Chapter 5: George Washington, Town Destroyer

Supplement to Endnotes

Endnote 1) About his furloughs: Cole obtained several furloughs for home by citing familial needs or health problems. In his compiled service record, the furlough in question was recorded as a sick leave.

Endnote 2) Sometimes an author has to cut out some of her favorite material. I decided to remove a chapter about Sullivan’s Raid from the book. Writing this chapter helped me sense how the farmlands that were a natural, everyday part of George Cole's youth, resonated with recent historical drama, revolutionary stories and the tragic conflicts between Iroquois Indians and the whites who yearned for those lands. I hope you will read it, and get a glimpse of the intense lust for the soil that brought the Finger Lakes region under the control of white settlers -- and how violence and dreams of prosperity were at the core of how and why settlers built homes in the Finger Lakes region. See 5.2, here. 

Endnote 4) Please see a short piece I wrote about the rumors and signs and relics that traced back to the Seneca Indians and their destruction. See 5.4, here. 

Endnote 5) If you did not read the essay from the previous footnote, see more on violence and relics in 5.4, here.

Endnote 9) Though largely eclipsed in northern papers, Potter's Raid was the war’s most daring and significant expedition in eastern North Carolina. As a reporter put it, the Raiders “raised the devil generally.” A Tarhill man would later describe the raid as “wholy inexcusable, cowardly and infamous in the extreme.”

    Yet the raid was doomed to get lost in reports about and debates over what Americans had endured the previous two weeks. Lee had been defeated at Gettysburg. Grant had triumphed at Vicksburg. There was the failed assault on Fort Wagner where black soldiers performed heroically and met death. And draft riots had broken out in New York City and in cities across the North. Even in a Confederate newspaper from Charlotte, North Carolina, the raid did not make the front page. In Charlotte’s weekly paper, the raids were discussed in some detail on the second page, but only after and besides discussions about England’s possible recognition of the Confederacy; the shocking casualties of Tarhill soldiers at Gettysburg, the New York Riots, the urgent need for more Rebel soldiers, and the perils of defeat and the loss of manhood should Confederates not answer to the Union’s recent victories: “Are we ready to see our mothers cooking for Yankee mistresses, our wives washing the dirty linen of Yankee officers…?”

    A week after it happened, the raid made a modest appearance on the crowded front page of the New York Times, only to sink again beneath a sea of more important news. Perhaps this was a foregone conclusion; since early summer most Union papers had pulled their correspondents out of North Carolina to follow action deemed to be more vital to the war’s outcome. In the popular northern view of the war, what transpired in the Tar River Valley was a mere footnote. See: Walter Clark, Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina, in the Great War, 1861–’65, 5 vols. (Raleigh, NC: E. M. Uzzell, 1901), Vol. III, p.174. See newspaper clipping: “OUR ARMY CORRESPONDENCE. From the Third Cavalry. Cavalry Post, Newbern, July 24, 1863, https://museum.dmna.ny.gov/unit-history/cavalry/3rd-cavalry-regiment/civil-war-newspaper-clippings. Accessed 12/29/2022; Western Democrat, July 28, 1863; David A. Norris, “‘The Yankees Have Been Here!’: The Story of Brig. Gen. Edward E. Potter’s Raid on Greenville, Tarboro, and Rocky Mount, July 19–23, 1863,” North Carolina Historical Review 73, no. 1 (1996), p.4; David A. Norris, Potter’s Raid, pp. i-ii.

Endnote 16) Southern reports claimed that black soldiers had helped take these clothes from “the helpless, unprotected women at the plantations….” Of course, white soldiers pilfered women’s clothes as well. Along with lifting jewels and liquor, Cole’s comrades ran off with dresses and children’s attire, not simply to heap suffering on white families, but with conflicted humanitarian motives: to clothe “contrabands” behind Union lines. As any white soldier who had spent time around contraband camps knew, black female refugees and their children sorely needed raiment. Yet, nobody on the expedition knew this better than the black scouts and soldiers.

    Harper’s Weekly reported in the first weeks of 1862, that while women only made up around a third of the fifteen hundred contrabands at Fort Monroe, the government only partly supplied “the men whom it employs with coat, trowsers, shoes and hat; but furnishes none for women and children, and no underclothing for any.” The army supplied much of the clothing for male refugees by handing down the discarded, threadbare uniforms of white soldiers. One report of conditions in the refugee camps pointed out that “clothing is their most pressing need, especially for women and children, who cannot wear the cast-off garments of soldiers.”

    From experience, white Union soldiers associated female refugees with poorly clothed bodies and half-naked children. From experience, they imagined incoming refugee men with shovels and rifles in their arms. The reality of conditions of slave families in the camps shaped the treatment of potential refugees during raids. Because those bodies that could heave and lug the most weight were deemed most worthy of freedom and stood the best chance of keeping close on the heels of escaping troops, female refugees -- and their young children or elderly -- were sacrificed on the altar of war and freedom.

    When a Yankee described hundreds of the refugees trailing behind Union soldiers into New Bern, he said they would “soon join the negro organizations.” And when they did, he pledged a “terrible retribution to be meted out by them” to their masters. The reporter either saw past the female refugees in the crowd or was simply reporting what he saw -- a column primarily made up of muscular freedmen who, he hoped, were itching to wear a uniform. Another reporter also suggested it was mostly men, that is, future black soldiers. He crassly described the “poor creatures” as “grotesxue [sic] and amusing.” Mounted on animals with protruding bones, the “wandering children” appeared to be happy and when asked where they came from, responded with: “Running 'way from de Rebs" and “gwine to fight 'dem now."

See: Walter Clark, Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina, in the Great War, 1861–’65, 5 vols. (Raleigh, NC: E. M. Uzzell, 1901), Volume III, p. 175; “The Lounger: For the Contraband," Harper's Weekly, Jan. 11, 1862; Report quoted in: Jim Downs, “The Other Side of Freedom: Destitution, Disease, and Dependency among Freedwomen and their Children during and After the Civil War," in Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War, eds. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 78-103; Cavalry Post, Newbern, July 24, 1863 and Utica Morning Herald, 7/23/1863 on Third Cavalry, found at the New York State Military Museum, Clippings: https://museum.dmna.ny.gov/unit-history/cavalry/3rd-cavalry-regiment/civil-war-newspaper-clippings. Accessed 12/29/2022.

    Virginia slaves were much more willing to run with families to Union lines than they were inclined to take up arms for the Union. See: Ervin L. Jordan, Black Confederates and Afro Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), pp. 265-270; for more on impressing blacks, see: Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 68-73.

Endnote 21) George Cole reported that the Scuffleton bridge was the “Scuppernong Bridge,” likely a name he confused with the Scuppernong River which was well outside the scope of the raid. The widespread destruction, of town after town, had begun to blend into confusion. Cole’s comrade, Major Ferris Jacobs, called Scuffleton, “Scupperton,” which appears to be a combining of Scuffleton and Scuppernong. The names of rivers and roads must have morphed through official and camp conversations, as soldiers tried to give names to a strange land. “Scupperton” also appeared in a northern newspaper. The conflicting names reveal the confusion and blending of memories that happened during the war itself, and that were hardened into official stories through the news.

Endnote 31) A northern correspondent, who appears to have been referring to the same escape, reported that “at one time it seemed as if our men would be entirely cut off, but they were saved by colored guides” who conducted the cavalrymen to a safe path. A Yankee lieutenant later recalled that a “colored boy” had first pointed Union troops to the spot to ford the creek. This “boy” may well have been a full-grown man, and possibly one of many black guides who were rendered nearly invisible in official army records. The same lieutenant remembered that the ford showed signs of not having been used for years. New York Times, August 5, 1863; David A. Norris, Potter’s Raid: The Union Cavalry’s Boldest Expedition in Eastern North Carolina (Wilmington, NC: Dream Tree Books, 2007), pp. 121-122, 141.

Endnote 33) A Confederate soldier recalled that he followed tightly on the heels of the raiders for “some miles after crossing the creek and finally commenced to press them, when perhaps a wagon load of meat and negroes would be dropped.” One paper from Wilmington, North Carolina published a scathing report of the raid, actually suggesting that Rebel forces, due to incompetence and greed, allowed the Union forces to just barely escape, thereby ensuring that loads of booty would be dumped in their paths. The paper reported that when civilians showed up to recover the jettisoned items, the Rebel soldiers made them wait their turn: “No wonder that raids are successful, and therefore popular among the Yankees, if the history of their escape from Tarboro be a specimen of how things are managed in that section.” See: Wilmington Journal, August 27, 1863; Also see: Clark, Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina, Volume 4, pp. 80-81.

Endnote 38) For a short essay on the crucial role played by black guides and spies in the war, see 5.38, here.

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