Feeding and Pillaging
— Stoneman's Raid —
[Preface]:On March 24, 1865, Union Gen. George Stoneman led 6,000 cavalrymen from Tennessee into southwestern Virginia and western North Carolina to disrupt the Confederate supply line by destroying sections of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, the North Carolina Railroad, and the Piedmont Railroad. He struck at Boone on March 28, headed into Virginia on April 2, and returned to North Carolina a week later. Stoneman's Raid ended at Asheville on April 26, the day that Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to Union Gen. William T. Sherman near Durham.
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On April 9, 1865, Union Gen. William Jackson Palmer, commanding one of Gen. George Stoneman's cavalry brigades, led his men west from Salem to the Yadkin River. They camped for 36 hours on the east bank of the Shallow Ford Plantation, home of Confederate Congressman Richard C. Puryear. Puryear's daughter Betty Puryear Gibson, recalled that Palmer's soldiers found "everything sent to the woods for safety." What the soldiers could not eat, they carried away.
The
Carolina Watchman reported that "a small force of Yankees" entered Huntsville, just down the road ahead of you, "yesterday morning [April 11] at 6 o'clock." The Federals surprised the Home Guard, which fled, abandoning a hundred new Enfield muskets. In Huntsville, the cavalry burned the Red Store but spared the Kelly-Clingman Tavern and the White House, where U.S. Congressman Thomas Lanier Clingman (later a Confederate general) grew to manhood. During the raid, Clingman was at Shallow Ford Plantation recuperating from a wound he received in 1864.
Near here, Mrs. Sarah Byrd Dalton, a Union sympathizer, was asked to serve breakfast for fifteen officers. As hungry enlisted men continued to arrive, she eventually fed a hundred Federals, and her corncrib supplied some of the almost 4,000 horses in the Union herd. The U.S. government later reimbursed her.
Union soldiers pillaged the nearby house of plantation owner Joseph Anthony Bitting, while Federals attempted to rob Greenberry "Berry" Harding's dwelling. When Harding, recovering there from wounds, shot and killed on intruder, the other fled.
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