Meanwhile, in Palmer’s camp, the sound of “Boots and Saddles” broke the early morning stillness of April 1, 1865. Colonel Betts began day twelve of the raid by ordering his Pennsylvanians to once again test Roaring River. This time the raging stream proved fordable. Pickets were called in – one, Frederic Antes, was relieved at about 9:00 a.m. – and the eastward procession began anew. The day was pleasant and warm; the sky above was clear; and the countryside made a favorable impression. Betts described it as “a very woody country, with few houses,” and “a very barren country with but few inhabitants.” Weand was particularly taken by the terrain. “On April 1st we marched through an immense pine forest. It was the finest piece of timber land I ever saw.”
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By 4:00 p.m., the Federals had put about ten miles of empty countryside behind them, and the quiet streets and modest buildings of Elkin were at hand. The town impressed one horseman as a “small but thriving” community that fortunately for them was not thriving with Confederate defenders. On Big Elkin Creek, a tributary of the Yadkin that flowed through town, sat the only structure of military value: the Elkin Manufacturing Company, a small cotton mill that had been in business for almost twenty years. Owned by the Gwyn family, the concern employed about sixty people, mostly young single women who boarded with local residents. The mill had manufactured Confederate uniforms for most of the war, so it was conceivably a legitimate target.

Forty-year-old Richard Ransome Gwyn managed the mill. A frail man who had not fought in the war, Gwyn tried to protect his operation. According to tradition, he met the Federals at the mouth of Big Elkin Creek and offered them the hospitality of his home. He also offered to secure food for his guests. Palmer accepted and established his headquarters in Gwyn’s home, which sat on a hill near the factory. The Pennsylvanian was apparently pleased by this gesture, and also by the fact that Gwyn was a fellow Mason. To this day, some say that Palmer placed a guard around the cotton mill to prevent its destruction.

The men also enjoyed their visit to Big Elkin Creek – particularly their opportunity to fraternize with the factory’s female employees, who welcomed the visitors with “quite a reception.” Flirting became the main pastime at the mill. Meanwhile, the men found ample supplies inside the factory, the local general store, and a nearby grist mill. Quartermasters lost no time in seizing and distributing bacon, flour, butter, honey, lard, molasses, chestnuts, and tobacco. It was a case of perfect timing, because rations had not been issued in a week. The only problem was finding the time to prepare the food. A Pennsylvanian wrote, “We miss our ‘hard-tack’ very much, now that it is all gone. In place of it flour and cornmeal are issued, which usually is mixed with water and fried, but if we stop long enough the colored women bake it for us, and how good it tastes!”

Palmer recognized that the haul at the mill would not satiate his ravenous brigade, so he sought other food sources. He found a couple of other mills in the area and put them to work, and soon had three mills grinding meal. His troopers also added about five hundred bales of cotton to the list of captures.

Thanks to these foraging successes, the people of Elkin suffered comparatively less than their neighbors in Wilkes and Watauga. Old Man Dickie Gwyn, Richard’s father, was one of the few who made an unwilling contribution to the cause. Federal troopers took all the corn, fodder, and straw from his home, Cedar Point, which sat on a hill west of Big Elkin Creek. The raiders did not molest Gwyn’s bacon or his horses, and his cattle escaped as well. Thus satisfied, the Federals camped for the night in and around Elkin.

Mallaby’s signal corps unit, still divided by the river, did its job and kept communications open. The signalers south of the Yadkin left the Wilkesboro area at 7:30 a.m. and reached Jonesville around noon. Meanwhile, across the river, the flagmen said goodbye to their lady friends, but only after enjoying a good breakfast and picking up horses to replace the ones they had left on the other side of the river. These cavalrymen also followed the Yadkin River eastward, crossed Roaring River at a deep ford, and finally caught up with the 10th Michigan. By 1:00 p.m., the two detachments were able to raise their flags again and start sending messages. When suppertime rolled around, Frankenberry was able to take a break. Camping beside Palmer’s headquarters near Elkin Factory, the Pennsylvanian tore into a supper of fried meat and a large biscuit. As he ate, Frankenberry listened to the mill grinding away and admired the hundreds of bales of cotton stacked nearby.


​For more, see Chris J. Hartley, Stoneman's Raid, 1865.

Excerpt from Stoneman's Raid, 1865, (c) Chris J. Hartley

George Stoneman remained stymied by the Yadkin River. Indeed, of all the geographic obstacles the Cavalry Division of the District of East Tennessee would face on this raid, the Yadkin River posed the greatest challenge. This was not the first army that the river had frustrated; eighty-four years before, during the Revolution, Cornwallis’s British army had struggled across it while en route to Guilford Court House. Today, March 31, Stoneman’s planned move into Virginia remained frustratingly impossible, but the return of good weather promised to make the Yadkin passable again. “The rain had ceased and the afternoon was bright, having the appearance of Spring,” recalled a 13th Tennessee man. This fine day, Buzby added, meant that “everybody was in better humor. The ‘wounded,’ after a good night’s sleep, awoke quite refreshed,” he recalled. The Pennsylvania trooper could not resist sharing the experiences of the previous day. Hopping on to Camelback, Buzby somehow made it across the river and described the review to Colonel Palmer. “Palmer rarely indulged in a good laugh, but did this time,” Buzby recalled.

After a leisurely breakfast, Mallaby’s signallers established communications between the separated columns. Frank Frankenberry and two comrades paddled across the river in a dugout and set up a signal station on the porch of a house overlooking the river. By mid-afternoon, Palmer was ready to report to his superiors. “No enemy to be seen this [side] of the river,” he signaled. With his way clear, Palmer suggested that he move the First Brigade past Roaring River to Hickerson’s Plantation, about six miles from Elkin. From south of the river, Stoneman and Gillem signaled back and affirmed Palmer’s plan, and pointed the Second and Third Brigades eastward as well. Sliding the division in that direction would position it for a quick northward march. Stoneman also signaled that the two brigades on the south bank would march on Jonesville. They expected to capture the town on April 1, while Palmer was to take Elkin, opposite Jonesville. There he was to camp and secure forage.

With that the march resumed, at an easy pace. Since the rainy, muddy days had spread out the Second and Third Brigades, the leisurely march allowed the column to close up. They also scooped up the area’s abundant forage; thus, despite the obstinate river, Stoneman’s Yadkin Valley detour had been a success. The troopers even took time for other duties – specifically, an inspection. The division’s inspector general inspected the arms of the 11th Michigan to ensure readiness for anything that might come their way. The early halt also gave the men time to ponder their leaders’ strategy. Like Beauregard, Johnston, and Stephen D. Lee, Stoneman’s men assumed they would strike Salisbury, which was now within reach. Instead, Stoneman only sent a few detachments toward different points on the North Carolina Railroad to create confusion.

One such group, which included three companies of the 11th Kentucky Cavalry, rode into southern Yadkin and northern Iredell Counties to burn the factories located along Hunting Creek. This was the industrial center of the region: several cotton factories, including the Eagle Mills, Buck Shoals and Troy facilities, went up in smoke, along with eight hundred bales of cotton and one thousand bushels of wheat at Eagle Mills alone. It was a lightning attack, because the machines at Buck Shoals were still running when the match was applied. The troopers did pause long enough to share cloth with the workers before lighting the fire.

Only Wilfred Turner’s Turnersburg cotton mill escaped, even though the Kentuckians may have ridden within a half mile of the mill. The reason for its escape is uncertain. According to one account, Turner asked Col. S.A. Sharpe, commander of Iredell’s Home Guard, for help. Sharpe posted his men on a hill along Rocky Creek. The home guardsmen built breastworks and stacked up cotton bales for protection, and this position may have dissuaded the Federals from making an attack. Another explanation had it that a local took a group of slave children to the raiders. “See these children?” he reportedly said. “If you burn that mill, you will the take bread out of their mouth.” Yet another source claims that Masonic ties of the defenders and the attackers saved the Turnersburg mill.

Thursday, March 30, 1865, dawned with the cavalry division camped around the small town of Wilkesboro. The torrential spring rain continued, soaking everything. Water trickled inside Colonel Trowbridge’s rubber cloth coat and awoke him, so he began making breakfast. This did not ease his misery. “If you would have a picture of some of the minor discomforts of a cavalry raid,” Trowbridge wrote, “imagine … sitting on a log in the woods, near a sputtering fire, with a tin plate on [your] knees, a tin cup of coffee … on a stump …, making a breakfast of fried bacon and corn pone, while the breakfast was fast being cooled and the coffee rapidly diluted by the incessant rain.” Fortunately, an officer appeared and rescued him. “Why, Colonel, what are you doing here? They have a good warm breakfast for you down at that farm house. There are about thirty of the fellows there and they are keeping a place for you,” the man said. The grateful Trowbridge wondered if the man was an angel.
​
After breakfast, the 10th Michigan stayed put on the north side of the Yadkin. Besides staying dry, Trowbridge’s main objective for the day was to collect the men who were still missing from the previous night. Lt. Col. Charles M. Betts’ 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry exerted only slightly more effort. Despite the storm, the troopers marched at about 8:00 a.m. “Raining and roads very heavy,” read Company A’s morning report. Three or four miles down the road they approached the Reddies, a tributary of the Yadkin. Finding a very deep ford, the troopers waded across. Betts ordered his men to camp on the other side, still north of the Yadkin at a point roughly opposite Wilkesboro.

Stoneman’s objective that Thursday was to reunite his part of the division with the 15th Pennsylvania and 10th Michigan north of the Yadkin. Once joined, the division could resume its journey toward Christiansburg. Col. William J. Palmer took the lead and ordered his brigade’s last regiment, the 12th Ohio Cavalry, across the river to join the other two regiments. Palmer marched with the 12th as it headed for the nearest ford. Trooper Howard Buzby, astride Camelback, followed Palmer. Buzby had campaigned with Palmer often and knew him well. When deep in thought, Palmer would press one or both heels in toward his horse’s flanks, as if he were trying to squeeze out an idea or a plan, yet without touching the horse. As the column passed through Wilkesboro – Buzby called it “quite a village” – he saw Palmer doing just that, with both heels; something apparently disturbed his boss. Soon he understood. The Yadkin River, Buzby said, was “running wild,” and was fast becoming a dangerous obstacle. As the Ohioans braved the river, Palmer ordered Buzby to stay on the south bank and guide the other two brigades to the ford.

Buzby watched the Ohioans struggle across. It was still early; the column stretched back into Wilkesboro. The rain showed no signs of letting up. Pvt. Joseph Banks, who described the storm as “powerful,” noted with alarm that the river was rising fast. Soon the crossing became a ford in name only, forcing some men to swim their horses. That was no easy task. “Almost any horse can swim, but you must let him have his head, ease up off the saddle and swim a little yourself,” wrote Buzby. “Some never reached the other side…. It was a fearful sight.” A few men may have drowned in the attempt, but the 12th made it across. Once on the north bank, the exhausted Ohioans bivouacked and searched for forage.

For more, see Chris J. Hartley, Stoneman's Raid, 1865.

Excerpt from Stoneman's Raid, 1865, (c) Chris J. Hartley

​It was wet and nearing dusk when the Ohioans approached the village. Evening came early because of the dark rain clouds overhead; the heavy precipitation that characterized March 1865 throughout the South had found the raiders again. Despite the weather, some of the local young men, fearing conscription, had spent the day plowing "vigorously" in the fields. In town, a new conscription officer and some thirty-six Confederate soldiers went about their business. Forty-year-old Calvin J. Cowles, a local herb dealer, had just finished writing a letter when the Federals "came dashing into town and turned everything upside down. . . . They came in with a yell and ran completely through the place frightening a small body (36) of Confederates out of their wits and out of the place. In about half an hour they entered my yard . . . and they met me pistol in hand pointing threateningly at my breast commanding me to open my store which I did as quickly as possible. They 'prowled' the store but did not take my money – burned the Gray House and all my fence convenient to the road – took half my corn and all my fodder – took 4 mules and Nat and the mare – took Nels and Jim off with them. . . . The boys took the … Gilbert saddle and rode off right before our eyes not even saying 'goodbye.'"

Wilkesboro was the home of Lt. Col. J.A. Hampton’s 68th Battalion of Home Guards. Hampton and his men never had a chance; according to Cowles, the Ohioans rushed in "like an avalanche." Local tradition suggests that a skirmish broke out on Barracks Hill between the 12th Ohio and the home guard. If it did, the fight did not amount to much. One cavalryman, Maj. E.C. Moderwell, recalled only that the Federals rounded up a few prisoners and some commissary stores in Wilkesboro. Another Ohio trooper recorded that the town had been evacuated when the troopers arrived. Only Gillem, who was not present, dramatized the event when he reported that the cavalry “drove the enemy” from town. As darkness fell on March 29, the 12th Ohio Cavalry firmly held Wilkesboro. The regiment would remain in Wilkesboro for the night.

A few miles away, the 15th Pennsylvania continued its now downhill trek to Wilkesboro, following the 12th Ohio. As the day lengthened the weather worsened, extinguishing whatever light remained. Streams, hills and dales, and both Lewis Fork and the Yadkin River barred the way. Finally, about 10:00 p.m., the regiment halted at a plantation about four miles from Wilkesboro. In the heavy rain, they camped in a freshly plowed field. But if the weather was miserable, the fine plantation offered a cornucopia. Even the unit’s worn-out horses got their first feed of grain since crossing the state line. Their hosts, the Gray family, welcomed the raiders pleasantly, and expressed their hope for peace. The night’s work was not done for Howard E. Buzby, however. Buzby, a member of Colonel Palmer’s escort, rode off to find Stoneman. Buzby applied his Texas spurs to his horse, Camelback, and pitched into the blackness. When he found the commanding general, he reported, “[Colonel] Palmer sends his compliments, etc.” Stoneman offered no orders, other than instructions not to get too far ahead. Buzby returned to camp, delivered this message to Palmer, and then promptly fell asleep on his blanket.

Last of all came the frustrated 10th Michigan. Trowbridge’s men marched all day to overtake their missing comrades, but only wildlife kept them company. “I do not remember that we saw, during the whole day, a single person of whom we could make a guide or from whom we could gain any information as to the country,” he wrote. As the day ended, the colonel’s dilemma worsened. “Night came on, and it was so dark we could scarcely see our horses heads,” Trowbridge complained. One of the men in the column testified to the difficulty of the rainy march. “This was the worst night march I ever experienced. The rain poured in torrents[,] dark as Egypt in a mountain region[,] the road frequently lying on the verge of awful precipices where to have gone off would have been instant death to both rider and horse,” he wrote.

For more, see Chris J. Hartley, Stoneman's Raid, 1865.

Excerpt from Stoneman's Raid, 1865, (c) Chris J. Hartley

Rumors preceded Stoneman's Federal cavalry raiders, indicating that a force of ten, fifteen, thirty, or even sixty thousand was on its way. In preparation, residents of Boone, the county seat of Watauga County, “toted” their hams to mountain pastures, set them on boulders, and covered them with moss.
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Although nestled deep in the mountains and distant from any front, Watauga County and the rest of western North Carolina had witnessed untold strife. In fact, there was a direct relationship between East Tennessee and Western North Carolina – the two areas were mirrors of each other. When the war began, many residents of Western North Carolina supported the Confederate cause. About twenty thousand men from the region flocked to the Confederate banner. But as in East Tennessee, mounting hardships bred Unionism. Casualties at the front, depredations of foragers from both sides, the Conscription Act, inflation, and the Confederate government’s tax-in-kind policy – which required farmers to turn over one-tenth of their crops to the government – left many mountain residents hungry and destitute. Wives begged their soldier husbands to come home. As dissent grew, Western North Carolina became the dominion of guerillas, deserters, and raiders. This was an ugly internal war, and both sides had blood on their hands. As a result, Unionism peaked around the time George Stoneman arrived.

For the balance of the war, Watauga County had been better prepared than most to deal with such internecine conflict. The local home guard, Maj. Harvey Bingham’s 11th Battalion, was uniquely able. Bingham, a Caldwell County native in his twenties, was a twice-wounded, discharged veteran of the 37th North Carolina Infantry Regiment. Invited to take command of the local home guard, Bingham wisely recruited other discharged veterans wherever possible to lend backbone to his force. He ultimately raised two home guard companies from Watauga and neighboring Ashe County, and stationed them at Camp Mast. Although an unimpressive array of Mexican War surplus tents, shacks, and works, Camp Mast became one of the Confederacy’s few secure positions north of Asheville. Bingham kept one company on alert constantly, while the men of the second company stood down and went home. This system proved effective, and Bingham made his presence felt in battling Keith Blalock and other Unionists. In February 1865, however, the tide turned. About one hundred Unionists surrounded, hoodwinked, and captured Camp Mast, ejecting a home guard company from the war and sending the local force into disarray.

The Boone home guard meeting on March 28 was an effort to regroup in the wake of the Camp Mast debacle. This was not just a gathering of green teenagers and old men beating their chests. Many of those present were furloughed, paroled or recuperating Confederate soldiers, home from the front. Organizationally, the men wisely emphasized experience, and elected new leaders with that in mind, including Lt. Elijah J. Norris, a twenty-one-year-old veteran of the 18th Tennessee Infantry who bore scars from five wounds. The men agreed that the reconstituted company’s task was to keep order and prevent depredations. The first opportunity for the unit – officially Company B of the 11th Battalion North Carolina Home Guards – came all too quickly.

Boone was a town of several log cabins, a handful of larger homes, a courthouse, an inn, and a general store, surrounded by laurel tree-covered hills and high mountains. It was about 11:00 a.m. on March 28 when Keogh and his men rode into town. At that moment, about one hundred home guardsmen were drilling at the muster grounds near the courthouse. More men watched from the upper story of the home of Jordan Councill, another home guard captain.[v] Suddenly, gunfire erupted. According to one account, it started when someone accidentally fired their weapon. However, it is more likely that the surprising sight of blue-clad cavalry in town sparked a deliberate reaction. Some of the home guardsmen had been off duty when Camp Mast surrendered. Some had escaped the surrender. Others were just Southern sympathizers, ready to serve. All were still smarting from the rough handling they had taken. They resolved not to be beaten this time – but they did not realize the power of the force headed their way.

For more, see Chris J. Hartley, Stoneman's Raid, 1865.

Excerpt from Stoneman's Raid, 1865, (c) Chris J. Hartley

On the morning of March 27, Stoneman issued orders based on the plans gruffly laid the night before. His goal: to make a rapid push across the Watauga River and into North Carolina, reuniting his division in the process. At about 8:00 a.m. on March 27, a clear, warm Monday, the First and Second Brigades left their camps. For a few miles, their route paralleled the Watauga River. Behind them, the Iron Mountains passed into the distance; ahead loomed the Stone Mountains, the last obstacle between the raiders and North Carolina. Frank Frankenberry called it a “romantic road. Mountains on each side … and a small stream by the road side.” About five miles down the road, at a crossing of the Watauga River, officers called a halt. After a three-hour pause to rest and feed their hungry horses, the march resumed. Only a few homes lined the rugged route; a lonely wood road that trailed off into the wilderness was the only intersecting road they passed. That afternoon, the Federals stopped to feed again. Stoneman, wisely taking precautions to ensure he knew what – or who – awaited, sent a company ahead on a scout.

This was the second patrol of the day. At 8:30 a.m., Sgt. William F. Colton took one hundred men from the 15th Pennsylvania’s First Battalion up the Stone Mountains to secure a key gap. The veteran sergeant endeavored to execute the orders with his usual efficiency, but en route he stopped to feed the contingent’s horses. Palmer had ordered him to do just that, but it was the wrong thing to do. By 1:15 p.m. the chore was finished and the men were ready to continue, but Stoneman appeared as the troopers were moving out. Asking what Colton’s orders were, the general probed, “Were you ordered to feed?” Colton answered that he was. “Well, sir, either you have disobeyed your orders or my orders were misconveyed to you. You can halt here and report to Colonel Palmer.” With that Stoneman abruptly rode off, apparently to find another force to complete the task. A chastened Colton later confided to his diary, “It was cutting, but what could I say?” A few minutes later, he received other orders and was unable to complete the mission. Colton could only hope for an opportunity to redeem himself.

Around noon on March 27 in Elizabethton, Miller’s Tennesseeans left town on Gillem’s orders to follow the rest of the division into North Carolina. They rode southward through Valley Forge, found Stoneman’s winding column at Doe River Cove, and fell in. They made it as far as present-day Butler before camping for the night. Once again, some Tennessee troopers scattered to visit friends and family in the vicinity, but others gave military needs a higher priority. Stoneman’s troopers fortified Fort Hill, located near Butler, and established a post to relay signals from the North Carolina mountains back to Tennessee.

At the front of the column, the 15th Pennsylvania led the way, followed by the 10th Michigan and 12th Ohio. Stoneman and Gillem marched with the Second Brigade. The road, although narrow, winding, and steep, was a good one. Some citizens showed their colors and turned out to help, building fires and standing watch at fords and tricky places in the road. A local named Henderson Smith grabbed a torch and guided the 15th Pennsylvania over the unfamiliar route. Palmer sent orders back for the cavalrymen to pitch in and build fires too. Yet despite all these precautions, nighttime marching on a mountain road was still dangerous. At one troublesome spot, an artillery caisson tumbled over an embankment and into the depths, lost forever. A few horses and mules also fell to their deaths. An ambulance followed the caisson and fell into the blackness, and three men were disabled on the treacherous roads. One of the three men was probably Henry Birdsall of the 11th Michigan. “I turned a somersault off my horse backward,” he wrote. “Hurt me considerable but I got over better than could have been expected.”

The march was both surreal and beautiful. Wrote one veteran, “Looking back as we toiled up the mountain, the scene was grand and imposing as the march of the column was shown by the trail of fire along the road. Occasionally an old pine tree would take fire and blaze up almost instantaneously, looking like a column of fire. It was an impromptu illumination, and the sight of it repaid us for the toilsome night march.” Another veteran described it even more vividly. “The fires were lighting up everything about, and the troopers looked like mounted specters, moving silently along. On the one side were the troopers, taking up nearly the whole road; on the other was the dark ravine below, with the tree tops coming up nearly on a level with the road,” he wrote. Another cavalryman wrote, “There were places on the western ascent where it was necessary for men and horses to scramble almost perpendicular cliffs, and the memory of that cold night on top of the mountain is very vivid yet.”

And so the march continued. “We kept moving along, walking and leading our horses, stealing a little rest when the column would stop,” wrote a veteran. In the darkness, the extra horseshoes the men received at Morristown clanked annoyingly against each other. Some tired of the noise and tossed the extra shoes aside. Finally, when the division’s lead elements cleared the pass at the top of the mountain, Stoneman and Gillem relented. Between midnight and 5:00 a.m., depending on the troopers’ location in the long column, the exhausted raiders finally paused. As one trooper remembered it, “I was unfortunate in having to stop where the road was narrow and badly washed in gutters,” he recalled. “I crowded up the bank to the side of the road, gathered a few crooked sticks, laid them across the gutter and lay down with my horse standing beside me. My feet extended over the path at the side of the road. I was disturbed several times by orderlies passing over my feet, but soon got used to that.” But if rest was scarce that night, progress was evident. Angelo Wiser marked the First Brigade’s headquarters at the Reese home, a mere two hundred yards from the North Carolina line.
​
The Tennessee phase had ended successfully. Confederate defenders were back on their heels. Before the raiders lay new objectives and new obstacles. The next chapter of Stoneman’s raid was about to begin.

To find out what happens next, see Chris J. Hartley, Stoneman's Raid, 1865.

Excerpt from Stoneman's Raid, 1865, (c) Chris J. Hartley

​March 26, 1865 was a Sunday. The air was chilly and the ground was white with frost, but the Union cavalrymen did not take time to either warm up or observe the Sabbath. Rations were still being distributed from the trains; Frank Frankenberry received coffee and sugar. Other men tended their horses. Already some mounts were showing the wear and tear of the journey, so two Pennsylvanians from Company K of the 15th were sent back to Knoxville with all of the unserviceable horses. The rest of the horses were fed and men drew rations, and then the streamlined division headed into the rising sun, leaving the comfort and security of Tillson’s troops and trains. Some troopers left as early as 4 a.m., and the entire column lurched into motion over the next several hours. Parts of the 11th Michigan were among the last to leave, finally putting hoof to road around 10:00 a.m. The morning slipped away uneventfully as the Federals rode through Leesburg, crossed a high ridge, and approached Jonesboro around midday. Now undefended, Jonesboro, one of the state’s oldest towns, was as uninviting as most East Tennessee hamlets. They “look like Northern villages that have set out to travel and got stuck in the mud,” one traveler thought. “Has been a pretty town, but shows the effect of war,” added a raider. Soon Jonesboro was behind them, and the afternoon passed away. Bored, the men had nothing to do but ride, talk, and enjoy the scenery. Pennsylvanian Septimus Knight was the exception; he drew the extra duty of shepherding the growing mass of blacks – mostly escaped slaves – now following the column. The hobbled condition of Knight’s horse, which had been kicked the night before, made his job even harder.

Thirty miles of ever-harsher terrain slipped away. Pennsylvania troopers from Company A surprised and captured four enemy soldiers, but that was the extent of the day’s excitement. Between 9:00 p.m. and midnight, they camped in a broad area extending from Buffalo Creek to Dry Cove and Doe River Cove – but near the North Carolina road. The men were worn out, but their horses still had to be fed. Gillem and Stoneman spread out the division’s campsites to make foraging easier, but it didn’t help. “As we get nearer to the mountain forage becomes more scarce, and to-day our horses went hungry,” a cavalryman lamented.

The horses didn’t go hungry from a lack of effort on the part of their riders. Each day, men searched local residences for horses, mules, food, and anything of use to sustain the march. These visits were sometimes traumatic for the locals. Not far from Doe River Cove lived a typical East Tennessee family that knew only too well the hard hand of war. One son lay in a cold grave, killed at Spotsylvania. Two more sons had been wounded in other battles but remained in the army. Still, the night Stoneman came, no fewer than eight people were at home. The man of the house was seriously ill. His aging wife waited at his bedside. Their three daughters were also on hand to help, as were four servants. A Confederate soldier on furlough rounded out the home’s occupants.

Rumor had preceded the raiders. “’Stoneman! Stoneman!’ was the dread name on every lip,” one of the daughters, Matt, remembered years later. The raiders appeared at midnight, cloaked in an eerie, rainy darkness. “A heavy wind moaned through the tree tops and drove an unintermitting patter of rain against the windows – a typical March night, an ideal opportunity for mischief,” remembered Matt. Suddenly, heavy thumps of booted feet and deep voices came from the front porch. Someone knocked loudly on the door. Hearts pounding, the daughters jumped to their feet and whispered urgently to each other. Julia, the eldest, with a young servant girl at her side, finally went to the door, trembling as she walked. “Who’s there?” she called weakly.

After a long, ominous silence a muffled answer came from the other side of the door. “Cavalrymen from Stoneman’s army.”

“What – what do you want?” Julia asked.

“Supper and – O, just anything,” replied several voices. The girls knew that meant anything they could lay their hands on – food, loot, or worse.

The door cracked open. A tiny beam of candlelight streamed in, revealing menacing armed shadows on the porch. Helpless, Julia opened the door wide, and the soldiers came in. Matt watched from a corner. “They tramped ponderously in, the shadows, uniformed in dark Northern blue, dripping with rain and clanking their spurs and scabbards, two dozen or more – tall, powerful men, principally well drilled and toughened by countless sleepless nights in the saddle,” she wrote, with understandable exaggeration. A few men walked toward the closed door of her father’s room, which was also the refuge of their Confederate friend. Quickly, tears welling in her eyes, Matt stepped in front of the door, and appealed to the officer in charge. “O, please don’t let them enter this room! It is my father’s room, and he is terribly sick, and the sight of all – all these blue uniforms, I – I fear, would kill him. Surely there is nothing in there you want. O, anything else – but to kill my father! Please keep them back.”

To find out what happens next, see Chris J. Hartley, Stoneman's Raid, 1865.

Excerpt from Stoneman's Raid, 1865, (c) Chris J. Hartley

To the accompaniment of music from the bands, Saturday, March 25, brought another early start. The First and Second Brigades broke camp around 7:00 a.m. and resumed the procession to Jonesboro. The 15th Pennsylvania, a regiment that knew the area well, took the lead. The journey turned out to be as boring as usual, but at least the scenery was pleasant. A later visitor to the region remembered East Tennessee this way: “It is a country of pleasant hills, bounded and broken into mountains.… A few first-class farmers have comfortable painted or brick houses, while scattered everywhere over the country are poverty-stricken, weather-blackened little framed dwellings and log huts,” he wrote. The sharp eyes of cartographer Angelo Wiser did not fail to note the surrounding woods either.

“Frank” Frankenberry enjoyed this land of plenty. He spent the day in charge of the pack train and marched between brigades, just behind Reagan’s battery. Stopping by the roadside, Frankenberry bought a chicken for twenty-five cents. That night, in bivouac on a rebel farm, the signalman made chicken soup for supper. He washed it down with a glass of cold milk, and then grabbed a bar of soap to wash away his own dirt.

The day was eventful in other ways. That afternoon, as the Federals neared Babb’s Mill, about sixty Confederates from Vaughn’s Brigade materialized. The Federals attacked immediately, and Weand later remembered the result with satisfaction. “Company E of our regiment had the advance, and charged with such spirit that they [the enemy] were driven off, leaving four prisoners in our hands,” he wrote. Other witnesses claimed the capture of as many as nine “Johnnies” in the skirmish. Whatever the actual total, the Federals suffered little. Only one Union horse went down, pitching its rider headlong into a ditch. Later, Company F also encountered the enemy while scouting. The Federals pursued but the four enemy troopers escaped.

For more, see Chris J. Hartley, Stoneman's Raid, 1865.

(c) Chris J. Hartley

The pleasant evening gave way to an equally pleasant March 24. Long before the bugles sounded, “Frank” Frankenberry rose from his bedroll, which was close by his horse. He found some water, made some coffee, and then packed up. The rest of the raiders did likewise and moved out at about 7:00 a.m. Stoneman and Gillem again set a casual tempo, probably to help the men adjust to campaigning. After all, many had not been in the field since 1864. A thirteen-man detachment of the 15th Pennsylvania remained in Morristown to wait for a following party and escort them to the regiment. George W. Madden, a member of the 10th Michigan, also stayed behind. Stricken with a worsening illness, Madden was to be transported back to Knoxville for treatment.

The day brought the raid’s first disturbing news: an enemy force was reported around Jonesboro. Although still more than thirty miles away, Jonesboro sat squarely on the raiders’ projected route. To deal with this possible threat, Stoneman resumed his old habits and divided his command. Once the column passed through Russellville and reached the old Bull’s Gap battlefield, Stoneman sent Colonel Miller’s all-Tennessee Third Brigade – accompanied by a telegraph operator to help with communications – riding rapidly toward Bristol. While Gillem’s division continued to Jonesboro and Tillson followed the main road to Greeneville, Miller’s goal was to march to the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad between Jonesboro and Carter’s Station. If Miller could reach that point, he would be squarely behind the enemy. It would also confuse Confederate defenders about Stoneman’s true destination.
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In the event, it was Palmer’s First Brigade that had the campaign’s first brush with Rebel defenders. As they led the way on the Babb’s Mill Road toward Jonesboro that Friday morning, advance riders encountered a small enemy force. The Confederates scattered, but the raiders managed to collar a handful of enemy soldiers. Under close questioning, the Confederates identified themselves as members of the 61st Tennessee, a mounted infantry regiment serving in Brig. Gen. John C. Vaughn’s brigade. Routine returned in the aftermath as the journey continued through increasingly hilly terrain. At about 5:00 p.m., Palmer’s and Brown’s Brigades bivouacked several miles east of Bull’s Gap, near Lick Creek.

Across the countryside, troopers settled in for the night. Allen Frankenberry prepared supper and put up a shelter tent for the night. He then turned to his diary but had to set it aside when duty called. After stopping by Colonel Palmer’s tent to pick up a guard, the signalmen rode up a high hill to establish communications with Greeneville. Reaching the top of the hill, Frankenberry climbed a tall tree and saw the light he was looking for. Afterward the signalmen returned to camp, picking up a straggler on the way. A large supply of hay awaited the signalers and their horses.

At about 4:00 a.m. on March 23, the strains of cavalry bugles sounding reveille echoed through “the hills and vales” of East Tennessee. “Frank” Frankenberry got up, fed his horse, and had breakfast himself, and then saddled his mount. “The bands play, the bugles sound and all is lovely…. Pull out and are away,” he wrote. The raid was now begun in earnest.
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Elements of the cavalry division left Mossy Creek as early as 7:00 a.m., and the bulk of the division was on the road within the hour. Despite a swirling wind that blew all day, the day started with promise; above the skies again dawned clear and underfoot the road was good. Setting a leisurely pace, Stoneman steered the cavalry and Tilson’s infantry and artillery toward Morristown, Tennessee, where he planned to supply the division. The trip was easy and picturesque, through a rolling, agrarian landscape. “Move on over a very pretty country,” Frankenberry thought. In the distance, low hills shadowed the column, while closer at hand occasional dwellings and cultivated fields bordered the road. In between, streams obstructed the way, but they were easily forded. By early afternoon Morristown came into view. Barely one year had passed since Longstreet’s army had wintered around this key crossroads town. Its citizens remembered the hardships the Confederates had wrought, and welcomed Stoneman’s raiders warmly. “Had a cordial, hearty welcome from the loyal citizens,” wrote a raider. “These people came from all the surrounding country to see us, and while perched on their rail fences greeted us with smiles and many a ludicrous expression,” he reminisced.

Equally welcoming were the rations and forage distributed at Morristown from Tillson’s trains. Each man also received ammunition, four horseshoes, and nails. Most appreciated this bounty, but H.K. Weand presciently worried that it had “a smack of a hard campaign in it.” And not everyone was quite so lucky. In Tillson’s 4th Tennessee Infantry, Thomas F. Hutton did not get to draw rations because he was on picket duty.

Mundane activities claimed the rest of the day. The Tennessee brigade camped north of town. Elsewhere, in the bivouac of the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry, Frederic Antes took a few horses out to graze. Lieutenant Mallaby unfurled his flags and tried to establish signal communication with Federal forces to the east but failed. At least two signalmen wrote letters home, with “Frank” Frankenberry including three pictures of himself. Other horsemen, warned to be ready to march early the next morning, simply relaxed and rested or talked. A camp rumor stated that Confederate President Jefferson Davis had resigned; another, more accurate rumor indicated that the armies of Sherman and Schofield had joined in North Carolina. Among those paying social calls that night was Sgt. Colton, who had helped gather carbines and horses for the 15th Pennsylvania. Stopping by First Brigade headquarters, Colton and his friend Colonel Palmer sat by a campfire and talked about minerals.

For more, see Chris J. Hartley, Stoneman's Raid, 1865.