Some bridges you just hate to burn

LYNCHBURG, Va.

     President Abraham Lincoln called the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad "the gut of the Confederacy." To Rutherford B. Hayes, it was "the jugular vein of rebeldom," and to James Garfield, "the grand lever on which the rebellion hangs."

     If three presidents could see how vital the railroad was, then why did the Confederacy leave it virtually undefended? Did they think the Yankees would spare the line for its covered-bridge aesthetics?
     Well, it worked for a little while.
     The V&T ran 219 miles from Lynchburg to Bristol, carrying lead, iron, salt, gunpowder, grain, and cured meat from the mountains to Robert E. Lee's army. Between April 4 and 8, Gen. George Stoneman and his soldiers destroyed or disabled over 100 miles of the track, using bonfires to bend the rails and burn the crossties. Timber trestles were especially easy to destroy and difficult to rebuild.
     On April 4, just a few hours before Gen. Stoneman intercepted the news that Robert E. Lee was retreating from Richmond toward Lynchburg, he had dispatched a battalion of 220 Pennsylvania soldiers under Major William Wagner to get as close to Lynchburg as possible and worry the Confederates about an attack from the west.
     Stoneman's commanding officer, Gen. George Thomas, had misgivings about destroying the railroad (which he called the East Tennessee and Virginia), because he knew the Union would soon have to rebuild it. On March 18, three days before the raid left Knoxville, Thomas directed Stoneman to:

destroy the railroad beyond Christiansburg, about ten or fifteen miles, where there are numerous trestles and small bridges, but not to destroy the bridge over New River west of Christiansburg. Should he ascertain that there is not a large force of the enemy in Southwest Virginia, and should he ascertain on reaching Christiansburg that General Sheridan has captured Lynchburg, as in now reported in the papers, he will not destroy any of the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad, but to move in the direction of Danville and threaten that place, should it be garrisoned by a large force; but, if it be weakly garrisoned, to attack it and destroy as much of the railroad as he can.

     The New River was the most formidable river crossing between Lynchburg and Bristol. The Union destroyed the trestle in 1864 in a raid that included two future presidents, Rutherford Hayes and William McKinley. It took the Confederacy two months to reopen the line. Stoneman damaged the bridge April 6 but did not destroy it. 

William Wagner's portrait when he was the
 first mayor of Colorado Springs, 1876-77

     The decision about whether to burn bridges near Lynchburg was left to Major Wagner, a 28-year-old from Philadelphia who was fascinated by trains. After the war, he would partner with his commanding officer, Col. William Palmer, as they blazed the way for the Union Pacific Railroad and co-founded the city of Colorado Springs.
     Stoneman dispatched Wagner's battalion April 4 from Jacksonville, Va. (now called Floyd). They marched overnight through heavy rain, reached Salem, Va., the afternoon of  May 5, and began working their way along the the tracks on the north side of the Roanoke River.

     On April 6, they passed through Liberty, Va. (now Bedford), where the mayor surrendered without a shot. Then they came to two majestic covered bridges carrying the railroad across the Little Otter and Big Otter creeks, which were undefended and ready to surrender to a match.

     Major Wagner hoped he wouldn't have to burn them. He ordered his men to build pyres of fence rails around the bridge timbers but not to light them just yet. Knowing Lee's days were numbered, he camped for more than a day, hoping he would get orders to call off the destruction. But the orders never came, and by midnight of April 7, Wagner knew he could wait no longer. He torched the bridges and marched overnight toward Lynchburg to gauge the Confederate resistance there. 
     On the morning of April 8, Wagner probed Lynchburg and got within about three miles of downtown before encountering substantial opposition. He withdrew quickly but convinced the Confederates that an attack could be imminent. This caused such panic that Gen. Grant heard about it on the eastern front. When Robert E. Lee heard that a Yankee army was approaching Lynchburg, he realized he was surrounded, and he surrendered the next day. 
     As far as Gen. Grant was concerned, Wagner's raid was Stoneman's most significant accomplishment. In his 1885 memoirs, Grant wrote:

The only possible good we may have experienced from these raids was by Stoneman getting near Lynchburg about the time the armies of the Potomac and the James were closing in on Lee at Appomattox. … He got on that [rail]road, destroyed its bridges, and rendered the road useless to the enemy up to within a few miles of Lynchburg. His approach caused the evacuation of that city about the time we were at Appomattox, and was the cause of a commotion we heard of there.

     With his mission accomplished, Wagner had to find a way to reunite with Gen. Stoneman, who by now had completed his destruction in Christiansburg and was on his way to who-knows-where in North Carolina. Over the next four days, Wagner's cavalry rode 207 miles while skirmishing with the enemy and eluding 1,500 rebels sent to hunt them down. Unlike the high toll of the 3-day raid on Wytheville, Wagner lost only one man killed and two wounded during his 9-day campaign.

     Wagner's battalion finally caught up with Stoneman the evening of April 12, guided the final miles by the glow of the bonfires Stoneman had lit in Salisbury, N.C.

NEXT➤ Meanwhile, back in Boone

The red lines on this 1871 map show the movement's of one of Stoneman's eight regiments, the 15th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry. At the top is Major Wagner's expedition to Lynchburg. Note how close he was to Appomattox the day before Lee's surrender.

How to hack Confederate secrets

President Lincoln and his youngest son Tad were hailed by freed slaves as they walked the streets of Richmond on April 4, 1865—Tad's 12th birthday. Richmond had been abandoned just two days earlier by Gen. Robert E. Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and it was up to Gen. Stoneman's cavalry to make sure they didn't escape. (Illustration by Thomas Nast)

   CHRISTIANSBURG, Va.

     Stoneman's raiders rode into Christiansburg near midnight on April 4 and caught the town asleep.
     The one Confederate on duty was the telegraph operator, and before he could tap S-O-S, the Yankees had a pistol to his head.
     There are several versions of what happened next. According to a lengthy report on the raid written by one of Stoneman's men, Gen. George Stoneman himself personally took charge of the situation:

     Immediately proceeding to the telegraph office, which the operator, in his haste to save himself, had left in perfect order, the General took possession, and succeeded in “calling” the Lynchburg operator, who at first was a little suspicious and answered back, “How are you, Yanks?” The reply was made, “You must be drunk, there are no Yanks any where around here.”
     Lynchburg—“What has become of the Yankees you have been telegraphing about all day as approaching?”
     Christiansburg—“Oh that was nothing but country rumors, and were found to be false.”
     Lynchburg was soon satisfied, and then proceeded to give the Christiansburg operator a lecture for sending rumors over the line, as they generally turned out false, ending it by saying that “during the day is has been reported through town that Sheridan was coming this way, but no one believes it now.” He then sent several messages, military and civil, one of the military messages of considerable interest ot the General, as it informed him of the intended movements west of him. The line refused to work soon after, and it was judged that it had been cut, and, as all supposed, it afterward proved true, that Major Wagner had arrived near Salem, and was tearing up the road and burning bridges.

     A more likely scenario* is recorded in the journals of our unofficial war correspondent, Capt. Henry Weand of Norristown, Pa. Here's his account of what happened that night in Christiansburg: 

     There had been assigned to the brigade a young telegraph operator, John J. Wickham**, who, when opportunity offered, rendered valuable assistance. Before reaching Christiansburg we had learned that the office of the telegraph company was in a freight car at the farther end of town, and before the Regiment reached that place, Lieutenant Hinchman, with a small detachment with Wickham, was sent to capture it and learn what he could of the movements of the rebels from the dispatches he could gather in.

     Making their way round the town in the evening they reached the car without discovery, and captured the operator at his instrument. Wickham began calling “Lynchburg,” but recalling the fact that the operator there would know a stranger was telegraphing, forced the Christiansburg operator to send the messages. He asked if they had any news of the Yankees, and kept up the conversation for some time, until a pointed question by Wickham, about the rebel forces, aroused the suspicion of the Lynchburg man, who said, “I believe I’m talking to the Yankees now.”
     Wickham then took the key and told him truthfully who he was, and at that the Lynchburg man let out with all the “cuss” words he was able to recall, and even these could not express his feelings at having given any information that could give aid and comfort to the enemy.
     Especially was his blasphemy heaped upon the poor operator who had been forced to send the messages. But here Wickham stopped him, and wired back that he should not blame him, as a fellow with a pistol at his head is apt to say just what the fellow who holds the pistol wants him to say. That ended the telegraphing, but the operator at Christiansburg thanked Wickham for the message he sent, as it would put him right with his associates in the rebel service.

     The fact that Stoneman inserted himself into this episode (whether or not he was actually there in person) tells you how important this was. For 10 days after leaving Jonesborough, Tenn., he had been offline, so to speak. He still had no way to contact his headquarters back in Tennessee, but now he had gained priceless intelligence from the enemy.
     Neither of those accounts decodes what Stoneman learned from those telegrams. But historian Clint Johnson tells us in his book, Pursuit: The Chase, Capture, Persecution, and Surprising Release of Confederate President Jefferson Davis: 

The Federals, mindful that telegraph operators recognized each other's tapping signatures, forced the Christiansburg telegraph operator to contact his counterpart in Lynchburg to learn war news. The Lynchburg operator willingly volunteered the news that Lee had abandoned Petersburg and Richmond. The questions kept coming until the Lynchburg operator finally tapped out: "I'm talking to the Yankees, aren't I?"

     In fact, President Lincoln had made a surprise appearance in Richmond 150 years ago today, on Tuesday, April 4, 1865, walking the streets of the Confederate capital and sending a powerful message that the war was all but over. Robert E. Lee's retreat was common knowledge in Lynchburg but was breaking news in Christiansburg. (On April 5, one of Stoneman's men found a Lynchburg newspaper that confirmed Lee's retreat.) 
     Stoneman now knew that Lee was coming his way. Providentially, he already had dispatched 220 men toward Lynchburg (the Wagner battalion that he assumed had cut the lines at Salem). Lynchburg was just 20 miles from Appomattox, where Lee was headed. 
     Conversely, Lee also now knew that the Yankees had him surrounded. Stoneman's cavalry had headed him off at the pass. The mountain railroads that could have been his escape route were going up in smoke.  
       Stoneman's relatively small army would have been no match for Lee, but the beleaguered Confederate general didn't know that. Five days later at Appomattox, he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia.

* ONE MORE PERSPECTIVE: The telegraph episode was also described by Captain Frank Holcomb Mason of the Twelfth Ohio Cavalry in an 1890 book called Sketches of War History. He wrote: "The telegraph office was captured, and a Union soldier, taking his seat at the operator's desk, exchanged military questions and confidences with the operator at Lynchburg for an hour or more before the trick was discovered." Capt. Mason was close to Stoneman and had high respect for him, so if the general had been personally involved in the telegrams, Mason certainly would have said so.

** JOHN JERVIS WICKHAM (1844-1898) was a native of Ireland who grew up in Beaver, Pa., and served three years as a telegraph specialist in the Union army. According to his obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "In June 1862, while serving as a cipher expert at the headquarters of the Twenty-third brigade, he was captured with the command by the rebel general, Forest, in action at Murfreesboro, Tenn. He was a prisoner of war for a number of months, his last place of confinement being Libby Prison." Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry defeated and captured Wickham's brigade to capture a Union supply post and hospital. After the war, Wickham became a lawyer and was a Pennsylvania Superior Court judge when he died at age 54.

NEXT➤ Some bridges you just hate to burn

Sgt. Angelo Wiser's map shows the April 4 march from Hillsville to Christiansburg via Jacksonville (now known as Floyd)

Good Friday and Abraham Lincoln

President Abraham Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, which falls on April 3 this year and was April 14 in 1865. On this solemn day when Christians remember the supreme sacrifice made by Jesus Christ to free us from sin and death, here's a glimpse of what Good Friday meant to Americans seven-score and ten years ago. Richard Wightman Fox, author of Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession, wrote this column for the New York Times in 2006:

The President Who Died for Us

By RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX

Published April 14, 2006 in the New York TImes

     Good Friday, the day commemorating Christ's crucifixion, falls on April 14 in 2006, as it did in 1865. On that evening, in the balcony box of Ford's Theater in Washington, John Wilkes Booth fired a handmade .41-caliber derringer ball into the back of Abraham Lincoln's head.

     In the days that followed Lincoln's death, his mourning compatriots rushed to compare him to Jesus, Moses and George Washington.

     Despite the Good Friday coincidence, the Jesus parallel was not an obvious one for 19th-century Americans to make. The Protestant population, then as now, included a vigilant evangelical minority who thought that Jesus, sinless on earth, was defamed every time ordinary sinners presumed to imitate him. No mere mortal could be put beside Jesus on a moral balance scale.

     But Honest Abe overwhelmed the usual evangelical reticence—by April 1865 the majority of Northerners and Southern blacks took him as no ordinary person. He had been offering his body and soul all through the war and his final sacrifice, providentially appointed for Good Friday, showed that God had surely marked him for sacred service.

     At a mass assembly in Manhattan five hours after Lincoln's death, James A. Garfield—the Ohio congressman who would become the second assassinated president 16 years later—voiced the common hesitancy, then went on to claim the analogy: "It may be almost impious to say it, but it does seem that Lincoln's death parallels that of the Son of God."

     Jesus had saved humanity, or at least some portion of it, from eternal damnation. Lincoln had saved the nation from the civic equivalent of damnation: the dissolution that had always bedeviled republics. "Jesus Christ died for the world," said the Rev. C. B. Crane in Hartford. "Abraham Lincoln died for his country."

     The small minority of Jews and Catholics, equally awed by Lincoln's bodily sacrifice, joined Protestants in hailing the president's uncommon virtues: forgiveness, mercy, defense of the poor and the oppressed. Catholics joined Protestants in noting his Christ-like habits of brooding in private and keeping his own counsel.

     Nearly everyone joined in heralding Lincoln's phrase "with malice toward none, with charity for all," which Christian mourners hailed as the heart of the Gospel. Those words from his second inaugural address, delivered just six weeks before his death, turned up on hand-scrawled banners all over the Union. People mounted them, along with black-bordered flags and photographs of Lincoln, in the windows of their homes and shops.

     Thomas Nast's 1866 painting "President Lincoln Entering Richmond" (commemorating his surprise stroll into the capital of the Confederacy on April 4, 1865, shortly after Robert E. Lee's retreat) reinforced the sentiment: Lincoln shepherded his people just as Jesus did. The president walked into Richmond before Holy Week the way Jesus rode into Jerusalem before Passover: humbly, not triumphantly. Both men were enveloped by exuberant admirers.

     Most American Christians turned to the Jesus analogy because they realized how much they loved Lincoln. They took his loss as personal, often comparing it to a death in the family. Many felt attached to Lincoln almost as they felt attached to Jesus. The striving rail-splitter from Illinois and the simple carpenter from Nazareth resembled them, the people. In contrast, while still heroic, Washington seemed more distant, even aloof.

     Yet calculation as well as veneration entered the campaign to sanctify Lincoln. Radical Republicans revealed a political reason for comparing Lincoln to Jesus. Trying to explain why a rational Providence had permitted Lincoln to die, they decided that the savior of the nation had proved himself too Christ-like, too softhearted, too "womanly," for the necessarily punitive job of "reconstructing" the postwar South. God in his wisdom had put Andrew Johnson in place for the messy task of enacting justice.

     Many Protestants also displayed a religious motive for emphasizing the resemblance between Lincoln and Christ. They made the president a virtual holy man because they wished retroactively to make him a morally impeccable and believing Christian. They considered theater-going, a favorite pastime of the president, as morally dubious; his choice of the stage for recreation on this day of crucifixion made them sick at heart.

     And Lincoln, who after 1862 had spoken repeatedly of his dependence on God and Providence, had never referred much to Jesus. The barrage of Jesus comparisons offered a camouflaging aura of piety for a man who had enjoyed lowbrow, off-color humor as much as play-acting.

     Seven score and one years have passed since Good Friday 1865, and Lincoln has always remained his own man. In his final years, he had set his own course by balancing a pressing sense of the rule of Providence with a persistent belief in the power of reason.
     Still, he can—and should—stand as historic demonstration that a republican hero's sacrifice for the people comes very close to Christ's ideals of self-denial and self-giving.

NEXT➤ 'I believe I am talking to the Yankees now'

Bloody welcome to Virginia

HILLSVILLE, Va.

    Aside from the skirmish in Boone, the first two weeks of Stoneman's Raid were little more than a monotonous march—280 miles of non-stop clippety-clop.
    That all began to change when the cavalry moved from North Carolina into Virginia and caught a whiff of the Confederate railroads. 
    On Monday, April 3, 1865, Gen. Stoneman began to deploy what he called his "bursting shell"—sending out cavalry regiments like shrapnel to hit multiple targets at once. 
     From Hillsville, he dispatched a regiment of 500 Tennesseeans commanded by Col. John K. Miller to attack Wytheville, 30 miles to the northwest. The next day at Jacksonville (now called Floyd), he sent 220 crack Pennsylvanians toward Lynchburg, 100 miles northeast. The main column of about 3,300 mounted troops continued 20 miles north to Christiansburg, the railroad hub of southwestern Virginia.

Col. John K. Miller led the raid
on Wytheville, less than 100 miles
 from his home in Elizabethton, Tenn.

     All three "exploded" on April 5, and within hours there were no more trains running west of Roanoke. On the very same day that Stoneman learned that Robert E. Lee was retreating west from Richmond, he effectively slammed the door on Lee's only escape route into the mountains.
     In that regard, the Pennsylvanians would strike the biggest blow, which we will detail on April 5. But the Tennesseeans paid the biggest price, so let's start with their mission, which began 150 years ago today.
     Wytheville was a vital source of iron and lead for the Confederacy. The Shot Tower State Park off I-77 north of Hillsville is where much of Lee's ammunition was made. Wytheville was well-defended to the west, but the Virginians never expected to be attacked from the south.
     The Federal troops made a difficult midnight crossing of the New River, where one man drowned. The reached Wytheville at dawn on April 5, destroyed five railroad bridges, and torched four boxcars, including one carrying five tons of gunpowder.

Virginia's Shot Tower produced lead
ammunition for the Confederacy.
 Half of the tower is underground,
 cut into a bluff on the New River. 

     As that explosion echoed from the mountainsides, it alerted Confederate cavalry nearby. Confederate Gen. John Echols and 7,000 troops were headed east toward Appomattox to unite with Robert E. Lee intending to make a stand against Grant. Over 500 Kentucky rebels under Col. Henry L. Giltner quickly drove Miller's Tennessee Yankees out of Wytheville and back across the New River.
     Both sides claimed victory. The Yankees cut the only railroad between Virginia and Tennessee and knocked out the lead mines that supplied one-third of the South's ammunition. However, the rebels made them pay dearly, with 35 men killed, wounded, or captured. There was also at least one rebel killed. From Stoneman's perspective, April 5 would one of the bloodiest days of the whole raid.
     The battle of Wytheville did vindicate Stoneman's roundabout route to Virginia. Had he followed the Tennessee valley directly from Knoxville to Christiansburg, he would have to fight his way through Wytheville, and his hands were tied by his orders "to destroy but not to fight battles." By coming up through North Carolina instead, he was able to avoid battles and strike his targets where they were weakest.

NEXT➤ Good Friday and Abraham Lincoln
 

Stoneman stayed the night of May 3-4 at the home of James Wilkinson in Hillsville, VA.
The house is now a five-story mansion open for tours.

Sgt. Angelo Wiser's map shows the march April 3 from Mount Airy NC to Hillsville VA via Fancy Gap.

From one newspaper to another: Thanks!

     Thanks to Mark Wineka and the Salisbury Post for his story today about The Stoneman Gazette. Thanks also to Tim Peeler for instigating.
     Without newspapers, I hate to think what might become of our world.
     Support your local daily! It's not perfect, but it sure beats the alternatives. 

A punchline worthy of Mark Twain

Famous Civil War photographer Mathew Brady is credited with this picture of Eng and Chang Bunker; Eng on the left with his wife Sarah Yates and son Albert; Chang on the right with his wife Adelaide Yates and son Patrick Henry. The photo is dated ca. 1865, which would be the same year as Stoneman's Raid, but I have not been able to pinpoint the exact date. Since Brady was a New Yorker and the Bunkers lived in North Carolina, the photo was probably post-war.

MOUNT AIRY, N.C.

 Four years after the Civil War, Mark Twain wrote an essay called Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins. He imagined Eng and Chang Bunker as the definitive example of the war that pitted brother against brother:

     During the War they were strong partisans, and both fought gallantly all through the great struggle—Eng on the Union side and Chang on the Confederate. They took each other prisoners at Seven Oaks, but the proofs of capture were so evenly balanced in favor of each that a general army court had to be assembled to determine which one was properly the captor and which the captive. The jury was unable to agree for a long time; but the vexed question was finally decided by agreeing to consider them both prisoners, and then exchanging them.
     At one time Chang was convicted of disobedience of orders, and sentenced to ten days in the guard house; but Eng, in spite of all arguments, felt obliged to share his imprisonment, notwithstanding he himself was entirely innocent; and so, to save the blameless brother from suffering, they had to discharge both from custody—the just reward of faithfulness.

 Wonder if Twain got the idea from Stoneman's Raid? 
 It is almost certain that some of Stoneman's troops visited the Bunkers' farm 150 years ago, when they camped April 2, 1865, in Mount Airy, N.C., the night before they marched across the Blue Ridge into Virginia. Whether Gen. Stoneman personally met the Siamese Twins is debatable.
 The Bunkers were staunch Confederates and successful farmers who lived in Mount Airy a century before Andy Griffith made it famous as Mayberry. Together they owned 700 acres and about 30 slaves. They married sisters and fathered 21 children. Each had a son who was wounded in service with the Confederate cavalry. The Bunkers' large homes and farms were the kind of targets that attracted raiders as they foraged for food and horses. 
 But were the twins home when the Yankees raiders came through? Or did they hide out, like many Confederate men did? I haven't found documentation that Stoneman's troops actually met the twins themselves. The 1903 regimental history of the Thirteenth Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry describes the Bunkers in general but says nothing about meeting them. The 1906 book on the Fifteenth Pennsylvania describes Mount Airy and neighboring Dobson as "very ordinary villages" without any mention of the extraordinary twins.
 As the Tennessee history shows, the troops would have been aware of the twins even if they never met them. They raided the Mount Airy post office searching for enemy intelligence, and they read everybody's letters as they rode toward Virginia on April 3. Bored soldiers would have speculated wildly about the twins' private lives, just like Twain did. Inevitably, a story this good would have reached Stoneman.
 On the other hand, there may be a kernel of truth in a story published in a Philadelphia newspaper that was widely circulated and probably embellished.
 As the story goes, Stoneman's cavalry had captured some Confederate wagons at Mount Airy and needed drivers. Some mischievous troops decided to hold a draft and set up a lottery wheel with the names of local men. You can guess what happened: Eng was drafted, and Chang was not. You can almost hear Twain wryly joking about how Eng couldn't go because Chang was a conscientious objector.
 If the "draft" happened at all, it was all a sham. The newspaper account says Stoneman was quite amused. In all I've read on the general, this is the only time I've ever seen a hint of a sense of humor. 
 Whatever happened, we can be sure the Bunkers were were not amused. For all they knew, their lives and liberty were at risk. Back in Boone (where the Bunkers' wives were from), some of Stonemen's men had gained a reputation for killing the kin of rebel soldiers. Other Confederate sympathizers had been marched off toward a miserable stockade in Ohio that the Bunkers knew all too well—Chang's son Christopher was a prisoner there. One of the Yankees may have tried to take advantage of one of the Bunker girls. A family story tells how she defended herself by punching him.
 Beyond the immediate danger was the inevitable economic devastation. Stoneman spared their houses, but without slaves or horses, there would be no way the Bunkers could manage their farm.

 

The Bunkers with their family and Grace Gates, one of their slaves. 

 It would be interesting to know how the Bunkers rationalized slavery, since they had personally been sold into bondage and trafficked overseas. They didn't see eye-to-eye on the issue, either. In the years before the war, they divided their assets, with Chang getting most of the land and Eng most of the slaves.
 When Chang and Eng were 18, a Boston sea captain discovered them in Siam (modern Thailand) and paid their mother $500 to take them on a 30-month tour of America and Europe. Once the twins turned 21 and gained control of their own affairs, they became famous and prosperous.
 Seeking privacy and normalcy, the Bunkers retired from show business at age 28 and moved to the Traphill community of Wilkes County, North Carolina. At 31, they married the Yates sisters, and they soon moved to Mount Airy and built two homes where their children could go to school. (Their story was detailed recently in Our State magazine, which dismissed the draft episode on a technicality.) They turned 50 the day before Fort Sumter was attacked, so they were exempt from serving in the Confederate army. 
 The war in general and the raid in particular left the Bunkers destitute. At age 55, they had to swallow their pride and go back on tour. It was a hard life. Chang drank too much, had a stroke in 1870, and died in his sleep on January 11, 1874. When Eng realized what had happened, he said, "Then I am going," and within three hours he was gone.

Eng and Chang Bunker gave the land for White Plains Baptist Church west of Mount Airy

Keeping up with the Bunkers

 Eng and Chang Bunker have over 1,500 descendants, who meet each summer in Mount Airy for the Bunker Reunion. The family tree includes:

Haystack Farm

• Christopher Wren Bunker (1845-1932), Chang's oldest son, served in the Confederate army and built Haystack Farm, a house that is on the National Register of Historic Places. His parents must have had high ambitions when they named him after famed architect Christopher Wren, who built London's St. Paul's Cathedral in 1710. 
• George F. Ashby (1885-1950), Eng's grandson, became president of the Union Pacific Railroad. 
• Gen. Caleb V. Haynes (1895-1966), Chang's grandson, was a distinguished World War II airman, flying the "Burma Hump" to support allies in China.
• Alex Sink (1948-), Chang's great-granddaughter, was a 2010 candidate for governor in Florida. 
• Caroline Shaw (1982-), Chang's great-great granddaughter, won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2013.

Mark Twain gets dead-serious about warfare

 Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) was 24 when the Civil War started, and he served two weeks in the Confederate Army in Missouri. One night he was involved in shooting an unarmed man, and he wrote hauntingly about it in an essay called The Private History of a Campaign that Failed. Here's an excerpt:

     When we got to him, the moon revealed him distinctly. He was laying on his back with his arms abroad, his mouth was open and his chest was heaving with long gasps, and his white shirt front was splashed with blood. The thought shot through me that I was a murderer, that I had killed a man, a man who had never done me any harm. That was the coldest sensation that ever went through my marrow.

     I was down by him in a moment, helplessly stroking his forehead, and I would have given anything then, my own life freely, to make him again what he had been five minutes before. And all the boys seemed to be feeling the same way; they hung over him, full of pitying interest, and tried all they could to help him, and said all sorts of regretful things. They had forgotten all about the enemy, they thought only of this one forlorn unit of the foe. Once my imagination persuaded me that the dying man gave me a reproachful look out of the shadow of his eyes, and it seemed to me that I could rather that he had stabbed me than he had done that. He muttered and mumbled like a dreamer in his sleep about his wife and his child, and, I thought with a new despair, "This thing that I have done does not end with him; it falls upon them too, and they never did me any harm, any more than he."

     In a little while the man was dead. He was killed in war, killed in fair and legitimate war, killed in battles as you may say, and yet he was as sincerely mourned by the opposing force as if he had been their brother. The boys stood there a half-hour sorrowing over him and recalling the details of the tragedy, and wondering who he might be and if he was a spy, and saying if they had it to do over again, they would not hurt him unless he attacked them first. It soon turned out that mine was not the only shot fired; there were five others, a division of the guilt which was a great relief to me since it in some degree lightened and diminished the burden I was carrying. There were six shots fired at once but I was not in my right mind at the time, and my heated imagination had magnified my one shot into a volley.

     The man was not in uniform and was not armed. He was a stranger in the country, that was all we ever found out about him. The thought of him got to preying on me every night, I could not get rid of it. I could not drive it away, the taking of that unoffending life seemed such a wanton thing. And it seemed an epitome of war, that all war must just be the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity, strangers who in other circumstances you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.

      My campaign was spoiled. It seemed to me that I was not rightly equipped for this awful business, that war was intended for men and I for a child's nurse. I resolved to retire from this avocation of sham soldiership while I could retain some remanent of my self-respect. These morbid thoughts clung to me against reason, for at the bottom I did not believe I had touched this man. The law of probabilities decreed me guiltless of his blood for in all my small experiences with guns, I had not hit anything I had tried to hit, and I knew I had done my best to hit him. Yet there was no solace in the thought. Against a diseased imagination, demonstration goes for nothing.

 Shortly afterwards, Clemens' 15-man company heard a rumor that a Union colonel was sweeping down on them with a whole regiment. "Our boys went apart and consulted; then we went back and told the other companies present that the war was a disappointment to us and we were going to disband," he wrote. 

 Clemens picked a good time to walk away from a fight, for the menacing Union colonel was none other than Ulysses S. Grant.
 They became friends after the war, and after Grant died in 1885, Mark Twain was responsible for publishing and marketing the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

➤NEXT: Bloody welcome to Virginia

Sgt. Angelo Wiser's map shows the march April 2 from Jonesville and Elkin through Dobson to Mount Airy, which generally followed the route of Old Highway 601. Wiser occasionally includes the names of households along the march, but there is no indication on his maps that the 15th Pennsylvania visited the Bunker farm.

Guess where NC's last rebel came from!

1949 portrait of Uncle Teen Blackburn, when he was 106.

HAMPTONVILLE, N.C.

 One of the last eyewitnesses* to Stoneman's Raid was Alfred "Uncle Teen" Blackburn, who was about 109 when he died in 1951. In an interview in 1938, Blackburn described the raiders coming through Yadkin County, "riding three abreast … on the narrow dirt road that runs a few feet in front of my house … burning everything along the way."
 As I have studied Stoneman's Raid, Uncle Teen may be the most fascinating character I've encountered. Try to reconcile these two claims:
 ►He was the last surviving Confederate veteran in North Carolina. 
 ►He was born a slave.
 Yes, the last rebel soldier in North Carolina owed his freedom to a war he lost.

 When talking about Uncle Teen, legend sometimes clouds the truth, and there are reasons to be suspicious of his birthdate, since his pension depended on it.

 Alfred Blackburn was born April 26, 1842, according to his obituary in the Statesville newspaper. Others say 1847 (according to research by Yadkin historians William Rutledge and Frances Casstevens) or maybe even as late as 1860 (per Adam Domby's 2020 book, False Cause). In that case, he wouldn't have qualified for a pension.

 One account describes him as the son of a white man and a Cherokee woman. Another historian describes him as a black man. He was a house servant at the Hampton and Cowles Plantation until his master (possibly his father or his half-brother) joined the 21st North Carolina Regiment in 1862. Teen accompanied him as a “body servant,” serving two years in the Confederate army as a cook and helper.
 Uncle Teen's strength and courage were legendary. He did not carry a gun, saying “a knife is handier,” and he liked to tell how he used a saber at the Second Battle of Bull Run to fight off a Yankee and save the life of Capt. Augustin Blackburn.
 When Capt. Blackburn was furloughed because of injuries, they both returned home to Yadkin County. 
 The raiders Uncle Teen witnessed at the first of April 1865 most likely would have been 100 mounted troops from the 11th Kentucky Cavalry, dispatched by Stoneman from Jonesville to burn Buck Shoals Mill, Troy Mill, and Eagle Mills.
 Uncle Teen exaggerated when he said they burned everything along the way, because the nearby plantation where he was born still stands. In fact, Stoneman's raiders rarely burned private homes, though they plundered at will.
 After the war, Uncle Teen tried his hand at farming, mining, and law enforcement before taking a contract job as a mail carrier. He walked the 25-mile round trip from Jonesville to Hamptonville three times a week for 40 years, which would be over 150,000 miles afoot—the equivalent of walking around the world six times. Then he got a mule, and finally a horse and buggy, and he didn't retire until he was 100. At 108, he was still walking a mile a day to visit a country store.
 In 1880, he married a teenager, Lucy Carson. They were proud parents of five well-educated children. His oldest daughter was 101 when she died in 1984.
 Uncle Teen died December 16, 1951. If we can trust his 1842 birthdate, that would be 109 years, seven months, and 20 days. For the last nine months of his life, he was recognized as North Carolina's last Confederate veteran, drawing a monthly pension of $26.26.
 Though the Yankees delivered him from slavery, he was always a rebel at heart. Historian Lewis Brumfield found a copy of Blackburn's 1941 taxes, and at age 99 he listed his occupation as "Confederate Soldier (Retired)."

Footnote about Alfred Teen Blackburn from
 "The Civil War and Yadkin County, North Carolina"
by historian Frances Casstevens.

 

*Last eyewitnesses to Stoneman's Raid

 I've found three eyewitnesses to Stoneman's Raid who outlived Alfred Blackburn.
 The last was John H. Pearson (1852-1954), who was not quite 13 years old when the raiders swept into Morganton, N.C., in 1865. Gen. Simeon Brown made his headquarters in the Pearson home across the street from the Burke County courthouse, while his troops searched for John's father, who was accused of killing a Yankee. Meanwhile, young John watched from a second-floor window of a neighbor's house. He died June 2, 1954, just 11 weeks short of his 102nd birthday. 

 Rev. William Lander Sherrill (1860-1953) was five when Stoneman's Raiders invaded his hometown of Lincolnton, N.C., and 70 years later he described it a newspaper column that he compiled into Sherrill's History of Lincoln County. Rev. Sherrill married the orphaned daughter of Capt. Charles Connor, who was probably the last Confederate officer killed in action. Rev. Sherrill was 93 when he died July 14, 1953. 

 William Allen Magee (1846-1953) was a bugler with the 12th Ohio Cavalry and was 18 years old when he rode in Stoneman's Raid. He was the next-to-last combat veteran of the Grand Army of the Republic when he died Jan. 23, 1953, at age 106. 

 A 14-year-old slave named Martin Luther Bost (1851-1939) witnessed the raid in Newton, N.C. 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."

Last veterans of the Civil War

 The last Union combat veteran was James Hard (1843-1953), a New Yorker who died 48 days after Magee at age 109. He once met President Abraham Lincoln in a White House reception and voted for Lincoln and Eisenhower in elections 88 years apart.
 In terms of lifespan, Hard (40,052 days) lived one week longer than Blackburn (40,045).
 When Blackburn died, there were a handful of other centenarians who claimed to Confederate veterans, but almost all of them have been discredited by census records. In hindsight, it appears that Uncle Teen was the next-to-last Confederate veteran, dying 15 days before an Alabama man named Pleasant Crump (1847-1951). Crump served in Lee's army until the surrender at Appomattox, and as he returned home to Alabama it is quite possible that he was among hundreds of rebels paroled by Stoneman's troops.

§§§§§

MOVING TARGETS: We're not absolutely sure when and where Teen Blackburn encountered the raiders. The way he describes them so close to his house, I think April 1 at Hamptonville is most likely. Two other possibilities:

• Windsors Crossroads, about four miles southwest of Hamptonville, where Blackburn is quoted on a Civil War Trails marker. 

• One historian suggests the mills may have been burned April 10 or 11 when the raiders passed through Huntsville. The proximity makes sense, but not the timing—by then Stoneman was concentrating his forces to attack Salisbury April 12.

 I'm satisfied that the raid Blackburn witnessed originated April 1 in Jonesville, where Gen. Stoneman and two brigades were waiting for floods to subside on the Yadkin River. Side raids like this were common during Stoneman's Raid, and some have not been well-documented. Buck Shoals Mill was on the South Yadkin River between Hamptonville and Windsors Crossroads, and the mill pond and ruins are still visible. Troy Mill and Eagle Mills were on Hunting Creek about six miles southeast of Windsors Crossroads and between the modern routes of I-77 and US21.

 The Hampton plantation still stands and is said to be the oldest house in Yadkin County. From US421, take US21 south and turn right on Hamptonville Road. Just before that turn-off is an unpaved dead-end where he lived: Teen Blackburn Road. His home burned in 2003.

NEXT➤ A punchline worthy of Mark Twain