Old man Lenoir at war: a Haywood County Civil War tale
by Rob Neufeld
Article published in Asheville Citizen-Times, Jan. 9, 2012
One hundred and fifty years ago today, at Camp Lee, a few miles inland from Myrtle Beach, Capt. Thomas Lenoir stayed behind in his tent, ailing from a bad back, while other Haywood Highlanders attended a ball thrown for the ladies of Grahamville.
Lenoir used the time to write in his journal, which has survived to this day, having been preserved by Lenoir’s great-granddaughter, the late Emily Michal Terrell; and shown to Carroll C. Jones, who has published a book, “Captain Lenoir’s Diary: Tom Lenoir and His Civil War Company from Western North Carolina.”
The man from Bachelor’s Retreat
Lenoir began chronicling the events of Co. F of the 25th N.C. Infantry Regiment on Nov. 1, 1861, when his men had finally arrived in Wilmington after marches and train rides, and drills and musters.
Lenoir was 44 years old with a 17-year old wife, Lizzie, whom he’d just married, left back home. Since he’d been assigned at age 29 by his father, a Wilkesboro planter and Haywood County pioneer, to take care of the family’s remote Forks of River farm, he’d devoted himself entirely to livestock, slaves, and local governance. There is no record of any woman in his life until he married Lizzie, and brought her to the place he called Bachelor’s Retreat.
From Camp Lee, Lenoir would march with his troops to a camp in Kinston; and would resign before they were deployed to fight at Malvern Hill.
His back pain and head aches, compounded by colds and a second attack of measles, plagued him, though he executed his duties with payrolls, musters, drills, and troop management.
Once, he court-martialed and punished three men for going AWOL for a day. He stamped out drunkenness.
Though his health was the major reason for discontinuing his command, he would say at an April 28, 1862 election, that “a considerable portion of the company…were impressed with the idea that I was over strict in discipline.” He did “not like to command men who were dissatisfied with me” and he “could not promise to be less strict.”
Cannons and care packages
The day before the social ball, pickets had come to camp with spent cannon shells to show off. The missiles had been shot at them near Palmetto Island, above Charleston. In addition to the battles over river and railroad access in west Tennessee, and the Federal intent on Richmond, armies were engaged in control over the south Atlantic coast.
Mail wagons entered camp after the pickets’ had visited on Jan. 8. Thomas received a nice care package from his mother and Lizzie, who’d made him a pair of linsey jeans.
Lenoir could remember the mail he had gotten regularly at Bachelor’s Retreat.
Just after he’d moved there, his sister Sarah had written him, “I feel very sorry, when I think how lonely you must feel sometimes, when you are in the house by yourself. I send you some seed, you must plant them for my sake, they will remind you of me.”
His mother and father continued to express remorse over Thomas’ heartache and aloneness. Thomas filled his own letters to them with humorous stories and business consultations. He oversaw ten tenant farmers and two families of 18 slaves.
He won prizes for purebred cattle. He organized an ice-skating exhibition at Osborn’s mill one freezing winter night, and showed off skate skills evidently acquired elsewhere.
Other men
Except for occasional relief from the Grahamville women—Lenoir records a concert they performed one night, for instance—there was little time for society in camp. Baggage handling alone was a trial, but what came from the depot was not as dispiriting as what went out to it.
Men were dying left and right of disease, and their corpses had to be sent home for burial.
After Lenoir left, the Haywood Highlanders experienced one of the most lethal battle histories of any company in the war: the Seven Days Battle; Antietam; Fredericksburg; Petersburg.
Carroll Jones devotes the second half of his 500-page book to them, including a detailed roster that shows who had what happen to them from enlistment in Forks of Pigeon to parole at Appomattox.
“Having previously written a history of the company’s regiment (“The 25th North Carolina Troops in the Civil War,” McFarland, 2009),” Jones writes in his preface, “I decided that it would be a relatively straightforward undertaking to…develop a brief historical chronicle of the company’s actions for the final three years of the conflict.”
Jones weaves in other soldiers’ letters. There are so many voices.
Lenoir to Inman to Henderson: Voices of the 25th
Article published in Asheville Citizen-Times, Jan. 16, 2012
Last week, this column focused on Capt. Thomas Lenoir, alone in his tent at Camp Lee in South Carolina while his soldiers were off at a ball. The men of his company, the Haywood Highlanders of the 25th Regiment, would pass through several battle hells on the way to death, prison, desertion, or Appomattox.
Some of them wrote letters or kept diaries, and last week’s column concluded, “There are so many voices.”
In response to the question, “Why are some people so obsessed with the Civil War?” one might point to the historical record. Primary sources abound; the dead are speaking. People of that time had been tested in the most intense and dramatic ways, with remarkably individual results.
Privates as well as colonels put their thoughts down. Sometimes, women did, too. African American history demands a more assiduous search for sources.
Inman and Henderson
William Pinkney Inman, a private in Lenoir’s company, gained voice in Charles Frazier’s novel, “Cold Mountain.” Toward the end of the war, after the Battle of the Crater, Inman was laid up with a neck wound in the Petersburg hospital.
We might imagine him having a moment with his wounded comrade, James Henderson, and asking, “How are you, Jimmy?”
We don’t know that they did communicate in that hospital, but we do know that Henderson was in Inman’s company and that they arrived in that hospital on the same day, Aug. 21, 1864. Henderson died two days later, of a wound to his left lung, suffered while trying to defend the Weldon Railroad, a major supply line, south of Petersburg.
So, James would not have been speaking very much. His immediate memory would have been of a charge across a corn field and into the woods at Globe’s Tavern to capture a Union battery.
Garland Ferguson, appointed a sergeant at age 18, when he’d enlisted, had been by Henderson’s side when James had fallen on the battlefield. “He told me farewell,” Ferguson would write Henderson’s widow, Maria, and he “said that he would die. He told me to tell his loving wife that he was prepared to die & that he wanted her to meet him in Heaven.”
Beginning at Camp Lee, where Henderson had been hospitalized with a long bout with typhoid fever and then measles—and where preachers had come regularly—he took up an increasingly prayerful tone.
The horrors of Malvern Hill, Antietam, and Fredericksburg heightened it.
“I can make out if I don’t git in another fight, which I don’t want to for I don’t fancy the balls and bomb-shells a-flying as thick as hale around my head,” he wrote Maria. “I think I could tell you something to see men lying all around me and some hollering.”
By 1863, soldiers were deserting in numbers and, if caught, executed before the troops. On August 23, Henderson reported to his wife many conversions in camp, and exclaimed, “I trust to Elijah’s god that religion may spred over our land and nation and that prayers may be constantly ascending to god for the Southern states.”
Henderson wrote over 200 letters to Maria. If Inman had heard even a sample of that talk, he would have encountered a Civil War story both similar to and very different from his own, an ecstatic litany of praise amidst the loss of life, love, and innocence.
IMAGE CAPTIONS
1. Typical Confederate encampment, from Library of Congress.
2. Joseph Becker’s illustration of the Battle of Weldon Railroad, in which James Henderson was fatally wounded, was published in Frank Leslie's Illustrated weekly newspaper.
