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Published: Spring 2002

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Copyright (c) 2002 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Chapter One.

The 26th North Carolina

The building blocks of every Civil War brigade were its component regiments, and the oldest, most experienced regiment of Pettigrew's brigade was the 26th North Carolina. It was organized on August 27, 1861 at Camp Crabtree, near Raleigh. The men came from eight different counties almost evenly divided between two geographic areas: the heartland of North Carolina, where the coastal plain met the piedmont, and the mountainous western side of the state.

The names of the individual companies that made up the 26th were colorful and expressive. The Jeff Davis Mountaineers from Ashe County became Company A; the Waxhaw Jackson Guards of Union County became Company B; the Wilkes Volunteers of Wilkes County became Company C; the Wake Guards of Wake County became Company D; the Independent Guards of Chatham County became Company E; the Hibriten Guards of Caldwell County became Company F; the Chatham Boys of Chatham County became Company G; the Moore Independents of Moore County became Company H; the Caldwell Guards of Caldwell County became Company I; and the Pee Dee Wild Cats of Anson County became Company K.[1]

These companies were part of a great wave of reaction against President Abraham Lincoln's call for troops to suppress the rebellion on April 15, 1861. Like the rest of the Upper South states, North Carolina had refused to leave the Union before the firing on Fort Sumter, believing that the election of a Republican president was not sufficient cause to break up the nation. But the Confederate attack on Sumter changed the dynamics of the secession issue. While the North unanimously supported a military solution to the break-up of the nation, most citizens of the Upper South refused to answer Lincoln's call for troops. As a result, North Carolina and three other slave states seceded from the Union and joined the original seven Deep South states. Most of the companies that made up the Twenty-sixth were organized in July but the Moore Independents assembled on May 13 at Carthage, the first company of the regiment to form.[2]

As the companies assembled at Camp Crabtree and were selected for inclusion into the 26th, the personnel began to meet and form relationships that would see them through the remainder of the war. Maj. Henry King Burgwyn, Jr., commander of the camp, would be elected lieutenant colonel of the new regiment. He came from a planter family of Northampton County, North Carolina, and was descended from English aristocratic stock. Born on October 3, 1841, while his parents vacationed in Boston, Harry, as he was known, attended Burlington College in North Carolina and was tutored to enter the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The necessary appointment never came through so Burgwyn entered the University of North Carolina, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1859. His taste for military training was so strong that he immediately enrolled in the Virginia Military Institute. Burgwyn was a staunch supporter of Southern rights. He advocated the state's secession even before the firing on Fort Sumter and threw himself into war preparations when North Carolina left the Union. He was given command of Camp Crabtree on July 5, but a commission in a field unit suited his temperament and ambition much more closely. His election to the lieutenant colonelcy on August 27 was a prayer answered. Burgwyn was only nineteen years, nine months, and twenty-seven days old, "probably the youngest Lt. Col. in the Confederate or U.S. service," he proudly noted in his diary.[3]

Capt. Abner B. Carmichael of the Wilkes Volunteers was elected major of the regiment, but the colonelcy went to a man who had no prior association with any of the companies at Camp Crabtree and thus he would not even see his new regiment for several days after the election. Capt. Zebulon Baird Vance of the 14th North Carolina was given the nod by the company officers on August 27. He was a popular politician from the western counties of North Carolina, and thus was well known by at least the three companies that hailed from the mountains. Born in Buncombe County near Asheville on May 13, 1830, Vance entered the University of North Carolina in 1852, but studied for only one year before he was admitted to the bar. He made a reputation as a lawyer, local politician, and editor of the Asheville Spectator before election to the North Carolina House of Commons and the U.S. House of Representatives. Vance was a staunch Southern Whig, one of four Tar Heel Unionist Congressmen before Sumter. He deplored the pending breakup of the nation but was prepared to honor the Deep South's decision to leave. When Lincoln called for troops to restore the Union, Vance denounced the policy and enthusiastically joined the Confederate war effort. He volunteered as a private in the Rough and Ready Guards of Buncombe County but quickly was elected their captain when the unit became Company F, 14th North Carolina. Vance's men endured a summer of garrison duty at Suffolk, Virginia before he was notified of his election to command the 26th. It was not unopposed. An anonymously published letter to the Raleigh Register, possibly authored by Burgwyn, urged the election of Rev. Cameron F. McRae, Burgwyn's brother-in-law, but this suggestion fell flat.[4]

Two other people who would rise to prominence before the war was half over, entered the regiment in 1861 through the lower ranks. John Randolph Lane was born on Independence day, 1835, in what friends would later characterize as straightened circumstances. A contemporary believed this helped to shape his character, recalling that he was "reared with the advantages of self-denial." Entering the Chatham Boys as a corporal, he soon was elected captain of Company G. His hard work and ability to learn the science of military affairs catapulted him into the lieutenant colonelcy when Burgwyn rose to command the regiment. Both men would be hit on July 1 at Gettysburg, Burgwyn to die and Lane to suffer untold agony from a horrible head wound. Yet the pugnacious Lane would survive, return to rebuild the regiment, and be wounded several times more before the war was over. He lived to see the turn of the new century.[5]

John Thomas Jones was another quick-riser in the ranks. He was a twenty-year old student at the University of North Carolina when Sumter was fired on, but, like Burgwyn, he was a strong supporter of secession even before Lincoln's call for troops. The new Confederacy was "fighting for the institutions of the whole South," he wrote home, "and the South will yet sustain them. Who would rather be swung on to the tail end of a Northern . . . Republic than to be equals in a Southern confederacy[?]. The safety of our institutions depend upon our being united; if we are divided where are we to look for success." An alliance between the Upper South and the North would lead to "an abolition ticket here in this State. As for me I will never live in any such a country." Jones left the university just before graduation and volunteered as a private in the 1st North Carolina, a six month regiment. He saw combat at the battle of Big Bethel on June 10, 1861, and organized the Caldwell Guards. Jones served the company as lieutenant and captain, and was promoted major and lieutenant colonel by the mid-point of the war.[6]

The men who enlisted in the 26h North Carolina hardly spoke of their motivations to fight for the Confederacy, but defense of their native soil undoubtedly was the most important motive for the hundreds of men who made up the regiment. Lt. Henry Clay Albright of Company G offered some insight into their thinking when he wrote to a North Carolina newspaper that, "At the first sound of the war whoop, as it fell upon their ears from afar, these brave and chivalrous hearted men forsook the quiet of their farms, the happiness of the family circle, and all they held dear to them, and rushed as one man to the defence of their young Republic's bright and unsullied honor. . . . they resolved to sacrifice their lives rather than submit to the tyranny of a wrong and misguided tyrant." Albright privately assured his sister that "I'm willing to undergo any necessary hardship or privation . . . for my country's cause, which is the foremost and dearest companion of my heart."[7]

Noah Deaton of Company H summed up this attitude in a letter to one of his female friends when he criticized the men who continued to stay at home while their neighbors enlisted. "[T]here are a great many young fellows that have no cares to keep them from going out in defense of their country but are such cowards that they would suffer subjugation rather than fight and I trust the ladies will not countenance such fellows." Deaton had the perfect remedy for anyone who was offended by his opinion, let them "take up arms to defend their homes and not wait for others to do what they should do." Deaton paid a price for his patriotism. He was captured at the battle of Bristoe Station on October 14, 1863, and was not paroled until nearly the end of the war.[8]

John Randolph Lane would commemorate the memory of the fallen at every opportunity for the rest of his long life. Speaking to the North Carolina Society of Baltimore in 1903, Lane eloquently remembered the men of his old regiment. They were "of good blood," he insisted. "I do not mean that their parents were aristocrats-far from it; many of them never owned a slave. They were the great middle class that owned small farms . . .; who earned their living with honest sweat and owed not any man." Lane called each of his comrades a patriot who was "convinced that the cause for which he was fighting was just; he believed that he owed allegiance first to his home and his State. He was standing to combat an unjust invader."[9]

No sooner had the regiment completed its organization than orders arrived to move out. The Federals were responsible for the unit's hasty departure from Camp Crabtree. It was scheduled to be sent to Virginia but a joint army and navy force under Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler was even then attacking the outer banks of North Carolina. The state's long coastline, indented by a number of huge sounds protected by a string of tiny barrier islands, was vulnerable. If the Federals could take these outlying islands they would have access to the relatively calm waters of the sounds. Most of the major rivers of the coastal plain drained into these sounds, offering avenues of invasion for seaborne Yankee armies. Fully one third of the state's territory would be laid open to Northern incursions, a number of port cities would be cut off from European trade, and the Federals would be in a position to interrupt the Wilmington and Weldon railroad, a vital link between North Carolina and Richmond.[10]

The 26th left Crabtree by rail early on the morning of September 2 and arrived at New Bern later that day, where it received orders to move south to Morehead City. The men were assigned to guard Fort Macon, a masonry fortification on the eastern end of Bogue Island which guarded Beaufort Inlet and the ports of Morehead City and Beaufort. Vance arrived on the evening of September 4 and took command of his new regiment as it made a difficult crossing of the sound. The men boarded a schooner which grounded well short of the beach, forcing them to complete the journey in small boats. One Tar Heel was "mashed to death a geting on the Boat" and another was injured very badly. The regiment spent its first few days on the island setting up tents and digging wells. Vance and Burgwyn agreed to name their first encampment in the field Camp Burgwyn, after the lieutenant colonel's father, who was on Bogue Island acting as a volunteer aide for Gov. Henry T. Clark.[11]

The logistical problem was immense. Vance was told to rely on the commissary stores at New Bern but they were inadequate. He wrote an imploring letter to Governor Clark, describing the 26th as "almost in a state of mutiny" because of a four month delay in its pay. Most of the men suffered from the want of "ordinary articles of every day use" and had no way to buy them from local merchants. Vance urged Clark to pay the men something or "I fear I shall not be able to maintain discipline."[12]

Vance's men retained their spirit and enthusiasm despite the shortages. W. E. Setser of Company F put it more boldly, "the bois ar all aneious for a fight. we think we can whip six thousand yankees. the bois sais they can whip five a peace. i think i can whip six my self." If the Northerners landed on the island, "we will feed them on canon plates and grape and musketry." They needed all the spirit they could muster, for soon after setting up camp on Bogue Island the 26th was hit by a wave of communicable diseases. Measles, malaria, typhoid fever, and mumps ravaged the camp and a special hospital was created on the mainland near Carolina City, three miles west of Morehead City. Nine men from one company died in a week's time. The sickness raged from September through December before it finally subsided.[13]

Despite the illnesses and lack of supplies, Vance and his regiment devoted their primary attention to the prospect of a battle. There were numerous scares and false alarms. John A. Jackson of Company H informed a friend, "we cant tel what a day will bring forth[,] the next time you hear from us we may have had a hard battle or may be prisners bound for New York or some other port." The only contact with the enemy came as the result of an accident. A transport steamer, The USS Union, became separated from a fleet sailing south from Fortress Monroe and grounded on the shore of Bogue Island twelve miles west of Fort Macon on November 1. It broke apart and several people on board were drowned. Eighty-one survivors approached Vance's regimental camp with a flag of truce on November 2 and gave themselves up. Vance was criticized by his superiors for not adequately picketing the approaches to his camp, illustrating the laxness with which he tended to run the regiment. Although the ship was broken up, it contained a load of valuable articles, and Company D, F, H, and K were detached to salvage it. The work began on November 4 and lasted until the 19th. Horses, muskets, whiskey, champagne, coal, mattresses, pillows, clothing, and two rifled cannon were recovered. At times the men were fired at by Federal ships but they took shelter behind the sand hills and no harm was done.[14]

When it became apparent that the Federals had no intention of attacking Fort Macon, the regiment left Bogue Island to establish winter quarters on the mainland on November 26. Camp Vance was laid out near Carolina City. The men's health improved with the onset of cooler weather and the Christmas season passed quietly, save for several men who became drunk and rowdy and had to be placed in the guardhouse. While many enlisted men found their huts at Camp Vance to be clean and comfortable, Burgwyn thought the camp was in wretched shape when he returned from a stay in the hospital to recover from typhoid fever. Little care had been taken to police the area, so "you may imagine the filth," he complained to his mother. Discipline seemed worse than ever. Although Burgwyn drilled the men four hours every day, he was not satisfied with their proficiency. He heard recitations on tactics from officers each day as he slowly raised the standard in "my regiment." Burgwyn came to compare it favorably with all the other units in the area. "My own is the best & if it had a good Colonel would be a most capital reg. Col. Vance is however a man without any system or regularity whatever & has so little of an engineering mind. . . . His abilities appear to me to be more overated than those of any other person I know of." Burgwyn was critical of several other officers as well, calling them "exceedingly inefficient in tactics." He believed the quality of the 26th would be "much improved" if these officers could somehow be levered out of their positions.[15]

A long-awaited Union offensive into the sounds soon drew the regiment out of Camp Vance. Brig. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside commanded a joint army and navy force to seal off port cities and establish a major Federal presence on the coastal plain. Roanoke Island and New Bern seemed to be the most likely targets so Confederate authorities began rounding up all the troops they could spare. News of Burnside's expedition reached Camp Vance on January 24 and the order to move arrived two days later. Vance left immediately with six companies and Burgwyn was to follow with the rest the next day. The regiment made Camp Branch their home for the next six weeks. Named for Brig. Gen. Lawrence O'Bryan Branch, commander of the District of the Pamlico, it was located four miles south of New Bern close to the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad. Fort Thompson, on the west bank of the Neuse River, and a line of infantry works connecting it to the railroad were nearby. The threat to New Bern was real but not immediate. Rain set in with a vengeance, pouring down for four days running in mid-February. Sickness began to rise in the ranks, pneumonia and flux were among the afflictions, and Vance himself came down with a tough case of an undiagnosed illness. "Vance knows nothing about the manege of a Regmt," concluded Burgwyn when the colonel refused to move the regiment to better ground.[16]

As the men continued to wait for action, they were pressed to voluntarily reenlist for an additional two years of service as soon as their twelve months were up. John Thomas Jones did not believe it was possible for his Company I to willingly reenlist. "There are not more than 20 of my company that will go in without going home." William H. Glenn of Company B supported Jones' view. "I think I will go home befor I Stick mi name to a nuther paper," he wrote. Vance warned the reluctant soldiers that the Confederate Congress might pass a conscript law that would draft all soldiers to remain in the service.[17]

Ironically, the two highest ranking officers were eager that winter to leave the regiment. The ambitious Burgwyn wanted a regiment of his own. "I am exceedingly disgusted with my present position," he complained to his father. "Vance is totally unsuitable in my opinion & I am heartily tired of being under his command. As for discipline not the faintest idea of it has ever entered his head." Vance himself wanted to recruit more men and form a legion, a unit that combined all arms. He dreamed of a second infantry regiment, two companies of cavalry, and a battery of artillery. "This would make a handsome brigade with which I would like to take the field on active service." The authorities in Richmond were happy to see him raise additional units but refused to promise a commission as brigadier general.[18]

Vance did accomplish one thing in this period, the recruitment of a regimental brass band, but it was only by accident that he secured a group of musicians. The band had no connection to any of the counties that contributed troops to the regiment, its roots lay in the rich Moravian heritage of Forsyth County. The Moravian denomination originated as a reform movement in Bohemia nearly a century before the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. It grew dramatically under the sponsorship of a Saxon nobleman, Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, who created a Moravian colony on his landed estate in the 1720s. The Unitas Fratrum, or United Brethren, expanded soon after that and established communities such as Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1741, which became the center of the Moravian Church in the northern colonies. Salem, founded in Forsyth County in 1766, became the center of the Moravian Church in the southern colonies. A high regard for education and a love of choral and instrumental music were two of the distinctive characteristics of Moravian life in America.[19]

Moravians from Salem already were in the regimental bands of the Twenty-first North Carolina and Thirty-third North Carolina, and Samuel Timothy Mickey wanted to organize men for a third unit. He was in New Bern trying to find a regiment that was stationed on Roanoke Island, but was stymied when Burnside captured the island. Mickey happened to meet Vance in the lobby of the Gaston House in New Bern. Vance recognized Mickey immediately. "'You are the very man I am looking for,'" Vance told him. "'You represent the Salem Band.'" The colonel talked him into committing his group to the 26th. Vance bypassed red tape and agreed to receive Mickey's men "as an independent band, . . . without being regularly enlisted." The musicians would be paid not by the Confederate government but by the officers themselves.[20]

The group consisted of eight men, with Mickey elected as their "captain." Several members of the band were accomplished players but others were neophytes, including Julius Linebach. He had worked as a bookkeeper for the Haw River Mills in Alamance County and had always wanted to do his duty for the Confederacy, but "was not anxious to become a target for bullets fired by any one." So when someone suggested he quit his job and join the Salem Band it seemed like a workable compromise. Linebach found that blowing a horn could be dangerous too. The mouthpiece of his brass instrument hurt his lips and he thought his lung power was not up to the demands of the horn. His lips chapped, cracked, and bled at each practice, "so that after every piece we played I could pour a spoonful of bloody water from my crook." He solved this by trading instruments with Joe Hall, who had a cornet. The band acquired a uniform of sorts before leaving Salem, "cadet jeans with brass buttons, of which we were rather proud."[21]

Mickey's band left Salem on the morning of March 5 and reached the regiment by rail two days later. The musicians set up tents the next day just outside the guard line so they could come and go freely and bought caps in New Bern to complete their uniforms. The band had to play for guard mounting at 8 a.m.; perform at the daily evening dress parade; give a short concert each night; play at regimental inspections every Sunday morning; and also play at each brigade review. They practiced every morning and afternoon. One of the most difficult things to learn was how to play and march at the same time, until they acquired the ability to divide their attention "between music, feet, & the ground." The condition of the parade ground did not help either, for every stump, root, and hole tripped up a band member.[22]

The music that began to waft over Camp Branch failed to soften the news that Burnside was on the move. He landed on Roanoke Island and defeated the outnumbered Confederates there on February 8. The Federals now had access to the rivers that penetrated the coastal plain and all of eastern North Carolina was seized with a panic. Burnside would launch the biggest attack of his campaign, using 8,000 men, in an effort to take New Bern. Branch had only about 4,000 volunteers and 2,000 hastily organized militia to defend it.[23]

Two lines of infantry works protected New Bern. Most of Branch's strength was gathered at the Fort Thompson Line where the 26th already was stationed, but it ended at the railroad. Six miles farther south a work called the Croatan Line could easily be outflanked by troops disembarking at Fisher's Landing, between the two positions. Branch sent the 26th and a battery to reinforce the 35th North Carolina on the Croatan Line when word of Burnside's landing south of that earthwork reached New Bern. By the time it got there by rail the line had been evacuated, and the 26th narrowly avoided a Federal force that had landed between the two lines while retiring to the Fort Thompson Line.[24]

The Confederates worked feverishly on the night of March 13 to prepare the Fort Thompson works in a deluge of rain. The line ended about forty yards short of the track opposite the head of a swampy ravine called Bullen's Branch, which ran westward from the tracks for about one and a quarter miles into Brice's Creek. When Branch decided to extend the line west of the track he had to retire it one hundred fifty yards to the rear so as to take advantage of the higher ground north of the branch. The terrain here was in the shape of narrow fingers of land, each about ten feet higher than the bottom, pointing southward. Vance planned and built a series of detached redans at the farthest edge of these fingers. He could not have constructed a continuous line of trench unless he moved the position at least a half mile farther north than the rest of the line east of the railroad, creating an even bigger gap at the track.[25]

These redans, about eight in number, were hastily made and barely adequate for the task. The first one was two hundred yards west of the railroad but the rest were only about twenty to forty yards from each other, and about thirty yards from the branch bed. Each one curved in a semi-circular form around the forward edge of each finger, were about forty yards wide with no ditch or retrenchments, and had good parapets. The trees had been cut down in front of the redans and in the swampy branch bottom, which had been made even wetter by the partial damming of Bullen's Branch and the rain that fell on March 13, so that three feet of water stood in front of the redans. Vance was put in charge of the irregular line west of the railroad. He stretched out the 26th North Carolina in the redans so that his right rested at Weathersby Road and divided responsibility for it among the regimental field officers. He posted himself in the center, placed Major Carmichael in charge of the left, and sent Burgwyn to see to the right. Carmichael had charge of Companies A, D, and G. Burgwyn had three companies, two guns of Capt. T. H. Brem's battery, and Companies A and E of the 19th North Carolina (better known as the 2nd North Carolina Cavalry), which was dismounted, and Capt. Walter G. McRae's independent company of North Carolina infantry.[26]

After a day and a night of heavy rain, the morning of Friday, March 14, dawned with a dark, gray overcast. Patches of fog hung low in the woods fronting the Confederate earthworks. Burnside's men advanced early in the morning with Brig. Gen. Jesse L. Reno's brigade deployed along and to the west of the railroad embankment. Reno hit Vance's line at 8 a.m., sending the 21st Massachusetts to slice through the gap in Branch's line along the railroad and aligning the 51st New York, 9th New Jersey, and 51st Pennsylvania west of the railroad. The 21st Massachusetts gained a foothold in the gap but was temporarily stalled by Confederate reinforcements. The air was still foggy when the rest of Reno's line aproached Bullen's Branch and Carmichael's wing of the 26th opened fire. Vance was impressed by the very first volley his regiment fired in anger, calling it "especially magnificent . . . the blaze at the muzzle of the guns was bright and glorious." The firing began on the left and was taken up company by company to the right, but Reno's line did not extend to Weathersby Road and Burgwyn's wing never became engaged. Four companies of the 33rd North Carolina under Col. Clark M. Avery reinforced the 26th in the redans while two other companies under Lt. Col. Robert F. Hoke reinforced Burgwyn's men on the right.[27]

The 26th North Carolina was engaged in a hot fight against three times its numbers, but the Federals were reluctant to press home their attack because of the obstacles presented by Bullen's Branch. The heaviest fire took place on the left, where the Federals fired high at first, "cutting the boughs from the tops of the trees in our rear," recalled Capt. Oscar Rand of Company D. Carmichael conducted himself magnificently. A "quiet, nonobtrusive and rather slow" man, he was exalted by combat. "His face, form and bearing will remain in my memory as long as I live," remembered Rand, "as I saw him that morning, moving slowly from one end to the other of Rifle Pit No. 2, his head just above the bank, observing the enemy and quietly telling the men where to put their bullets."[28]

As soon as the Federals tried to cross the branch, the 26th met them with an "uninterrupted, fierce and deafening" fire. "Many of the Yankees tumbled over," wrote Vance, and "the rest toddled back into the woods." But the enemy began to gain the upper hand when reinforcements pushed forward along the railroad to help the 21st Massachusetts and Major Carmichael was shot dead at about 11 a.m. He and Colonel Avery were standing behind the left wing of the redan when a bullet entered his mouth and exited the back of his neck. Rand was standing next to him and saw that death was instantaneous. "A feeling of bitter grief ran through the trenches as he fell, for there was not a man in the Twenty-sixth regiment who was not devotedly attached to him." It was possible that the Federal who fired this shot saw a small Confederate flag, three by four inches in size, that was mounted on a miniature staff attached to Carmichael's cap. A woman in New Bern had given it to him, and that may have distinguished him enough to draw the attention of a sharpshooter.[29]