newton.)
 However, the 1911 book, the 2009 historical marker, and the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans say it was Capt. Charles F. Connor who was killed in the raid.
 For the purposes of this story, I am blending the 1911 profile (which calls him Charles F.) and a 1935 newspaper column by Connor's son-in-law (who calls him Charles T.) Other than the middle initial, their stories match. T or F, true or false—it's not worth fighting over.

Lt. Charles Connor

 No Confederate soldier from Catawba County had more to lose than Charles Connor. His father, Major Henry Connor, owned 77 slaves and 5,329 acres near Sherrill's Ford on the Catawba River. Much of his estate is now lakefront property on Lake Norman.

 Major Connor was the son of Irish immigrants, became one of the first graduates of the University of South Carolina, and fought in the War of 1812. In the spring of 1839 (the same year of his abolition speech), he married Lucy Hawkins, who was said to be the daughter (or perhaps the niece or granddaughter) of William Hawkins, a Princeton graduate who was governor of North Carolina during the War of 1812.
 The first of their three children, Charles Connor, was born April 3, 1840. Charles was still a teenager when he married Mary Jane Sherrill and acquired 600 acres in a crossroads community called Terrell, about 20 miles southeast of Newton. Their first son, Thomas, was born Jan. 5, 1860. Two daughters were born during the war, Luetta in 1862, followed by Emma.
 After the Civil War erupted and North Carolina seceded, Charles Connor volunteered for the Fifth North Carolina Cavalry. He was elected second lieutenant of Company K in September 1862 and resigned his commission two months later. It is possible that he was promoted posthumously to captain, but it seems unlikely that he was commanding rebel troops when Stoneman's Tenth Michigan Cavalry raided Newton.
 The Tenth Michigan was commanded by Col. Luther Trowbridge. In his regimental history, Trowbridge tells us that Yankees occupied Newton for almost a week: 

About midnight on the 14th, news was received at Statesville of the surrender of Lee's army [April 9]. On the 17th, the Tenth was sent to Newton to guard the fords of the Catawba, and to gather in any stragglers from Lee's army who were seeking to get away without being paroled, being busy at that work for several days. News of the assassination of President Lincoln was received at Newton on the 23rd.

 The map in Trowbridge's book (below) shows that the Michigan troops first went from Statesville to Lincolnton and then circled back toward Newton, entering the town from the southeast. This is an important detail that contradicts the notion that Connor chased the Yankees down West A Street, which is west of the town square. 

 A 14-year-old slave named Martin Luther Bost (1851-1939) witnessed the occupation of Newton. At age 86, Bost shared his memories in a 1937 interview with the WPA Writers Project. 

 "I don't remember much about the war," he said. "There was no fightin' done in Newton—just a skirmish or two. Most of the people got everything jes ready to run when the Yankee sojers come through the town. This was toward the las' of the war. Cose the niggers knew what all the fightin' was about, but they didn't dare say anything. 

 "The man who owned the slaves was too mad as it was, and if the niggers say anything they get shot right then and there. The sojers tell us after the war that we get food, clothes, and wages from our Massas else we leave. But they was very few that ever got anything. Our ole Massa say he not gwine pay us anything, corse his money was no good, but he wouldn't pay if it had been."

 As far as the people of Newton knew, their sons were still bravely fighting Sherman in eastern North Carolina. Lee's surrender applied just to Virginia. The Confederacy was still alive, and Jefferson Davis was still president. Still, the shocking death of Lt. Connor (whatever the circumstances) must have broken their will and convinced them that resistance was futile. They were powerless to prevent the Yankees from burning the Catawba County jail and a Confederate warehouse. 
     Lt. Connor was evidently the only casualty of the raid in Newton. He is among 29 Confederate veterans buried at his boyhood church, Rehobeth Methodist Church near Terrell. 

Inscribed on Charles T. Connor's gravestone: "Kind one, thou art gone without a moment's warning. Thy absence makes thy once happy home a waste." It is telling that his grave has been decorated with flags from both sides (compare this photo to the one above).

 Lt. Connor's 28-year-old widow, Mary Sherrill Connor (1836-1889), held her family together through one tragedy after another. One of her brothers was killed in battle in 1862, and another came home crippled. Her father-in-law Major Connor died just seven months after her husband. She remarried in 1869 to another Confederate veteran, Levi Lockman, and had another daughter. 
 Son Thomas Franklin Connor (1860-1947) founded the Terrell Country Store that stood until 2020 at the old crossroads on N.C. 150 near Lake Norman.
 Elder daughter Luetta Connor (1862-1941) married Rev. William Lander Sherrill (1860-1953), a Methodist preacher who wrote a series of newspaper columns that were compiled into a scrapbook history of Lincoln County. (The Connors' land had been part of Lincoln County before Catawba County was formed in 1842.)
 Rev. Sherrill had vivid memories of Stoneman's Raid in Lincolnton, when he was five. Seventy years later in 1935, he wrote:

      As a five-year-old child, watching as the invading army entered the village, little did I dream that some "rough necked" soldier in that group had the day before in Newton, for no provocation, shot and killed a brave Confederate lieutenant, Charles T. Connor, who had for four years been a gallant soldier of the South. It was a brutal and cowardly act. That young Lieutenant, killed April 17, 1865, left a little three-year-old girl, who grew to womanhood and in 1884 became my wife and still abides with me.

 When he died July 15, 1953 at age 93, Rev. Sherrill was probably the next-to-last eyewitness to Stoneman's Raid, outliving 109-year-old Alfred "Uncle Teen" Blackburn (1842-1951) by 19 months and 106-year-old Ohio bugler William Allen Magee (1846-1953) by six months. The last eyewitness I have found was John Pearson (1852-1954) of Morganton, N.C. 

 Rev. Sherrill lived long enough to see the coming of Lake Norman on his grandfather-in-law's land. During his final years, power company officials were buying acreage in the Catawba River valley in preparation for building the Cowans Ford Dam in 1959. The lake was filled in 1963, 98 years after Stoneman's Raid passed through. 
 Rev. Sherrill and his wife are also buried at Rehobeth—a biblical name that means "place of inheritance" or "place of flourishing." Rehobeth United Methodist Church is less than a mile from Lake Norman, just south of the Terrell crossroads on N.C. Highway 150. 

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ONE OUT OF THREE NEVER CAME HOME: Catawba County had a population of 10,709 in 1860. Most of the men (2,123) served in the Confederate military, and almost one-third of those did not survive the war. Catawba had 147 killed in action and 477 who died because of disease, in prison, or other war-related circumstances, according to exhaustive research by Derick Hartshorn with the Capt. C.F. Connor Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

NEXT➤ 1865 Boone Raid made the New York Times

CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL DAY: Honor roll of Southerners killed in Stoneman's Raid

The Terrell Country Store, founded in 1885 by Lt. Connor's son, was torn down in 2020.

This map of the Tenth Michigan Cavalry's route indicates that the raiders looped through Lincolnton before invading Newton from the southeast.