From Sun Journal, New Bern, NC:
When General George Pickett hanged 22 men in early 1864, he charged them with being traitors to the Confederate cause.
At first glance, the charges were just.
Pickett had picked about 500 men up as prisoners of war during his retreat from what would be the final attempt for the South to recapture New Bern. Most were North Carolinians and 22 were identified as men who had previously served in the Confederacy.
Southern regiments of union-leaning men were generally referred to as “buffalo soldiers.”
You don’t read much about these regiments in battle, because the government was smart enough not to make them fight aggressively against their fellow North Carolinians – not only would they be likely to refuse to do so, but many of these soldiers had been fighting for the Confederate side and their capture in a fight could not go well for them.
One might find the thought that a man could quit the Confederate side and join the Union side to be incomprehensible. Imagine an American soldier crossing the lines and signing up with the Germans in World War II. Certainly, fellow Confederates found it incomprehensible – at least those who dared to speak. “The deserter… belongs to the wicked and abandoned grade of society morally, that can be found in the land,” Chaplain John Paris of the 54th NC, a witness to the hangings, wrote. “They are generally illiterate, ignorant and vicious. Possessed of prejudices, proceeding from gross ignorance, against government officials; they can readily listen to any appeal made to these prejudices… hence an easy matter for them to learn to despise their country and its cause.”
More tellingly, he complained of “disloyalty at home… disloyalty that has its home in the bosoms of persons not in the military service…” Merchants and others, who would grow fat off the war (and many did, selling to both sides) – men who were troublemakers declaring the conflict “a rich man’s war and the poor man’s fight,” men whose hearts are against their nation.
But one must remember it was a war of ideals as much as of boundaries – and unionists in North Carolina undoubtedly considered themselves to be supporting their nation – the federal government – as did the Confederate soldiers. A man could have his heart with the Union and not, in his heart, be against his home state. Rather, he believed he was fighting to return it to the fold where it belonged. As one historian has argued, most of the generals fighting for the South had little room to criticize men who wrote on the Confederate government to join another side. Hadn’t they done the same thing in violating the oaths they’d taken when they left the US Army?
A number of men who joined the Carolinian armies were not at all enthusiastic about it. Rather, they did so in fear for their lives, their families’ lives or their reputations. Others were forced to join, against their will.
While I don’t mean to say there weren’t deeply loyal Southern men making up the vast majority of the Confederate army, there were also unionists who were looking for any opportunity to safely switch sides.
Early on, when battles ended, the captured men were often paroled and sent home behind Union lines. There, they found themselves unable to buy or sell unless they took an oath of loyalty. When times got bad enough, many men signed up for the Union army simply as a means of having an income to keep their families alive.
The final sticky wicket for Pickett (I honestly didn’t realize I was writing a bad rhyme, there, until I finished it) was the men he was hanging were enemy combatants – prisoners of war. Executing your enemy’s men is rarely a wise move, especially when he’s got plenty of yours for retaliation.
I don’t know where Pickett’s head was at – none of us can – but we know he was a vain man, that he had never really recovered from the trauma of Gettysburg, that he was quick to pass the buck, and that he had nothing to show for his latest effort but a gang of North Carolinians in blue. He was ready to take his anger out on something and he had it in the Kinston 22.
He received a letter from Union commander General John Peck begging for the men’s lives – a in which, sadly, Peck made the mistake of naming the prisoners who had formerly been Confederates. In a supreme act of sarcasm, he thanks Peck for supplying the names of the men he would hang. The men would get a trial, but records tell us it was a kangaroo court that sent them to their deaths.
Next week we’ll take a personal look at one or two of those men.
Contact Bill Hand at [email protected] or 252-229-4977.