Chapter 7

AN ISOLATED VALLEY IN WARTIME

A BIRACIAL CONFEDERATE FORCE

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GIVEN THAT NEITHER the Cherokees nor the white farm families in the Oconaluftee Valley depended on slave labor and that North Carolina as a state was slow to secede from the Union, involvement in the Civil War by the area’s residents might be expected to have been minimal. However, both fighting-age men and the entire civilian population were dramatically affected by the conflict throughout and long after the war years. After much public debate and a state convention, North Carolina seceded from the Union on May 20, 1861, eleventh to do so among the southern states. President Abraham Lincoln’s call to raise troops against the Confederates who had attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina served as a tipping point for many who, though they did not view the slave economy as something for them to fight for individually, were offended by the idea that Lincoln would raise troops of southerners in the states that had not seceded to fight against their regional neighbors.¹

EARLY CONFEDERATE ENLISTEES

Local views of the Confederacy divided the community to some extent and are obliquely referenced in the minutes of the Lufty Baptist Church in the fall of 1861. The September minutes stated, “Fellowship not found for a peculiar cause,” a singular instance of the breakdown of community harmony in the official church record. In October, the church did not meet for “certain causes,” so presumably the situation had not improved over a month. It is intriguing to speculate where the dividing lines may have fallen in the community. One wonders if the more affluent families who were slave owners may have been more in favor of secession than those who were not. According to the 1860 census, John Mingus enslaved two individuals, and the two Enloe households in the valley enslaved a total of eight persons. Of course, the Jackson County residents who enslaved the most people were William Holland Thomas, who owned thirty-eight, and J. B. Love, who owned forty-nine, but they did not attend the Lufty church. In his study of western Carolina slave owners, historian John Inscoe presented evidence that non-slave-owning whites believed strongly in property rights, held racist views, and were unsettled by the idea of free Black people, thinking that it was better for them to be enslaved than not, even though in the mountain communities they posed little security threat because of their small numbers.² Nonetheless, the church did remain open during most of the war; pastors Richard Evans and W. H. Conner held services.³

A few Oconaluftee men volunteered for the Confederate forces before secession. Both Hamilton T. Mingus, the son of Dr. John and Polly (Enloe) Mingus, and Thomas Enloe, the grandson of Abraham and Sarah Enloe and son of Scroop and Sarah Ann Enloe, volunteered their service on April 27, 1861, traveling a few miles east to Webster, North Carolina, to join different regiments. Two of Abraham and Sarah’s sons and another grandson volunteered soon thereafter. Benjamin M. (Mattison) Enloe, age fifty-three, and his brother John’s son, Benjamin F. Enloe, age twenty-four, enrolled a couple of weeks later on May 15 at Edneyville, and William A. “Bill” Enloe, brother to Benjamin M., enlisted as a captain late in the summer on August 31. Joseph A. Collins, son of Robert and Elizabeth (Beck) Collins, enlisted on May 30 in the same company and regiment as Matt Enloe.⁴

An August letter from twenty-one-year-old Hamilton stationed in Asheville to his brother Abraham Mingus, who was back at home, suggests his enthusiasm for the cause:

Tragically, several of these volunteers exited the ranks quite early. Hamilton became ill in November and was admitted to Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. He was later transferred to Petersburg, Virginia, and died on January 11, 1862; it is not clear that he saw combat. The older Benjamin Enloe, Benjamin M., was discharged “for disability” about six months later, on June 6, dying about a year later. Thomas Enloe, a twenty-three-year-old private, was killed at the Battle of Mechanicsville, Virginia, on June 26, 1862; local historian Carl Lambert claimed that his tongue was shot off. Captain Bill Enloe engaged in battle at Cumberland Gap under Gen. Braxton Bragg in May 1862 but was “quite sick on way to command” on February 1, 1863, and resigned because of a disability on April 20 of that year.⁶

THE THOMAS LEGION

One prominent citizen of the region, Will Thomas, supported the Confederate cause from the start. By 1860, he was fifty-four years old, a successful entrepreneur, a state senator, a slave-owning farmer, and the agent of the Lufty Indians. Thomas favored secession in the North Carolina Senate, where he was serving his seventh consecutive term, as well as at the state convention, where the vote for secession was held. Thomas believed that, once the war was over, western North Carolina would become the center of the new Confederate nation and an economic hub with increased tourism and industry due to its central location. After the vote, he returned to the area and began creating infantry companies of Cherokees, which were first named the Junaluska Zouaves in honor of the late warrior hero of Horseshoe Bend. Envisioned as a home guard, these men began improvements to the Oconalufty Turnpike, because Thomas recognized that this road would be key to transporting goods and men over the mountains during the conflict. Even though the North Carolina Cherokees had no stake in the conflict, Thomas saw that they would have to participate to retain their legal, but uncertain, status in the region. Of course, the Cherokees’ agreements were with the federal government, so association with the Confederacy endangered their status and further delayed annual payments for their loss of land and other assets during the removal. At first, Thomas attempted to negotiate citizenship in the state as a condition of Cherokee service, but when the governor rejected this idea, Thomas persuaded the Cherokees to volunteer anyway, largely on the basis of their trust in him as their adviser. Also, in postwar interviews with anthropologist James Mooney, Thomas claimed that Gen. Kirby Smith hoped to enroll the eastern Cherokees for his command and sent a representative to them early in 1862 to persuade them to join. Thomas realized that if he allowed Kirby to enlist the Cherokees, they would soon be moved far from their homes and families and from his protection, so he conceived of enlisting the Cherokee companies himself as a local defense, especially guarding the mountain passes. Consequently, recruiting began in the spring of 1862.⁷ On April 9, 120 Cherokees and 12 whites enlisted at Quallatown as the North Carolina Cherokee Battalion and Thomas’s Highland Rangers, respectively. Thomas had already received orders for them to report to Knoxville; they left a few days later on April 15. Despite this immediate departure, Thomas worked continuously to keep the Cherokee and white soldiers close to home. He understood their tenuous ideological commitment to the cause, the real need for their labor at home, and their well-founded concern for the safety of their families, livestock, and homes.⁸

Just a day after the companies’ departure, the Confederate Congress passed the conscription law requiring all able-bodied men between eighteen and thirty-four to serve in the military for at least three years. No doubt, this law compelled many Oconaluftee Valley men to enlist in the Thomas Legion, the enlarged version of the early white and Cherokee companies. The conscription law was deeply resented by the mountain families who had few enslaved people to leave behind to maintain farm operations and who had already volunteered in proportionally large numbers. Resentment was further fueled by the exemption of white farmers who owned more than twenty slaves and could purchase a substitute for $300. Non-slave owners who had the money could also purchase a substitute. No doubt, conscription was an important reason that July 17, 1862, was such a big enlistment day for the legion in Quallatown. On that day at least twelve Oconaluftee Valley men enlisted, including Aseph T. Enloe (the son of Benjamin Mattison Enloe and his second wife, Mary Jaynes); brothers Sevier S. Enloe and John T. Enloe (sons of Abraham and Sarah Enloe); John Collins (the son of Robert Collins and Elizabeth Beck); Ephraim S. Conner (the son of Joel S. Conner and Katherine Mingus); Benjamin Carver (the son of Israel Carver and Mary Bradley); brothers James Holland Jr. and Osborn Bradley (sons of James Holland Bradley and Martha Grant); and brothers William, John, Stephen, and Samuel Carson Beck (all sons of Samuel and Cynthia Beck). All were placed into Company F of the Infantry Regiment of the legion, under Thomas’s command until the end of 1862.⁹ Interestingly, future principal Cherokee chief Nimrod Jarrett Smith joined Walker’s Battalion, the second regiment of the legion, but on September 1, he was transferred to Cherokee Company A, serving as first sergeant.¹⁰

By September 27, 1862, when the enlarged and combined forces of the Thomas Legion mustered at Knoxville, it had two regiments. The Infantry Regiment of eleven companies was led by Thomas, who gained the rank of colonel by election of the men, and by Lt. Col. James R. Love II, a nephew of Thomas’s wife. The second regiment, Walker’s Battalion, was composed of five infantry companies, three cavalry companies, and one artillery company, led by Lt. Col. William C. Walker. In December 1862, however, the cavalry companies were transferred out of the Thomas Legion.¹¹

Several theatrical moments followed the arrival of the original Cherokee companies into Knoxville. These Cherokee volunteers under Thomas’s command made their way to Knoxville in the spring of 1862 via Webster and Franklin, North Carolina, attracting additional recruits as they went. Enola, a chief, and Ayunini, a conjuror, are reputed to have served as sergeants of the companies, though service records do not confirm their presence.¹² From Sweetwater, Tennessee, the Cherokees took the Tennessee and Georgia Railroad into the city, where they marched in formation down Gay Street, one of the central city streets, on their route to a camp north of town. Captain James W. Terrell, a longtime friend and business associate of Thomas, recalled that they “seemed to be the object of a grand curiosity, a large crowd followed or passed on the sidewalks all the way from the depot.”¹³ The troops once again drew a crowd when a Cherokee-language service was held at the First Presbyterian Church on Sunday, led by Unaguskie, the grandson of Yonaguska, and included both a sermon and music, all conveyed in Cherokee without translation. Soon the companies moved farther out of town, to Strawberry Plains, to guard the railroad bridge over the Holston River. Throughout their encampment in the Knoxville area, the Cherokees were objects of great interest, attracting visitors to their camp to watch their ball games, put on as diversions during some uneventful days. The Cherokees also experienced several diseases as they adapted to camp life: camp fever (epidemic typhus), measles, and mumps, which resulted in several deaths.¹⁴

In September, one of the most consequential battles occurred for the Cherokees, establishing their reputation among Union troops as fearsome warriors. They were led toward Cumberland Gap to watch for federal troops who might be moving south. At Baptist Gap, the Cherokees were ambushed and responded swiftly and effectively to drive off the Union forces. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Astoogatogeh, a grandson of famed warrior Gul’kalaski, was killed during the battle, inflaming the Cherokees, who retaliated by scalping several of the wounded and dead Union soldiers. This incident embarrassed Thomas, who had worked steadily to ensure whites of the Cherokees’ “civilized nature.” Apologies were made and the scalps were returned to the surviving Union troops. Captain Terrell later claimed that the Cherokees scalped defeated Union soldiers throughout the war, but records do not exist to confirm this report. Nonetheless, much contemporary newspaper coverage of the event sealed the Cherokees’ reputation as fierce, certainly, and brutal, whether or not that characterization was deserved. In addition, they were recognized as excellent fighters and exceptionally talented trackers of deserters, criminals, and bushwhackers, which were loosely organized Union companies that terrorized and plundered mountain families and, when they met them, Confederate troops. Until the fall of 1863, for roughly a year, the Thomas Legion, including its Cherokee and white companies, camped at Strawberry Plains and guarded roads and railroad bridges from attack by small groups of Union loyalists in Tennessee who made repeated attempts to shut down the transport and communication lines in East Tennessee. However, the loyalists had fleeting support from the Union command, so the bridges that they burned were soon rebuilt and many of their leaders were brought into custody and sent to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, as prisoners of war.¹⁵

Understanding that many men from East Tennessee and western North Carolina were reluctant to pick up arms against the Union but were willing to serve as home guards and skilled craftsmen, Thomas recruited “miners and sappers” to enable these men to comply with conscription and help the war effort less directly than as soldiers. The idea was for these men to build roads and bridges and to serve as masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, and gunsmiths for the Confederacy. Unfortunately, once Alfred E. Jackson was promoted to brigadier general of the brigade that included the legion, he ordered the miners and sappers to take up arms alongside the rest of the soldiers, a decision that led to a number of early desertions among men who felt coerced to fight against their will.¹⁶

Even so, Thomas succeeded in assigning some men to detachments that worked in this capacity. It seems that one instance where the miners and sappers were at work was in building a fort to protect Alum Cave, a source of saltpeter for gunpowder. Thomas also repeatedly made a strategic argument for the detachments guarding the mountain passes. In a letter of November 22, 1862, to Governor Zebulon Vance, Thomas explained his thinking: “As long as we can hold the Country encircled by the Blue Ridge and Cumberland mountains … we have the heart of the South. The loss of this country larger than England and France is the loss of the Southern Confederacy and we sink under a despotism.”¹⁷ Service records of a number of Company F recruits indicate that they were on detached service for several consecutive months in the Smoky Mountains under Colonel Thomas’s order. As a civilian volunteer at age fifty-six, Robert Collins, the well-known guide of the North Carolina Smokies and toll keeper of the Oconalufty Turnpike, led a group of these men in work to improve the turnpike, construct Fort Harry, and build a road up to the cave. Although there is some dispute about the size and design of the fort, it was built just below the bluff; using today’s landmarks, it was positioned on the north side of Newfound Gap Road one-half mile north of the first tunnel after the Chimney Tops parking area, in the V between the Chimney Tops and Mount LeConte at 3,300 feet in elevation. Some sources have described it as a log fort of 100 feet by 100 feet, with a palisade of two rows of pointed logs on the perimeter. Aden Carver, the younger brother of Benjamin Carver, a private in Company F, was just sixteen years old at this time and too young to enlist, so he was tasked with supplying the fort with cornmeal ground at the original Mingus Mill ten miles down the North Carolina side of Oconaluftee Valley. He made regular trips to the fort on this mission.¹⁸

Living conditions in the fort were primitive. The barracks were damp, unheated, and crowded; with 300 men stationed in a small area, they had to sleep in three shifts and share bunks. Cooking was done over an open fire, and water was retrieved from a box spring inside the palisade. Consequently, many men suffered from pneumonia while stationed at Fort Harry. Unfortunately, Collins himself caught pneumonia at the fort and died there on April 9, 1863. Robert’s eighteen-year-old son, Kimsey, had enlisted as a private in the Thomas Legion, Company F, just three months earlier. His service records show that he was on detached service in the Smokies in March and April, so he may have been stationed at Fort Harry when his father fell ill. After Robert’s death, his body was carried over the mountain to be buried in the old Beck cemetery in Oconaluftee, now near the Tow String horse camp. Perhaps his son was able to organize this trip and accompany his father’s body to his final resting place. Thus the life of one of the most renowned Oconaluftee mountain guides ended.¹⁹

Also, it seems possible that Benjamin Carver died of the same illness contracted in the same way as Robert Collins; his pay records note that he was on detached service in January and February 1863, present with the company in Tennessee in March and April, but dead by May 24, 1863. In December of that year, his widow, Narcissus, filed a claim for him with the state auditor; they had been married less than a year when he died, and his son, Benjamin, was born that same, sad year. The location of his grave is unknown, but it might have been in a cemetery nearby, the Fort Harry Confederate Burial Ground, said to include the graves of thirty-nine soldiers and one hundred Cherokee civilians. This cemetery has long been marked by a large three-by-four-foot stone, roughly in the shape of an upright arrowhead, placed along Road Prong Trail, which follows the old turnpike on the Tennessee side. Though no headstones exist, author Pete Prince attempted to locate the graves by dowsing in the 1980s.²⁰

OCONALUFTEE CONFEDERATES AT FREDERICKSBURG

Meanwhile, Oconaluftee Confederates in other regiments were seeing battle action in Virginia. Benjamin F. Enloe and Joseph Collins served in the Twenty-Fifth North Carolina Infantry Regiment. This regiment spent the winter of 1862 in South Carolina but moved into Virginia and Maryland in June, fighting at Antietam, Malvern Hill, and Fredericksburg in the late summer and fall of that year. Though Antietam was inconclusive, Malvern Hill was a Union victory. Consequently, the Confederate victory at Fredericksburg, December 11–13, 1862, was reassuring to the company despite the thousands of casualties suffered there on both sides.²¹ In a letter to his uncle Dr. John Mingus, Benjamin described the Union charge on Marye’s Heights in that battle. In this charge, massive Union forces were disadvantaged by the Confederates’ strong position behind a stone wall along a hillside:

Pay records confirm that Benjamin F. served until late in the war. He was captured at the third battle of Petersburg on April 2, 1865, a decisive Union victory leading to the capture of Richmond, the Confederate capital, and Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender a week later at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. After his capture, Benjamin F. was taken to Point Lookout, Maryland, as a prisoner of war. On June 12, 1865, he was paroled and required to take an oath of allegiance to the United States.²³

Joseph Collins also continued to serve, though he was listed as sick during November and December 1862. No later pay records exist to determine if he took part in the siege of Petersburg; it is likely that he did not because Aden Carver placed him at Soco Creek in early 1865.²⁴

LAWLESSNESS AT HOME

Tepid support for the Confederacy and the resentment over the conscription act caused the North Carolina highlands to become overwhelmed with deserters who “lived off the area, banded together for protection, and defied all attempts to return them to their commands,” according to historian Noel Fisher.²⁵ Combined with continuing violence instigated by these deserters and by Union loyalists, the region became disordered and lawless. Civilians’ daily lives were marked by threat of attack from desperate gangs and individuals who were hungry but also inclined to thievery and violence. By early 1863, Governor Vance estimated that 1,200 deserters were hiding in the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains.²⁶ Also, deprivation from lack of farm labor and from looting caused homesteaders to hide food, valuables, and livestock any place they could imagine. To protect provisions, families hid food in wells, between walls, under floorboards, above ceilings, under porches, on their persons (such as in bags and under long skirts), in caves, under logs, or buried in the ground.²⁷ A couple of anecdotes suggest the confusion of the times. In the spring of 1863, Bill Slate, the husband of Rebecca Mingus Slate, set out on a trip to Tennessee across Indian Gap to buy seed corn. But he never returned and was never again heard of. Relatives believed that he had been attacked and killed by bushwhackers. That same season, Carson Beck, who was on furlough from the Thomas Legion for sickness, nonetheless made a trip across the gap for salt. Salt, of course, was essential to the mountain families to maintain their livestock and to preserve food. On his return, he met bad weather and was forced to unload his cargo, hide it, and return for it the next day once the storm had passed.

By June, the Confederate assistant quartermaster general wrote that it was “impracticable” for him to collect the tax in kind from civilians in Cherokee, Macon, Jackson, and Haywood Counties because of the privation of the citizens.²⁸ This tax, enacted just a few months before, in April, directed 10 percent of each family’s agricultural production to Confederate troops and was adopted, in part, because it was easier to collect than previously enacted taxes on luxury items and slaves. But when there was no harvest and nothing to eat, obviously the tax could not be paid. Conditions only worsened. The Cherokee families, especially, were starving throughout 1863 and 1864. In early 1864, Thomas wrote requests to Richmond for cornmeal and flour from the Confederate storehouses in South Carolina to be distributed to Cherokees. Eventually some was dispersed, though conditions remained dire. By May 1864, Margaret Love, the wife of a legion officer, wrote to the governor of North Carolina that the Cherokees were trying to survive by eating weeds and tree bark. There is no doubt that the security and food problems on the home front sapped morale among the troops, leading to more desertions.

THE THOMAS LEGION’S CAMPAIGN IN EAST TENNESSEE

During the winter and spring of 1863, the companies of the Thomas Legion were scattered around East Tennessee guarding bridges, railroad depots, and other key locations. In June, Union colonel William P. Sanders launched a campaign to control East Tennessee. He approached Knoxville indirectly by traveling west and south of the city, then turning north to attack the critical railroad bridge at Strawberry Plains. At that moment, however, most of Jackson’s command, including the majority of the Thomas Legion, was well north of this location, expecting incursions from Virginia. After a skirmish with the Confederates at the Strawberry Plains bridge, the Union forces burned the bridge; seized stores of food, salt, ammunition, and guns (though later they had to be abandoned); and captured about 137 enlisted men. These men were primarily from the Thomas Legion. Perhaps because the Union had no way to transport or guard the prisoners, they were paroled by a Union colonel, sent home, and told not to fight any more. Understanding that the men were fatigued and that some were actually ill, Thomas accepted the parole once he learned of it. For example, typhoid had spread among the troops; Osborn Bradley had died of it on April 4, 1863, just a couple of months before. But Jackson disagreed with Thomas and demanded that the men return to their companies, an order that a portion of the parolees complied with but that others, feeling tricked, did not. Jackson took offense from Thomas at this turn of events and had him arrested for disobedience. After a while, these charges were set aside in the face of continued skirmish activity in East Tennessee. Even so, this incident aggravated an antipathy between Jackson and Thomas that had existed since Jackson’s nixing of the “troops” of miners and sappers.

On September 1, 1863, the Union occupied Knoxville, which pushed the Confederate troops both north and east to defend the region and to prevent additional incursions from Virginia. The next day, Thomas, who was stationed again at Strawberry Plains, was ordered to take the two Cherokee companies to the mountains and protect the passes along the Tennessee–North Carolina border. While en route, he was pursued and attacked by Union forces but not captured. He returned to his headquarters in Quallatown, and the Cherokee troops camped at Soco Creek as well as Balsam Gap, a few miles east. This order effectively split the legion apart and reassigned the command of the white soldiers, the majority of the troops, to Col. James R. Love. Major William W. Stringfield, a standout junior officer, remained to serve with Love throughout a fall chase of Union troops around East Tennessee. A few Cherokees seem to have remained with these companies, though almost all were under Thomas’s direct command.²⁹ For example, Joe Welch, also known as Willogeskik and originally assigned to Cherokee Company A, became a prisoner of war after the third battle of Winchester on September 19, 1864, and was sent to Point Lookout, Maryland, as a prisoner of war, so he must have remained with the white companies after the split. Love, Stringfield, and Lt. Col. William C. Walker led Thomas Legion soldiers on successful Confederate skirmishes at Limestone, Telford Station, Greeneville, and Henderson Mill, Tennessee, at one point capturing 350 troops who were sent by train to Richmond as prisoners of war.³⁰

WAVERING LOYALTIES AND DESERTIONS

Regardless of these successes, desertions continued for an array of reasons. Some soldiers changed sides. In September 1863, enough men and boys to comprise six companies from North Carolina’s southwest counties joined Union forces in East Tennessee; they became the Second North Carolina Mounted Infantry of the Union.³¹ Also, the highlanders were aware of the precarious existence of their families back home. As North Carolina enlistees, they wanted to serve in their home state and to be commanded by a North Carolinian such as Thomas, rather than by Jackson, a Tennessean. Finally, resentment over the Conscription Act persisted. During this period, more than 350 men in the Legion went absent without leave.³² Some of the deserters were Oconaluftee soldiers. Asoph Hughes, son of Rafe and Elizabeth Hughes, enlisted in April 1863 and spent time on detachment in the Smoky Mountains that spring, but by October 20 he was listed as absent without leave. By January 1863 he was declared a deserter, and in April 1864 he was back on the receipt roll of Walker’s Battalion of the Thomas Legion. Although one source stated that he did not return to his widow, Mary Nations, and eight children after the war, a family story states that he fell ill while on furlough from the legion and died at home. He has a headstone in the Hughes Cemetery.³³ Three additional Bradley cousins, brothers Andrew Jackson, William, and Thomas, as well as James and Osborn’s half brother, Wilson, had enlisted in the legion the previous March and were present for the string of conflicts in East Tennessee, along with James, who had joined in 1862.³⁴ All but Andrew Jackson were in Company F of the first regiment of the Thomas Legion; Andrew Jackson was enlisted in Company K. The pay records of the Bradley cousins in Company F show that they went absent without leave and then deserted in mid-October, immediately after the skirmish at Greeneville. James and Wilson returned to their companies at some point because they participated in the 1864 campaign in the Shenandoah Valley. William did not return; at the end of the war, according to Confederate records, he took an oath of allegiance to the United States in Knoxville, Tennessee. Thomas seems not to have returned either, but the Confederate records do not establish where he went after he deserted.³⁵ Further, Union service records suggest that William, Thomas, and James enlisted in the Union’s Second North Carolina Mounted Infantry. However, the records are vexingly inconclusive because the Knoxville enlistment dates for these three men were recorded as October 6, 1863, before they were reported as Confederate deserters. Even so, if these sets of records refer to the same individuals, they do show that James, though he enlisted in the Union company, “false mustered” and did not serve, which would be consistent with his return to the Thomas Legion. The Union records show that William was detailed as an orderly at a regimental hospital from December 1864. By the spring he became one of Col. George Kirk’s raiders and died in Boone, North Carolina, on April 4, 1865, of typhoid pneumonia; however, this account cannot be true if he appeared in Knoxville at the war’s end to take an oath of allegiance. The records for Thomas do not present as much confusion; he was detailed at a hospital as a wood chopper in the winter of 1864 and then guarded a forage train the next year.³⁶ Although the actual service of these men remains a mystery, the combined records do reveal a fluidity in commitment among a share of mountain soldiers.

COLONEL THOMAS’S MOUNTAIN STRATEGY

During the fall of 1863, the Cherokee companies focused on three tasks: improving the turnpike, seeking deserters and compelling them to rejoin their companies, and suppressing looting and raiding by Union bushwhackers crossing the border from Tennessee and from active North Carolina Tories. Thomas was given authority to recruit two additional Cherokee companies for these tasks, but they were inadequate given the massive area that they were to police. Thomas’s superior at this point, Brig. Gen. Robert B. Vance, the governor’s brother and the commander of the Department of Western North Carolina, favored arresting deserters and sending them to Asheville, rather than collecting them back into their companies. He also determined that the North Carolina troops should become more offensive and harass, if not directly attack, Union troops just over the border. Consequently, in early December 1863, Thomas moved about half his troops to Gatlinburg and set up camp, evidently preparing to stay the winter, because the men built huts and some brought their wives. Once the Cherokees were in place, the Tennessee home guard captured and imprisoned a Thomas scout; in retaliation, Thomas took 200 men to Sevierville to free the scout, which he did while also briefly arresting sixty home guards and seizing their guns and ammunition. Keeping the arms and ammunition, Thomas’s men returned to camp in Gatlinburg, but the foray aroused the ire of Union brigadier general Samuel D. Sturgis, who sent a party of 200 men, guided by Union loyalists, to retaliate. Cherokee lookouts sounded the alarm of the Union soldiers’ approach in time for them to engage in a one-hour volley and then withdraw back into the mountains and all the way to Quallatown. The Union troops captured one prisoner and recovered the arms and ammunition just seized, as well as several horses. The “prized souvenir,” though, was Thomas’s hat, left behind in haste.³⁷

The new year began with a watershed event for the Thomas Legion and for Thomas personally. On January 3, 1864, Lt. Col. William C. Walker, commander of half of the legion, the regiment called Walker’s Battalion, was roused from his sickbed at home in Cherokee County by Union raiders, shot, and killed. The brutality and boldness of the attack stunned the Confederates and made it plain to all how serious the threat of bushwhackers had become in western North Carolina. Thomas acknowledged the event as a warning and immediately hired a twenty-man “Life Guard” of Cherokee warriors for his personal protection. These civilians protected him until the end of the war. Even though his life had been threatened before, this murder was taken seriously.³⁸

Despite this undeniable sign that the region needed better Confederate policing, the larger war caused General Vance once again to order Thomas with about 125 Cherokees over the crest of the Smokies and into Tennessee. He was accompanied by Lt. Col. James Henry of the Fourteenth North Carolina Battalion and about 375 cavalrymen. The planned action was intended to block Gen. Ambrose Burnside of the Union from communicating with federal forces to the north. The poor condition of the road and the frigid winter weather made the crossing especially difficult. According to North Carolina historian John Preston Arthur, the artillery had to be dismantled to transport it downhill:

Nonetheless, the Cherokees completed the ordeal and made camp, once again, in Gatlinburg on January 12. Half of Henry’s men settled in Wear’s Cove, with orders to join Vance as backup in a day, and Vance took the other half of Henry’s men to Sevierville. There he overwhelmed and confiscated a large Union supply train, a great achievement for the general. Vance moved to the planned rendezvous point, but Henry and his half of the cavalry troops did not appear until a day later; the reasons for his delay have not been confirmed. News of the seizure reached Union command quickly, and a company was sent out to retake the supplies. Vance and his portion of Henry’s men were surprised by an attack the next morning, January 14, in part because the general failed to post lookouts. He and fifty of Henry’s men were captured, as were the supply wagons. Subsequently, Vance became a Union prisoner in Virginia for the remainder of the war. With this undesirable outcome, both Henry and Thomas were viewed as at fault for disobeying orders, and some accounts say that they were charged and senior officers demanded a trial, but if charges were filed, they were later dropped. This calamity hurt Thomas’s reputation with key politicians, Congressman Allen T. Davidson and, of course, Governor Vance, the general’s brother.⁴⁰

Thomas and the Cherokees returned to North Carolina, probably repeating the arduous hauling of wagons and artillery over mountain, and camped in Deep Creek by January 22. They resumed their efforts to patrol Cherokee, Clay, Jackson, and Macon Counties. Federal raids over the state line continued, and in early 1864, fifteen Cherokees were captured and taken to Knoxville, where they were bribed to betray Thomas. While captive, they cooperated with their Union hosts but did not comply with the requests in the long run. Thomas was too respected by the Cherokees to be betrayed. Upon release, most of the captives returned home to serve again in the legion. However, a few did defect and joined the Union for the remainder of the conflict. After the war ended, they were ostracized when they tried to return home.⁴¹

Another continuing activity of Thomas’s men was to collect deserters and reunite them with their companies. The colonel’s willingness to accept deserters back into the fold was ill regarded by other officers; in time their disapproval manifested itself in numerous complaints to the Confederate secretary of war, James Seddon. Also, Thomas did not comply with the command of Col. John B. Palmer, General Vance’s replacement. In September 1864, Thomas was arrested and sent to Goldsboro, North Carolina, for a court-martial. He was found guilty in October, but Thomas refused to accept this ruling and went to Richmond to appeal to the president. Meanwhile, Brig. Gen. James G. Martin was appointed to command the Western District of North Carolina, supplanting Palmer, on September 16, 1864. Martin was an accomplished veteran of the Mexican War who was forced to relinquish a more active Confederate command during the Civil War because of limiting effects of an amputated arm. From his headquarters at Morganton, Martin was asked to weigh in on the Thomas controversy by General Lee and President Jefferson Davis. He provided the rationale for reversing the court-martial: “Col. Thomas certainly is no military man but many allowances are to be made for him. He has heretofore had but ten waggons [sic] in his whole command and only very recently no [quarter]master or commissary, no designated point from whence to draw his supplies … and the troops in my district have not been paid since December 1863. At this time I deem it inadvisable to make any more changes and trust those already made may be deemed satisfactory.”⁴² With this opinion, Thomas was allowed once again to return to his position in the legion, and within a few weeks, he was authorized to recruit three companies, one as engineers, and allow absentees to return.⁴³

OCONALUFTEE SOLDIERS FIGHT IN THE VIRGINIA CAMPAIGN

When Thomas and the Cherokee companies went into the mountains during the fall and winter of 1863–64, the rest of the legion, under the command of Love and Stringfield, went to Whitesburg, Tennessee, where they lived on very short rations. In late April, they fearlessly defended Carter’s Depot, Tennessee, from a Union attack of three cavalry regiments, a success that showed their mettle to the Confederate leadership and sent them north to Saltville, Virginia, to guard a salt quarry. Hoping to improve the situation in the mountains, Thomas wrote to General Bragg, with support from Governor Vance, asking to have the legion reunited and returned to western North Carolina, and the decision was made to do so. However, a communication delay and a round of new attacks in Virginia pulled the soldiers into the Shenandoah Valley, where they became part of a long campaign during the spring, summer, and fall of 1864. In early June, the legion companies fought valiantly at Piedmont, holding a weak gap in the Confederate line. Nonetheless, the Union forces prevailed; 1,000 Confederates were taken prisoner and 1,600 were killed or wounded. In the legion, 12 were killed, 21 wounded, and 42 captured. Only 300 men of the legion remained ready for battle. While following the Union troops west toward West Virginia, the surviving legion visited the grave of the revered general Stonewall Jackson in Lexington, an inspiring moment, and were met with heartwarming public support from citizens. Next came the Battle of Monacacy in Maryland, a Confederate win, but the legion did not participate and was fresh to lead the subsequent march east to the outskirts of Washington, D.C., in early July. Even so, the legion’s Company F was recognized for its accuracy with firearms and for its fierceness; it acquired the nickname of Conley’s Sharp Shooters after Lt. Robert T. Conley. Because Confederate troops were outnumbered, they withdrew from Washington into Virginia for six weeks of marching and countermarching against the Union throughout the state. On September 19, Confederate forces engaged the Union for the third time at Winchester, also known as the Battle of Opequon.⁴⁴

This battle ended in defeat for the Confederates and cost the legion seventy-five men, killed, wounded, or captured. Cherokee Joe Welch, or Willogeskik, was captured and sent to Maryland as a prisoner of war. At least one Oconaluftee Valley resident, William Beck, was severely wounded at this battle. A private in Conley’s Sharp Shooters Company F, he had enlisted with his three brothers in July 1862. His brother John had likely been killed in the summer at Cool Spring, though definitive service records are missing. The whereabouts of Stephen and Samuel Carson are also uncertain. The last record for Steven placed him on sick furlough in December 1863, and Carson endured a period of illness in early 1863 but reenlisted in February 1864. So Carson may have been with his brother on that fateful day. At enlistment, William was the thirty-three-year-old father of six children, and his wife, Rachel, was pregnant with the seventh. Records show that after the battle William was taken to Baker Mansion, a field hospital, where he stayed for two weeks, suffering from a gunshot wound that had caused a compound fracture of the tibia and fibula of one leg. The leg became gangrenous, which led to William’s death on October 26, five weeks after the battle. He was buried at Stonewall Cemetery in Winchester, Virginia.⁴⁵

By this time Thomas had been arrested pending court-martial in North Carolina, so on September 30, Love ordered Stringfield to Asheville to take over command of the Cherokee companies. He settled at the Quallatown headquarters while about 400 men guarded a 150-mile line in the mountains from Murphy to Asheville. Love remained with the remnant of the legion in Virginia, which included fewer than sixty men following an October battle at Cedar Creek, also a Confederate loss. On November 17, 1864, Love and fewer than one hundred men were at last able to leave Virginia to reunite the legion in western North Carolina in early December. Though they had lost three-quarters of the men who entered Virginia the previous spring, at this great price they had earned a distinguished record of service.⁴⁶

UNION RAIDS AT HOME

Because of “too much confusion in the land, the cold weather and the excessive rain,” as the minutes note, Lufty Baptist Church did not meet regularly during the fall of 1864 and winter of 1865.⁴⁷ Indeed, not only did dangers and problems with deserters continue, but the mountain community experienced its most direct involvement with the war that February. On February 4, 1865, Col. George W. Kirk, one of the most feared, despised, and effective Union raiders, led 600 men into western North Carolina via Newport, looted Waynesville, burned Colonel Love’s home there, and freed prisoners from a jail. On the return, Conley’s Sharp Shooters ambushed Kirk along the Soco Gap Road, so the Union companies retraced their steps to Waynesville and set out across Balsam Gap on February 6. Once again, Kirk met Thomas Legion troops, this time at Wilmot, as he and his men encountered Stringfield and about 300 Confederates, both Cherokee and white soldiers, in the encounter that became known as the Battle of Soco Creek. Incensed that Kirk was invading their home, the legion fought fiercely for an hour but ran out of ammunition and was outnumbered two to one. Consequently, Stringfield was forced to withdraw toward Quallatown, while Kirk’s raiders followed the Oconaluftee River to the turnpike and up and over the crest into Tennessee.⁴⁸

As they swept back into Tennessee, the raiders looted and terrorized. Florence Conner Gass, who was seven at the time, later recalled her parents’ home being ransacked. Aden Carver remembered shooting at Smokemont (then Bradleytown) and said, “I remember about Kirk. … Kirk’s men were foraging and stealing as they went. Only the old Indians were at home. The younger ones were with Col. Thomas [actually Major Stringfield]. These old Indians were carried off by Kirk and some of them shot.” Indeed, at least one old Cherokee man was forced to flee with Kirk; when he became unable to continue, he was shot and left. Confederates soon found the man, cared for him until his death, and buried him in a shallow grave. The place where he was buried is called Indian Grave Flats in his honor.⁴⁹ Fort Harry, also on the route, was burned by Kirk’s men during their dash back into Union-held East Tennessee. Afterward, usable remains from the camp were salvaged by Bradleytown residents, including a partially burned wagon.⁵⁰ Cheering Kirk’s success, the Knoxville paper reported that for booty he brought back “three rebel flags, more than twenty prisoners, 150 horses, and killed more rebels than he captured,” though these claims and numbers seem questionable.⁵¹ Even though Kirk was ambushed and hotly pursued on his return trip, the daring and deep penetration of Union forces into western North Carolina signaled the region’s vulnerability to all.

The spring brought more incursions into western North Carolina, but no more large raids occurred in Oconaluftee. Even after the truce between Generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, attacks, lootings, sackings, and skirmishes took place in Salisbury, Boone, Asheville, and Waynesville. Companies of the legion were scattered throughout the area guarding towns and fending off attacks, often effectively. Most famously, Conley’s Sharp Shooters skirmished with Union colonel William C. Bartlett as late as May 6 and forced his company to retreat to Waynesville. Lieutenant Robert T. Conley claimed to have fired the last shot and killed the last Union soldier in the war, though the assertion can extend only to North Carolina, not the war as a whole. Colonel Thomas, attempting to intimidate Union forces in Waynesville, had his Cherokee companies light nighttime bonfires around the perimeter of the town, just before a surrender negotiation the following day, on May 7. On that day, General Martin, Colonel Love, and Colonel Thomas accepted surrender terms from Bartlett but only after Thomas had made a show of force by arriving with his Life Guard of twenty dressed in war paint and demanding that Bartlett surrender. Martin accepted Bartlett’s terms, which were surrender and immediate parole after the troops and officers handed over their arms. On May 9, the Civil War ended in North Carolina. Because they were civilians, the members of Thomas’s Life Guard were allowed to keep their personal rifles, though this story was exaggerated subsequently by Thomas to claim that all of the legion were allowed to do so, which was not true.⁵² Nonetheless, the exploits of the Thomas Legion are extraordinary in that both Cherokee and white soldiers served together for years, though not always in fully integrated companies. That fact suggests that full measures of mutual respect and acceptance must have been present among both groups. A reunion photograph taken in 1903 of Lieutenant Colonel Stringfield with eleven Cherokee veterans shows the pride among these survivors of the Thomas Legion.

Though a backwater, the valley was ensnared by the war, affecting residents at home and placing the men of the community in harm’s way in their service to the Confederacy. By the end of the war, living conditions in Oconaluftee Valley, as in all of western North Carolina, were poor. The farms had no draft animals, seed, or livestock.⁵³ Resident Edd Conner, who was a child at the time, reported as an adult that food and clothing were very scarce and that the roads were “muddy quagmires, making travel impossible.”⁵⁴ Most every mountain family of Oconaluftee lost one or more enlisted man to the war, either as a casualty or by illness. Some were taken prisoner and released only after the surrender. The many Cherokees who enlisted suffered equally during the war, and their families probably suffered more than the whites from deprivation. During the spring of 1865, after months of canceled meetings, the Lufty Baptist Church held a spring revival that was well attended and included a baptism ceremony in the Oconaluftee River.⁵⁵ This ritual of rebirth signaled a new era for the community, with entirely new opportunities and challenges.