THE 
 
 lopl Element of Jforth Carolina 
 
 DURIKG THE r WAR. 
 
 OMAHA EBBtTBLICAS FEIST. 
 
THE 
 
 LOYAL ELEMENT OF NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 DURING THE WAR. 
 
 A PAPER 
 Read before trie Nebraska Commandery 
 
 OF TIIK 
 
 MILITARY ORDER 
 
 OF THE 
 
 LOYAL LEGION <SH* UNITED STATES 
 
 By Companion JAMES W. SAVAGE, 
 
 Late Colonel 12th N. Y. Cavalry. 
 
 OMAHA, NEB. 
 1886. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2013 
 
 http://archive.org/details/loyalelementofnoOOsava 
 
chiton 
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 The Loyal Element of North Carolina 
 
 DURING THE WAR. 
 
 Companions: Remembering the apparent unanimity with 
 which the people of the south sustained the secession move- 
 ment after hostilities had actually begun, we are apt to forget 
 how devout was the love for the union in some sections of the 
 confederacy. Nowhere, not even in Eastern Tennessee, was 
 this sentiment stronger than in portions of the state of North 
 Carolina. 
 
 On the seventeenth of January, 1861, I was passing through 
 
 the last named state on my way to Milledgeville, Georgia. 
 
 The southern heart was fast catching fire, and there were 
 
 plenty of hot heads to apply the kindling torch in North 
 
 Carolina. Georgia had just passed her secession ordinance, 
 
 and the half grown, tar-heel boys were shouting for the side 
 
 which promised relief from the dreary monotony of their lives. 
 
 At every cross roads, and at every railway station you were 
 
 pretty sure to see two or three young men with the blue and 
 
 ■white cockade (at that early day the emblem of treason) in 
 
 their hats. Most of the old men on the train looked grave and 
 
 troubled, but kept quiet. Ex-Governor Moorhead, however, 
 
 a frank, plain-spoken old patriot, who had not long before 
 
 quitted the gubernatorial chair of North Carolina, left no one 
 
 in doubt as to what his sentiments were. He denounced 
 
 secession as a crime and secessionists as fools, in language 
 
 which was not to be mistaken. At one station where the 
 
 to shouting was unusually loud, and the symbols of disloyalty 
 
 Of 
 
 fe. 
 
quite numerous, the old governor could keep his patience no 
 longer; and going out to the rear platform of the car, he ad- 
 vised the shouters in terse, nervous and forcible Anglo-Saxon 
 words, by no means above the comprehension of the crowd, 
 to take the rebel cockades from their hats, and replace them on 
 more ignoble, even if quite as conspicuous, portions of their 
 bodies. 
 
 But persuasion, sarcasm and sneers were alike unavailing 
 against the tide. North Carolina was literally forced out of 
 the union four months later, by a convention possessing 
 neither the legal authority nor moral right to pass such an 
 ordinance; and as the conflagration spread, such men as the ex- 
 governor soon found themselves in a hopeless minority. 
 
 As for himself he did not long survive to witness miseries 
 which he could not alleviate or crimes which he had striven in 
 vain to prevent. But there were many sharers of his senti- 
 ments who survived the war, and who could truthfully say at 
 its close, " We have kept the faith." The western part of the 
 state, bordering on Tennessee, was to the full as loyal as West 
 Virginia. Captain Hock, of the Twelfth New York Cavalry, 
 who was captured at Plymouth in April, 1864, after enduring 
 some months of confinement at the camp in Salisbury, made 
 his escape, started westward and reached, after toilsome wan- 
 dering and perilous adventures, a force of union troops in 
 East Tennessee. He found in North Carolina an underground 
 railway, as systematic and as well arranged as that which ex- 
 isted in Ohio before the war. Its objects were two-fold: first, 
 to protect or secrete loyal North Carolinians who wished to 
 avoid the rigid conscription of the south ; and, second, to aid 
 in the escape of such Yankee prisoners as might choose that 
 precarious route to freedom. From the time that Captain 
 Hock, by accident, happened upon one of the stations of this 
 road, his sufferings and troubles were, in large measure, over. 
 
He found food and resting places, stations in secure srjots, 
 guides over intricate mountain paths and a hostility to rebel- 
 lion which the north, bitter as it was, hardly knew. Some- 
 times he would spend the night at the house of a prosperous 
 farmer, sometimes in a cave with two or three young fellows 
 who were seeking to baffle conscripting parties, and sometimes 
 alone in the forest. But wherever he was, he was sure to find 
 either explicit and unmistakable directions for the next stage, 
 or a conductor, alert, active and cautious, who accompanied 
 him over the more dangerous part of his way. Nor was this 
 help withdrawn until from a mountain peak near the Ten- 
 nessee border he was shown the federal flag floating over an 
 outpost of our army. Without the aid and comfort thus 
 afforded, it would have been impossible for the captain, lame 
 and sore from travel, and weak from starvation, to attain his 
 liberty, and he must either have perished on the inhospitable 
 hills or been returned to hopeless captivity. 
 
 But fidelity to the union was not confined to the western 
 or mountainous portion of the state. There were few counties 
 of the interior where the old traditional love for the country, 
 handed down from Guildford and other battle fields of the 
 Revolution, did not assert itself. At Spring Hill, not far from 
 Goldsboro, there was a community of loyal citizens so large 
 that it might be said to embrace the entire village. The fate 
 of their brethren at Kinston, of which I shall presently speak, 
 had kept them quiet while they were under the malevolent eyes 
 of confederate leaders; but they were well known to be disaffect- 
 ed to what was called the cause of liberty, and as soon as the 
 regiment to which I belonged marched into the place, and they 
 realized that speech was once more free, their unaffected joy at 
 our coming, and their undisguised terror when there was a 
 rumor that we were to be ordered away, were clear proofs that 
 their loyalty to the union was no pretense. Leaving out a 
 
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 strip of varying but of no great width along the coast, 
 and also the counties bordering South Carolina, and I doubt if 
 one could go ten miles in any direction without finding some 
 family, either openly or secretly, but at all events heartily de- 
 voted to the north. Certainly it was so in every portion of 
 the state to which my personal observation extended. On long 
 scouting expeditions, on raids to cut a railroad or destroy a 
 bridge, the places where it was safe to rely on what you heard 
 were as well ascertained as the light-houses along our coast. 
 There was of course, much fear among them, and they were 
 excessively cautious, for no reign of terror was ever so despotic 
 as that in the south during the war; but whenever they were 
 assured of safety, they were very free and outspoken. A planter 
 near Mosely Hall was, in my opinion, as true and honest a 
 patriot— I speak with all due reverence — as Lincoln himself. 
 Nor did he falter in his allegiance when the locusts of Sher- 
 mans army afterwards swarmed over his place and left him 
 with literally nothing but the four walls and roof of his house. 
 He visited me a few days after their interview with him, 
 cheerful and happy in the prospect of a speedy victory for the 
 union arms, careless of his own personal losses, and. refusing to 
 accept anything from me except some trifling commissary 
 stores, and a horn comb which he thought would please his 
 wife, who hadn't been able to comb her head for a week. 
 
 The line and non-commissioned officers made many acquaint- 
 ances which, if not in the most refined circles, served to make 
 scouting parties successful, and at all events, to while away the 
 tedium of many a long march. I recall the dawn of a sum- 
 mer morning after an all night's journey. Just as it became 
 light enough to distinguish faces, the head of the column, 
 marching by twos, approached a log hut by the wayside. A 
 young girl of fifteen, of that exquisite type of beauty only seen 
 at the south, which seems angelic while it lasts, but is so fleet- 
 
ing that it fades utterly away before the coming of womanhood, 
 rushed hurriedly down to the roadside with her hair flying, and 
 her bare brown feet and ankles twinkling in the grass. Scanning, 
 evidently with a fixed purpose, the face of every soldier that 
 rode by, her pretty, fascinating features lighted up as she 
 caught sight of an officer who a few weeks before had been 
 sent on a reconnoitering expedition over that very road. " Oh, 
 Lieutenant!" she cried, in a voice which was audible far down 
 the line, " Oh, Lieutenant! where's my fine toothed comb? 
 Where's my bladder of snuff ?" The story of woman's weak- 
 ness and man's perfidy could hardly be told in fewer or more 
 eloquent words. The laugh of the men, heard at intervals 
 from the rear as the story was repeated, indicated that the 
 gallant lieutenant had not heard the last of the appeal. 
 
 It was asserted that with a bladder of snuff, after that deli- 
 cacy became scarce, a Yankee could travel throughout the 
 entire state, and meet everywhere only good treatment and 
 unbounded hospitality. But this fact, perhaps, is hardly to be 
 relied upon as an evidence of loyalty; for the loss of their 
 favorite stimulant was a sad deprivation to the women of the 
 South, to whatever flag they were devoted. 
 
 Most of the loyalists of North Carolina would have been 
 contented after the breaking out of hostilities to remain quiet 
 on their plantations or patches and take active service in 
 neither army. But the time soon came when they were 
 obliged to choose their colors. Conscripting officers enrolled 
 every able bodied man in the confederacy; and in antici|)ation 
 of a speedy muster-in and enforced service in the rebel army, 
 numbers made their way into our lines as soon as the success 
 of the Burnside expedition had established a foothold at 
 New Bern, and offered themselves to the federal army. A 
 regiment of these men was formed, to which was given the 
 name of the First North Carolina Union Volunteers. They 
 
/ 
 
 were mainly employed in manning the fortifications; for 
 it was well understood that if captured, these conscripts, rebels 
 against a rebellion, could expect no quarter. The melancholy 
 fate of a detachment of these men forms one of the darkest 
 pages in the history of the war. 
 
 About two o'clock in the morning of the first of February, 
 1864, a furious assault was made upon the union outposts 
 near New Bern, which, although stoutly resisted, resulted in 
 the withdrawal of all our forces behind the fortifications of that 
 city. Unhappily, in the suddenness of the rebel advance, a 
 masked battery hidden in the forest, so constructed as to 
 command the Neuse river, and occupied by about forty of these 
 North Carolinians was cut off and completely isolated from our 
 troops; though from its situation it remained for a long time 
 undiscovered. Attempts were made during the night to com- 
 municate with these men. A brave young officer, who did not 
 survive the war, volunteered to carry an order to them, and 
 actually made his way through the rebel forces during the 
 night, but owing to the darkness and rain, lost his way in the 
 swamp and was obliged to return. The liveliest sympathy was 
 felt for these beleaguered patriots, and as the siege of New 
 Bern was soon abandoned, it was hoped that either the 
 enemy had failed to discover the work, or that the commanding 
 officer had instructed his men to disperse, and seek each to save 
 himself as he might. But the post when visited by us was 
 silent and tenantless, and it was not until weeks afterwards that 
 we learned that their commander from a mistaken sense of 
 duty, had resisted all their entreaties to allow them to save 
 themselves by individual flight, that they had been captured, 
 and after a hurried military trial, every one hanged at Kinston. 
 Some months later, I was shown the grove in which they were 
 executed. The trees of North Carolina never bore nobler or 
 more spotless fruit.