Chapter 9: No Return 

Supplement to Endnotes

 

Endnote 1) George Cole's compiled service record, combined with Mary’s pension application, paint a picture of a wife and wounded husband coming and going for much of the war. I’ve been able to imperfectly piece together some of their movement during the war. After his horse injury, she came to him in the fall of 1862 and stayed until late winter. Then, in March 1863, he followed her back home by obtaining a leave of absence for recruiting more men into his company. He returned home again in April and was there in May. Around early July, he returned to North Carolina in time for the grand, destructive raids launched on southerners’ property. Soon after, he applied for another leave of absence for health reasons. He left and returned in late September (only to be greeted with a court martial from Ben Butler). See: Letter to New Berne, N. Carolina Aug 18th, 1863; Letter from “Head Quarters Dept. of Virginia & North Carolina, Aug. 29th, 1863; Especially see the vital, if conflicting testimonies in: Court Martial of Major George W. Cole. Record Group 153, NN 916. NARA, Washington DC; Compiled Service Record of George W. Cole.

 

Endnote 2) Mary recalled later that she had stayed until May. But the private letters make it fairly clear that she left some time in mid to late April. See: typed copy of affidavit by Mary B. Cole, March 12, 1884, Cole’s Pension File; Remarkable Trials, p. 240: It is possible that Mary attempted suicide during her final visit a year later, near the end of the war.

 

Endnote 3) President Jefferson Davis had proclaimed that captured officers from black units would be handed over to state governments and tried as insurrectionists. The threat upon white officers and black soldiers also led to the cessation of prisoner exchanges, which created for both sides an epidemic of starvation and disease in the various prisons from New York to Georgia. See: General E.A. Hitchcock to Secretary of War, November 28, 1863, in OR, Series 2, Volume 6, pp.595-600. It is unclear how many white officers were killed instead of taken prisoner, as one method used by rebels was to kill as they cowered or lay injured on the battlefield, thereby obviating handing them over to state governments. See: Hollandsworth Jr., James G., “The Execution of White Officers from Black Units by Confederate Forces during the Civil War" in Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association Vol. 35, No. 4 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 475-489.

 

Endnote 7) In his memoirs, Dollard suggests -- but does not give names -- that it was Company C (Fox’s company) that ruined one of Dollard’s charges after the officers lost control of their troopers, turning an organized charge into murderous mayhem. There is no direct record of it between Dollard and Fox, but clearly, many lower officers vied for their Colonel’s favor. See: Dollard, Recollections, pp. 101-04.

 

Endnote 20) On the threat to kill Fox: Sergeant Brown remembered Edwards saying his threat a little before, while Fox attempted to tie Edwards. Other testimonies, though, suggest that it happened right before the killing; it makes more sense that Edwards would say such a thing while Fox was taking aim at him. Regardless, this was not an uncommon threat that relatively powerless enlisted men would make. No doubt this worried unpopular officers who entered battle with soldiers behind them who nursed old grievances.  While it was not highly unusual for angry men to make such threats in the heat of dispute, it is impossible to know how often this happened during the chaos of battle. There were many cases of “friendly fire” during the war; and a significant number of incidents of soldiers killing fellow soldiers. Hundreds of murders of civilians and fellow soldiers are on record within the Union army alone. One must conclude that the two categories of “friendly fire” and homicide overlapped to some small degree and that soldiers realized the dark possibilities. Battlefield vengeance promised to be masked by chaotic struggle and fraternal silence. When one Union general was killed by his own man (it was claimed to be an accident), the orderlies kept the cause of death a secret for twenty-one years. See: Webb B. Garrison, Friendly Fire in the Civil War: More than 100 True Stories of Comrade Killing Comrade (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1999), pp. 91-2. Also see: Thomas P. Lowry, Tarnished Eagles: The Courts-Martial of Fifty Union Colonels and Lieutenant Colonels (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 1997), p. 226.

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Endnote 22) Swarthout also testified that “as they began to halloo, several of the guard[s] from the Post came down -- about four rods off. They had carbines in their hands. Some of the men made expressions that they would shoot Lieut. Fox.” This, though, was after Fox had left Edwards lying in a patch of bloody weeds.

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Endnote 24) When Fox ultimately insisted on cinching the ropes himself, he brought all those involved—Black and white—into the tragically worded order. Butler perceived this. The major general copied George’s controversial order down in his letter to the War Department, pointing out how Fox had clearly been “in direct violation” of the first part of the order that forbade officers from abusing and tying up the soldiers. “Fox was disobeying the order of the colonel,” Butler reasoned, and because of this, Edwards had every justification to resist. The order had spawned the warped logic that Fox could not bind a man’s ankles but could execute him. “This was legally and technically murder,” Butler continued. But because of the blurred meaning of the order, “it is doubtful whether the act was not done under a mistaken sense of duty.” The Bureau of Military Justice agreed. Butler’s report, and 10/3/1864 response by Bureau in Court Martial of Edwin R. Fox, NN2550, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.​​

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Endnote 27) For more on looking at a “little book", see 9.27, here. 

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Endnote 28) Union officers in white units frequently exploited the vague and seemingly boundless powers of wartime authority -- from tying up privates, to using thumb screws, to (although quite rare) killing an insubordinate soldier to set an example. But, physical abuse within the black units was too close to the memories of slavery. As a result, certain forms of violence within the Colored Troops, had the explosive possibilities of a powder keg. Some black soldiers could not brook acts of white on black violence that smacked of the very brutalities of slavery they had risked their lives to end. See, for example: Berlin, Reidy and Rowland, The Black Military Experience, pp. 23-4.​