Circa1865

Born in Florida in 1791, Harjo belonged to the Echoille band of Seminoles (Harjo means “so brave you are crazy”). He fought in two Seminole Wars in Florida before his family was relocated to Indian Territory in 1842. In 1861, Harjo joined the 1st Regiment, Seminole Mounted Volunteers and saw action at Round Mountain, Middle Boggy and Second Cabin Creek.  After the war, he settled in what is now Seminole County, Oklahoma, raised a family and passed away in 1904 at the age of 113.

(Information courtesy: Ron Mitchell via the Forgotten Oklahoma group on Facebook)

Thahlo Harjo – 1st Regiment, Seminole Mounted Volunteers, CSA

“Interestingly the name “Seminole” itself translates into “seceder” or “runaway” from the Creek nation, which occurred under Chief Secoffee. The Seminole tribe initially acquired its African slaves as gift from the British after 1763 or were purchased by them in imitation of the Europeans and held them in “a type of democratic vassalage” to the tribe. Though not considered the equals of the Seminole and living in separate settlements, black runaways were taught to hunt, fish and fight against white settlers living on Seminole land. After the tribe’s defeat in 1839, many of these “black Seminoles” accompanied the tribe to resettlement in the West.

Only twenty-two years later, resettled Seminoles fought bravely against northern soldiers in the three Seminole Mounted Volunteer regiments of the Trans-Mississippi Department, led by Major John Jumper, whose native name was “Hemha Micco.”

Seminoles also fought alongside the victorious Florida and Georgia forces at the Ocean Pond (Olustee) battle on February 20, 1864. One northern soldier wrote a New York friend just after the engagement:

“The most desperate enemy that we have to contend with here is the Florida Indians in roving bands of bushwhackers [who] occasionally steal upon our picket lines under cover of night . . . Many redskins are sharpshooters. During the recent [Ocean Pond] battle they took themselves to the tree-tops and picked off many of the officers of the colored troops.”    

(Key West’s Civil War: Rather Unsafe for a Southern Man to Live Here. Bernhard Thuersam. Shotwell Publishing, 2022. pg. 143)

The Hibriten Guards of Caldwell County

“Company F of the 26^th North Carolina Regiment achieved a terrible fame at the Gettysburg battle in early July 1863.  During the fight at McPherson’s Farm on the first day every member of the company was shot down: thirty-three men were killed or mortally wounded, and fifty-eight suffered wounds and recovered. That “unparalleled loss” is the only instance of an entire company being wiped out in one battle during the war. A handful of Company F were perhaps stragglers and absent; at least one participated in the Pettigrew-Pickett Charge of July 3^rd, Pvt. Thomas W. Setser who suffered a severe wound.

Despite their virtual annihilation at Gettysburg, the “Hibriten Guards” rebuilt their strength in the months following the Pennsylvania campaign. Some of the wounded returned to duty; some recruits arrived. At the Battle of Bristoe Station in mid-October 1864, the company then comprised of 36 men, participated in the disastrous charge of two Tarheel brigades against a well-fortified enemy position.  The result was another near-obliteration of the company with five men killed or mortally-wounded, ten wounded and seventeen captured.

Pvt. Thomas Setser, who had recovered from his earlier wound, wrote a relative: “It was a pretty hard little fight while it lasted . . . John Tuttle was killed by a bayonet as he charged over the enemy breastworks . . . you can tell his folks I buried him best I could and cut his name on a piece of plank and put it on his grave.”

Setser, one of two surviving enlisted men of Company F later wrote: “When I look around and see none of our boys and think what has become of them I cannot help but cry, and it looks like our time will come next.”

(State Troops and Volunteers: A Photographic Record of North Carolina’s Civil War Soldiers. Vol. One. Greg Mast. Raleigh Department of Cultural Resources, Archives and History. 1995. Page 100.)

Largely, if not totally ignored in today’s discussion regarding November 1898’s unfortunate “newspaper editorial confrontation turned-violent” is the lack of perspective regarding the long lead-up to it. The local government, media and university are all complicit in beating the drums of racial animosity which will lead to less racial harmony, not more. The most detailed and informed book regarding this sad event is not a book, but a hard-to-find 800-page doctoral dissertation found at the end. Unfortunately, there are only several poorly researched and outright fictional books which do nothing to enlighten the reader.

Looking Back at Wilmington’s “1898”

First, it is probable that had the war of 1861-1865 not occurred and the South was left on its own to solve the riddle of racial coexistence, no November 1898 violence would have occurred. This racial conundrum was imposed on the American South by African tribes enslaving their own people and selling them to English, and later New England traders. After the Civil War the Republican party, anxious to maintain political hegemony over the country, enfranchised black men. These, along with Union veterans bought with pension money, kept Republicans in power.

The Democratic party finally rid North Carolina of Republican/Carpetbag rule by 1872, but Wilmington remained a holdout of Republican power due to its majority black population. The Democratic party dominated State politics through the early 1890s.

After the Republican-Populist victory in State politics in 1896, the Republicans began a program common to political parties – they dismantle and rearrange legislation the opposition party had erected to establish their own barriers to their opponents ever returning to power. This political strategy continues today.

In the run-up to the 1896 elections, Populists realized their plight as described by Hal W. Ayer, chair of the New Hanover County Populist party: “If the Democrats won, they would continue to ignore the farmers; if Republicans won, independently of Populists, they would be forced by the large black constituency which constitutes the great body of the party into some of the [Reconstruction] recklessness of 1868; and this is something to be feared as much as Democratic rule.”

These Populists, many of them farmers who believe the Democrats should have been more politically-attentive to them in the past, and “who distrusted the large black element of the Republican party,” decided to cooperate with the Republicans in order to “defeat the arrogant and hypocritical Democrats, and at the same time secure by such cooperation a balance of power in the State Legislature that would effectually check any wild or reckless plan that might be advocated by the Republican party.” As with many partnerships, the Republicans would forget their Populist associates once in power.

Both the Wilmington Messenger and Wilmington Morning Star newspapers wrote of the specter of corrupt Reconstruction politics returning to bedevil white residents. The black-owned Wilmington Sentinel endorsed Daniel Russell for governor – who was nominally a Republican and ignored by party leadership – to ensure black unity within Republican ranks. To the dismay of white Democratic voters, Russell, who promised patronage positions to those lieutenants delivering the vote, was elected thanks to strong turnout in sixteen black-dominated counties, with 87 percent of eligible blacks voting. It is noteworthy that 20 percent of eligible black voters cast ballots for the Democratic candidate, and 8 percent voted for the Populist candidate.

An irony within white Republican ranks was though they preached racial equality publicly, “they resented black officeholding and activity in Republican party affairs.” While earlier a superior court judge, Russell himself stated that “Negroes are natural-born thieves. They will steal six days in the week and go to church on Sunday to shout and pray it off.” However, by the mid-1890s white Republicans were a minority in their party and only constituted those hungry for political employment.

Prior to the elections of 1898, black newspaper editor Alex Manly penned an unfortunate editorial which insulted white women and predictably incurred the wrath of the area’s white menfolk. Many prominent men in Wilmington demanded that the city’s Republican mayor and aldermen close down the paper and force the editor to leave town. The Republicans did little or nothing which eventually led to a violent confrontation.

But lost in today’s rhetoric is the very basis of Manly’s editorial and what prompted it. Why is this ignored and not identified as the primary cause? Manly was commenting on an earlier speech of Rebecca Felton of Georgia, wife of a legislator, who addressed a group of Savannah women earlier and denounced the rape of white farm women by black men while their husbands were far off in the fields working. Mrs. Felton demanded that the Republican party, the political home of most black voters and which preached hatred toward Democrats, do something to end the heinous crimes of their constituents.

Manly’s later editorial claimed that the white women had somehow encouraged the advances of the black men attacking them in their homes. This predictably led an enraged group of white residents to march to Manly’s establishment to escort him to the rail station. Not finding Manly, on the march back to their homes these men were fired upon by black men concealed in houses being passed, and they returned fire. This entire episode was preventable.

The black New Hanover County Coroner, David Jacobs, summoned a Coroner’s Jury the following day to investigate the deaths of five black men from gunshot wounds. Three white men were wounded in the affair, one seriously. Though there are numerous unsubstantiated estimates of those killed or wounded, we have only the coroner’s investigation as an official source. On November 15th, black resident Thomas Lane was tried for firing a pistol into the group of men marching to Manly’s news office. Lane quickly ran out the back, but the return fire unfortunately caused the death of an occupant, Josh Halsey.

An important but marginalized voice in this 1898 affair is Collector of Customs John C. Dancy, a black Edgecombe County native appointed by Republican presidential patronage to his position, and the highest-paid person in North Carolina at the time. In this influential position he was considered the head of the Republican party and expected to foster and deliver the vote, and he surrounded himself with black employees at the Custom house who were expected to promote party interests. After the violence of November 1898, Dancy concluded that all blame be placed upon Manly’s editorial, which lit the flame.

A question to be put to rest is the often-heard claim that the conflict ended democratically elected government in Wilmington. The Republican-Populist legislature, once in power in 1895, altered municipal charters to benefit themselves. They amended Wilmington’s charter “so as to establish a partly elected and partly appointed Board of Aldermen.

The amended charter did not alter ward lines but allowed “qualified voters of each ward to elect one alderman and empowered the Governor to appoint one alderman from each of the five wards.” (McDuffie, pg. 460-461).  Under the guise of “preventing misrule by the propertyless and ignorant elements,” the Republicans strictly controlled Wilmington’s municipal government.

(Politics in Wilmington and New Hanover County, NC: 1865-1900. Jerome A. McDuffie, PhD dissertation, 1979, Kent State University, pp. 442-453; 738)

Mississippi Senator John Sharp Williams (1854-1932) was born in Tennessee but raised in Mississippi after being orphaned in the Civil War. After attending several fine universities in the US and Europe, he took his law degree from the University of Virginia in 1876. As a patriotic response to England launching its HMS Dreadnought in 1906, Senator Williams introduced a bill to change the name of an American battleship to the USS “Skeered O’ Nuthin’.

The Hardship of Wheatless Days

“In March 1918, the New York World, in an editorial article on the World War of the early twentieth century, took occasion to state:

“It will do the country no harm to note the reminder of Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi that its war sufferings in the matter of food have reached no very heroic stage as yet.”

Senator Williams was then quoted as saying:

“Men go out and exploit themselves about ‘wheatless days’ and the lack of food. The Southern Confederacy had no wheat for three years during the Civil War. I went from 1862 to Lee’s surrender without seeing anything made out of wheat except an occasional Christmas or birthday cake, and that was sweetened with molasses. What is the use of talking about hardships? We are having no hardships in this country. If you cannot stand hardships, then you are not worthy of your ancestors. Let us send men, munitions and food to France and quit our patrioteering camouflage.”

(The Women of the South in Wartime. Matthew Page Andrews, The Norman, Remington Company, 1920, pg. 30)

The heroic men of the Third North Carolina Regiment are immortalized in the Boney Monument at Third and Market Streets in Wilmington, a memorial to North Carolinians who fought valiantly to defend their homes, county and State. This impressive civic art features a standing bronze figure representing courage and protection, while a bronze figure of a fallen soldier represents self-sacrifice. The memorial was designed by renowned sculptor Francis Packer in 1924; the base and backdrop were designed by Henry Bacon, architect of the Lincoln Memorial.

The John F. Van Bokkelen noted below was the son of Mr. A. H. Van Bokkelen who “clothed and cared for his son’s men [of Company D] before the South’s new government was operable. Additionally, the father ensured that the wives and children of every man in his son’s company were provided for during the war. Young Van Bokkelen died of typhoid fever in late-May 1863; his Wilmington friend and fellow officer James I. Metts later named his first-born after Van Bokkelen.  (Doctor to the Front, Koonce, pg. 56)

Remembering North Carolina’s Soldiers on Veterans Day

“The brave men of the Third North Carolina Regiment, which included many men from New Hanover County who left their families, homes and farms to defend their State.

“September 17, 1862 was a day of unsurpassed carnage in which as many as four thousand Northern and Southern men died in battle. Exceptional losses were the rule, but the terrible honor of having suffered the most casualties at Sharpsburg may belong to the Third Regiment, North Carolina State Troops.

One of the largest units on the field, the Third North Carolina carried 520 men into action against the enemy, but by day’s end acting-adjutant John F. Van Bokkelen could account for only 190 of them. Later analysis revealed a staggering 111 battle deaths: 75 men killed on the field and 36 dying of their wounds in the weeks and months that followed. In all, 299 members of the Third North Carolina were killed, wounded and/or captured, a loss of 57.5 percent.

The Third rebounded but only to suffer two more terrible blows during the 1863 campaign: 233 men fell at Chancellorsville (58 killed), and 229 at Gettysburg (49 killed). The regiment suffered near annihilation at Spotsylvania, where 238 men were captured, but the survivors fought on, sustaining 139 more casualties, until a remnant of 58 men laid down their arms at Appomattox.”

(State Troops and Volunteers: A Photographic Record of North Carolina’s Civil War Soldiers. Volume One. Greg Mast, NC Department of Cultural Resources. 1995, pg. 339).

Saving “Uncle George” MacDonald

“The Osceola (Missouri) Democrat raised money to send “Uncle” George McDonald of St. Clair County, a colored Confederate veteran, to the Confederate Reunion at Columbia last month. In 1861 “Uncle” George went off with the men of St. Clair County and fought in several engagements.

At Wilson’s Creek a Minie ball plowed through his hip and buckshot struck him in the face. George lay groaning upon the ground when he was found by Owen Snuffer, a lieutenant of his company. Snuffer stooped down, examined the black man’s wounds and stanched the flow blood from them. “For God’s sake,” cried the suffering negro, “give me a drink of water.”

Snuffer’s canteen was empty but midway between the firing lines was a well. To reach it the lieutenant was to become the target of sharpshooters, and it meant almost certain death. But with bullets falling all around him like hailstones he pushed forward until the well was reached. And then he discovered that the bucket had been taken away and the windlass removed. The water was far down and the depth unknown.

The well was old-fashioned – stone-walled. Owen pulled off his long cavalry boots and taking one in his teeth he let himself down slowly, hand over hand until the water was reached and the boot filled. He then climbed up, straddling the well and clutching with hands and feet the rocky walls. Reaching the surface again he picked up the other boot and safely made his way back to his lines and brought water to “Uncle George.”

Returning from the war, “Uncle George” settled near Monegaw Springs and has reared an intelligent, honest and industrious family. One of his children educated himself, graduated the Smith University in Sedalia, and is now the pastor of a church in Kansas. Another child is a waiter at the Commercial Hotel in Osceola, an establishment known for high integrity.”

(Confederate Veteran, Volume XI, November 1903, pg. 494)

Brigadier-General Stand Watie

Brigadier-General Stand Watie was born in 1806 to Oo-wa-tie, his Cherokee father and half-Cherokee, half-European mother in Oothcaloga, Cherokee Nation (near today’s Rome, Geogia). His original name was “Degataga,” meaning “Stand Firm.” When his father was baptized in the Moravian Church as David Uwatie, the son’s name was changed to Isaac S. Uwatie. As an adult, the son modified his name to Stand Watie.

Learning English at a Moravian Mission School, he helped publish the school’s “Cherokee Phoenix” tribal newspaper. By the time he attained adulthood his father had become a wealthy planter holding numerous African slaves.

After the northern States had decided upon war and invasion of the South, Watie, appointed Colonel, raised a regiment known as the Cherokee Mounted Volunteers in July 1861 and became known as a gifted field commander and bold guerrilla leader.

His poorly armed troops participated in some 27 major engagements during the war as well as minor skirmishes, primarily utilizing guerilla tactics. At the Battle of Pea Ridge in early 1862 his Mounted Rifles captured an enemy battery though the battle was lost. After October 1862 Watie’s command was known as the Cherokee Mounted Rifles.

In October 1863 his unit routed detachments of the First Kansas Colored Regiment. In May 1864 Col. Watie was promoted to brigadier-general and a month later his men surprised and captured the enemy steamer J.R. Williams. The following September the Mounted Rifles captured an enemy wagon train at Cabin Creek with supplies worth an estimated $1.5 million. By this time Watie’s command had expanded included men from the Creek, Seminole, Cherokee and Osage tribes. The Seminole tribe in the West organized several cavalry regiments which fought alongside Southern forces; Seminole sharpshooters wreaked havoc at the Ocean Pond Battle in Florida as they picked off northern officers behind their troops.

In 1865 Gen. Watie refused to surrender his command to the enemy after Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Joseph E. Johnston capitulated in the East and kept his Cherokee Mounted Rifles in the field for nearly a month after Lt.-Gen. Kirby Smith’s surrender of the Trans-Mississippi Army in late-May 1865. Thus, he became the last Confederate General to surrender which he did on June 23, 1865.

Postwar, Gen. Watie returned to Indian Territory to rebuild his home, which enemy soldiers had burned to the ground. He journeyed to Washington to represent the Cherokee during the 1866 “Cherokee Reconstruction Treaty” proceedings, which resulted in the tribe being deprived of vast tracts of land in exchange for reinstatement in the north’s Union.

Gen. Watie returned to his Honey Creek Plantation home where he died in 1871. (WIKI).