In mid-February 1864, from his headquarters in Petersburg, Virginia, Major General George Edward Pickett responded to a Union general across the battle lines. Union Brigadier General John J. Peck had written to him twice. First, to protest killings mentioned in a newspaper. Then, about an order he had only just learned of.
Fifty-three North Carolina soldiers wearing Union uniforms had been captured during Pickett’s failed campaign against New Bern. Peck enclosed a list of their names. He wrote that they were loyal and honest citizens of North Carolina, formally enlisted in the United States Army. He expected them to be treated as prisoners of war.
Over two days and two replies, Pickett’s response was not polite. He wrote that he was holding about 450 officers and soldiers of the United States Army, and that for every man Peck executed, he would execute 10 of his. Then he did something crueler.
Pickett thanked Peck for the list of names, saying it would help his officers identify any deserters who had not yet been recognized. Then he told Peck what had actually happened. He enclosed a list of 22 men from the Union’s 2nd North Carolina Volunteers. He wrote that they had been executed according to the laws and customs of war.
The list was not entirely accurate on the day he wrote it. Letters across the lines traveled slowly. By the time Peck read the reply, the argument was over. The men he had sought to protect were hanged in a field outside Kinston in four groups over 18 days, before a Confederate brigade ordered to watch and before the townspeople, while their families waited to receive the bodies. Two of the 22 on Pickett’s list were still alive when he wrote it. Within a week, they too were dead.
Here is the question that outlived every man in this story. They were Southerners. Many had worn Confederate uniforms in some form, and for some, whether they were truly Confederate soldiers was the heart of the matter. They crossed into Union lines, took the oath, and wore Union blue. They were captured wearing it. To the Confederacy, that made them deserters, and desertion in wartime was punishable by hanging. To the United States, that made them soldiers, and soldiers captured in uniform were prisoners of war.
Both sides had made a promise to these men. Neither kept it. The two legal positions were arguable, and the debate continued for two more years while the U.S. government considered whether to arrest George Pickett for murder. More than once, it was said there was enough evidence to try him. He was never arrested, never charged, never tried. The 22 men he condemned each received a trial. He never needed one.
North Carolina was one of the last states to secede, and only after its voters had rejected the idea once. By traditional counts, it sent more soldiers to Confederate armies than any other Southern state, and also produced the most deserters. That contradiction drives this story. By 1863, desertion was a manpower crisis. In the months after Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee urged Jefferson Davis to impose the death penalty on deserters, specifically naming North Carolina men. He wrote that nothing would stop it except the death penalty, applied uniformly and without compromise.
Lee was describing a policy. Eventually, someone had to carry it out. The men who would be hanged were not ardent Unionists. In eastern North Carolina, Confederate law allowed local service units: home guards, partisan rangers, and bridge guards created to defend the homeland, where men served for a week and returned home between times. When they volunteered, the men would later say they were promised orally, and without writing, that they would never be taken out of their home county. That is the first promise in this story.
In October 1863, Richmond consolidated these companies into a regular regiment, the 66th North Carolina, intended for service outside the region. Their commander, Major John Nethercutt, would later sum up their reaction in one sentence under oath. The men complained that they had been treated unjustly. Fewer than half showed up. Some tried the courts. Others went to the woods or returned home.
The general in charge of the department responded with an official statement. No man who returned voluntarily would be punished. That general was George Pickett, the man most know for one afternoon at Gettysburg. His first response to desertion was leniency, and most men did return. But some never came back. They crossed to the Union-held coast, owning only what they wore, with families to feed and one obvious source of income.
The Union had been recruiting North Carolinians since 1862. That year, a Union colonel named Rush Hawkins, working with naval officer Charles Flusser, encouraged local Unionists to volunteer. The first question recruits asked him was this. Hawkins remembered it decades later. “What will be our fate if we are captured by the rebels?” Hawkins promised them protection to the utmost extent. That is the second promise in this story. There is no record that Hawkins ever met the men who would be hanged at Kinston. But the regiments he helped build were founded on that promise, and he carried it for the rest of his life.
By the winter of 1863, Union recruiting on the occupied coast was not entirely voluntary. Peck himself confirms this in writing, naming two methods: actual conscription and reserve conscription. Many of the men who died at Kinston would say they were threatened into joining. They were told that if they did not enlist, they would be taken across the lines and shot. They were enrolled in Company F of the 2nd North Carolina Union Volunteers and promised bounties most would not live to collect.
The Confederates had a name for North Carolinians wearing Union blue. They called them “buffaloes.” It was not a compliment.
On January 18, 1864, Company F was sent to an outpost called Beech Grove, near Batchelder’s Creek, west of New Bern. It was a log fort hidden in the woods, manned by North Carolinians and a detachment of the 132nd New York under First Lieutenant Samuel Lyth. Behind Union lines, inside a hidden fort, the new recruits felt safe from the men they used to fight alongside.
Around the same time, Lee proposed an operation to retake New Bern. Davis approved and placed Pickett in command over Robert Hoke, the North Carolina brigadier who had planned it. At the end of January, Pickett’s column moved toward New Bern. The coordinated attack failed, and he ordered a withdrawal toward Kinston. But the Confederates had found the outpost in the woods.
The Union tried to warn Beech Grove, but everything went wrong. One messenger got lost in the swamp. Fog blocked the signal stations. Other messengers were killed or captured on the way. The North Carolinians knew what capture would mean for them. They offered to get the garrison out using roads they had known since childhood. Lyth refused to move without orders. When Confederate regiments appeared before the fort, he surrendered without firing a shot.
On February 2, the Confederates captured them. Fifty-three men. Practically the whole of Company F. The prisoners wore new Union uniforms, and at first, no one saw anything else. They were treated as ordinary prisoners of war. During the retreat, the army camped along the Dover Road, wet and exhausted after marching through rain and mud. Word spread that there were North Carolinians among the prisoners, and soldiers came to look at them.
Two prisoners were identified, not by officers reading papers. They were recognized by men who used to stand beside them in the ranks of Company B of the 10th North Carolina Artillery. A sergeant named Blount King, along with Lieutenant H.M. Whitehead, named two men from their old company. David Jones, about 21, and Joseph Haskett, about 26. They remembered Blount King well. He would reappear.
What happens next reaches us mainly through King himself, in testimony he gave to federal investigators after the war. It is his memory, recorded long after the event, not an official transcript. But this is what he said. Pickett confronts the two men and asks where they had been. He listens to them. Then, according to King, he says: “Damn you. I don’t think you will ever go back there again, you damned rascals. I will have you shot, and all the other rascals who desert.”
Jones replies that he does not care if they shoot him now or what they do with him. Then King says Pickett turned to his generals, saying: “We must try these men shortly, and after executing a few, the rest will stop deserting.” One of the generals, Brigadier General Montgomery Corse, answers as King remembers it: “The sooner the better.”
It is tempting to read all this as the anger of a broken man, the general whose division was destroyed at Gettysburg venting on anyone nearby. Some popular accounts do exactly that. But historian Donald E. Collins, who wrote the most detailed study of this case, reads it differently. Not a man who lost his composure, but a commander carrying out a brutal deterrent, exactly the policy Lee had requested. “After executing a few, the rest will stop.”
If King’s memory is accurate, the fate was decided at that campfire. The trials that followed were not held to determine what would happen. They were held to give it legal form.
A court-martial was organized almost immediately. Its composition, its speed, and what it refused to hear would all be debated later. By the most careful reconstruction of events, the court considered 27 cases, all for desertion. Twenty-two of those cases would end at the gallows. One man would be acquitted of desertion. The other four could not be traced by this story.
The other 26 men captured at Beech Grove were never brought before this court. They were sent north to prisoner-of-war camps. The court met that first night in camp in the rain. Haskett and Jones admitted desertion but insisted that Union recruiters had forced them to take the oath. Either enlist or be shot. Their claim was ignored. They were sentenced to death by hanging on February 5, before Hoke’s brigade.
Confederate deserters were often executed by firing squad. These two would be hanged, a death usually reserved for something worse than desertion. Whether the court intended it or not, the method carried a message. In its view, these two men had not merely left. They had gone over to the other side.
The prisoners reached Kinston on the 4th and were put in the county jail. Witnesses later described men sleeping on the floor, lacking food and bedding. Those with family nearby fared better, as wives and neighbors brought food and blankets to the door when guards allowed it. On the morning of the 5th, a Confederate chaplain named John Paris visited both Jones and Haskett. He would write about them later, and his judgment was harsh. The most hardened and unfeeling men I have met in my life.
Meanwhile, the army faced a practical problem. Hangings were rare. No one had a rope. No one had an executioner. Both were found at the railroad depot, where a sergeant was sent to get rope from a shipment of pontoon bridge equipment and head to the execution ground. The sergeant was Blount King, the man who had identified Jones and Haskett at the campfire. He had served in the same company with them. He told the county jailer, Isaiah Woods, that he volunteered for the job. After the war, questioned by federal investigators, he said he carried out orders against his will. Both accounts cannot be true together. He is the key witness to what Pickett said at the campfire, and he is also the man who hanged the prisoners. The story depends on him, and he cannot be fully trusted.
The gallows stood in an open field within sight of the town. Hoke’s brigade was marched out and formed in a square around it. Hoke supervised. Pickett attended. A captain read the findings aloud. The nooses were placed. The two men were hanged. Afterward, King was seen cutting the buttons off their uniforms.
The deaths of the two men did not stop the process. They accelerated it. Once it became clear how many former Confederate soldiers were in the group, cooperation became like the only currency the prisoners had left. According to Walter Harrison, Pickett’s inspector general, one sergeant had a list of his old company’s names in his pocket, which he used to report men who had deserted his unit. Harrison did not name that sergeant or say what became of him.
While the court sat in Kinston, it issued death sentences for five more men: John L. Stanley, Lewis Bryant, Mitchell Busick, William Irving of Nethercutt’s battalion, and Amos Armitage of Whitford’s battalion, all facing the same charge and the same fate. Their old commander, John Nethercutt, came to visit them. Then he went to Hoke, the brigadier who had formed his men into a square around the first gallows, and asked if anything could be done. Hoke’s reply was brief. He had received his orders, and the men would be hanged.
On the 11th, in Goldsboro, the court heard thirteen more men, one after another. Families arrived but accomplished nothing. Bryan McColumn later said he hired a lawyer for William Hadock, but the court refused to let him attend. Other relatives later reported that they were not allowed to bring witnesses. Thirteen death sentences came out of that room. Hoke ordered the five previously sentenced men executed the next day and ordered a large gallows built to accommodate the coming numbers.
On the 12th, the five men were brought out. The oldest, Amos Armitage, 44 and gray-haired, spoke for them. He said he had made a mistake when he volunteered upon reaching New Bern. Mitchell Busick added that he had only joined because Union recruiters threatened to kill him. They finished with a message to their former comrades in the field. They had been wrong. They regretted it, and no one should follow their example.
It is impossible to know the true value of those words. They were spoken at the foot of the gallows before the army about to hang them, with a chaplain recording them for his own purpose. They may have come from genuine remorse. Or from fear, or a last hope of mercy, or an attempt to protect the families who had to keep living in that county. No one in that field recorded which motive it was.
An aide read the sentence. Nooses were placed around their necks. Seven men were now dead. Thirteen men waited in jail. They spent their last hours with their families and in prayer. John Paris, the chaplain who had called the first two men hardened, was with them and wrote about it later. He described a wife saying goodbye to her husband, a mother taking a last look at her son, a sister embracing her brother. In the same account, he framed their grief as shame. The shame these men had brought on their family names.
Paris did something else in that cell. As the condemned men spoke, he collected the names of civilians they said had encouraged them to leave the Confederate army. He passed those names to General Hoke. The chaplain who baptized them also passed the names of their neighbors to the general. His sympathy and his contempt sat side by side, and that was the true state of the town.
Catherine Summerlin was allowed a brief farewell with her husband Jesse. While she was there, another prisoner, William Hadock, asked her to make sure his clothes reached his mother. Paris wrote that eight of them were baptized inside the cell. On the morning of the 15th, two more, John and Joseph Brock, were taken to the Neuse River and baptized there by the Reverend George W. Campe.
On the 15th, the brigade formed a square in a field behind the town around the new, larger gallows. The thirteen walked through the soft sand of an old field toward the platform. A staff officer read the charges and findings. They climbed the steps and stood in a row. They were offered a chance to speak. If any of them did, no one recorded their words. The trapdoor fell. Surgeons confirmed death, and the troops marched back to camp. Twenty men were now dead. This time, the executioner was not Blount King.
Some of the dead were buried in a shallow grave at the base of the gallows. Families who wanted to reclaim them had to ask. Bryan McColumn went to General Hoke to ask for his brother-in-law’s body so he could bury him in his U.S. Army uniform. According to McColumn’s account, Hoke asked him whether a respectable man would bury someone in a Yankee uniform. Even in death, the question of what these men wore remained in dispute.
One widow testified she had no wagon to bring her husband home. So she sent her teenage son and a young nephew. They found the body and brought it home. Other widows lived behind Union lines and could not cross into Confederate Kinston at all. Their husbands remained where they fell.
Not every case before the court ended at the gallows. One man, Clinton Cox, was found not guilty of desertion. Acquittal did not mean freedom. Cox remained a prisoner and would die in jail. Southern newspapers called these men traitors. But the court did not. Every man executed at Kinston was executed for desertion, a military charge a panel of officers could decide in a single evening.
Two of the condemned still waited. Elijah Kellum and William J. Hill of Whitford’s battalion. Kellum’s case is the hardest to get past. He was a young, illiterate farmer, and testimony later raised doubts about whether the Confederate army had ever accepted him for service at all. According to one account, he had been rejected as physically unfit for Confederate service and was only accepted later by a Union regiment. A Confederate recruiting officer testified otherwise. If the first account is true, the Confederacy executed a man for deserting an army that had never really accepted him.
Meanwhile, the letters were still moving slowly across the lines. To follow them, we must go back to February 11. Pickett’s first letter, dated that day, was written before he knew any of this. He had read in a newspaper that Confederates had hanged a captured Black soldier wearing a U.S. uniform. He enclosed an order signed by Abraham Lincoln the previous summer, stating that for every Union soldier killed in violation of the laws of war, a Confederate soldier would be executed in return. He wrote as if the killing must have happened without Pickett’s knowledge, asked him to punish those responsible, and wrote that he would refrain from executing a Confederate soldier until he knew what Pickett had done about it.
Who that soldier was, this story cannot tell you. He is the first man to die in this story, and the one we know the least about. Then, around February 13, Peck learned for the first time that Company F had been captured. He wrote again, enclosing the names of the 53 men, calling them loyal and honest North Carolinians, formally enlisted in the 2nd North Carolina Infantry. When Peck wrote that letter, seven of those men were already dead. By the time it reached Pickett, 20 were dead.
It is easy to read Pickett’s thanks for the list and conclude that Peck had handed him a death warrant. The timeline does not support that. Peck sent the names to protect the men. By the time the names arrived, the list could do them little good or harm. On the 16th and 17th, Pickett wrote the replies we began with. The threat, the thanks, and the list describing all 22 men as executed, though the last two were still alive.
Those replies were still on their way back when Peck learned, on the 20th, of the first hangings from a copy of the Fayetteville Observer. He told Pickett that eight Confederate officers, from colonel to captain, were held at Fort Monroe as hostages for the safety of the surviving North Carolinians. Pickett prepared to answer executions with executions and moved to secure his prisoners in case retaliation escalated. He also stated his legal position as clearly as possible. These men were deserters from military service, captured bearing arms against their flag. If Pickett could prove the eight officers had deserted the Union army, he had the right to hang them. If he could not, and hanged them anyway, he was simply committing murder.
Peck’s final letter offers no legal argument. He tells Pickett his duty has been performed and closes with a single sentence. The blood of these unfortunate men will be on your hands and on those of your associates. On the 22nd, Elijah Kellum and William Hill were hanged. The number on Pickett’s list was now accurate. The ten-for-one threat never came.
Pickett sent the report to General Benjamin Butler, who passed it to Ulysses S. Grant, who refused to authorize any retaliation. He had already made his position clear in an earlier letter to Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, stating he would not claim any right of retaliation to punish deserters who had actually been conscripted into the Confederate army and then joined the Union. The eight officers at Fort Monroe were not executed. None of Pickett’s 450 men were executed. The only threat in this correspondence that anyone carried out was the one against the 22.
On February 28, six days after the last execution, John Paris was given Hoke’s entire brigade as his congregation. He preached about the killing of the 22, comparing the deserters to Judas and Benedict Arnold. The sermon was printed and distributed. The purpose of the executions was announced from the pulpit: not justice for 22 men, but a lesson for others.
The lesson did not work. Later in 1864, men from Pickett’s division were still deserting, and Pickett complained that Jefferson Davis kept pardoning men sentenced to death. On the other side of the lines, a Union officer reported deep fear and discouragement among the North Carolina soldiers still serving in his ranks. The executions may not have stopped Confederates from running. But they may have made Union supporters think twice before enlisting.
Then the war ended, and the Kinston case did not disappear because the people who witnessed it were still alive and living in the same county. In September 1865, Captain W.H. Doherty, an assistant quartermaster in New Bern, began pressing to bring Pickett and Hoke to justice for killing U.S. soldiers while they were prisoners. He is the main reason any investigation happened at all, more than anyone else. No one knows why he cared so much.
A board of inquiry heard witnesses who were there: widows of the executed men, veterans of both armies, townspeople who had stood in that field. The most damning testimony came from John Nethercutt, the major who had begged Hoke to spare his men’s lives. He described what his battalion actually was and what his men had been promised. From that testimony, the board concluded that a number of the executed men had been in local defense service, not the regular Confederate army, and could not have been guilty of the crime for which they were hanged.
On November 18, 1865, the board named those responsible for what happened. Pickett, who approved the sentences. Hoke, who carried them out. The officers of the court-martial and the men who served as executioners. The board’s recommendation was explicit. A military commission should be appointed to try them.
Pickett did not wait to learn the outcome. With Jefferson Davis in a cell at Fort Monroe and charges against Lee looking increasingly likely, he took his family into exile in Canada for a time. In Washington, the first board’s report reached the office of Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, the army’s top lawyer, and Holt dismantled it. He said the board had misunderstood Nethercutt’s testimony, that the evidence on that point actually tended to prove the men were deserters, and that it had questioned too few witnesses. He described the dead as men who had been murdered. And in the same report, he concluded that the evidence before his office could not yet support charges against those responsible.
Men who were murdered. Not yet a case. In the same report. This was only his first reading of the file. The case was not closed. A second investigation was ordered.
The second board convened in Raleigh on January 23, 1866, and hit a wall. Witnesses did not want to talk for fear of being seen as informers. Memories, the investigators noted coldly, had become defective. They searched state records and enlistment rolls and went looking for the records of the court-martial itself. They did not find them. This must be said precisely, because this is where many accounts go wrong. It was never established that the records were destroyed. They simply could not be found by federal investigators in 1866, in a defeated region with uncooperative witnesses.
Meanwhile, something else was on its way to Holt’s office. George Pickett’s own wartime letters. Holt found his evidence in Pickett’s own words. In the “ten-for-one” letters and the “thanks for the list” letters, Pickett declared his responsibility for the executions as the commander responsible for them. This, Holt concluded, was evidence on which charges could be built. His recommendation changed completely. Arrest Pickett. Hold him for trial. The letters Pickett wrote to intimidate a Union general in 1864 became the strongest evidence against him in 1866.
On March 12, while the second board was still working in North Carolina, Pickett wrote to Grant. They had known each other before the war. Pickett’s letter was a careful attempt to take a position. He described people of ill will trying to stir up the troubles of the past and asked only for confirmation that his parole from Appomattox would protect him. He did not deny what happened. In correspondence that year, he wrote plainly: “I approved the sentences.” Four days later, Grant forwarded the request to President Andrew Johnson with his personal endorsement. He wrote that he knew Pickett personally as an honorable man. He admitted the punishment was harsh and that what Pickett had done could not be easily justified. Then he made the argument that mattered most to him. He warned that a trial would reopen the question of whether the United States intended to honor the contract made to secure the surrender of an armed enemy.
Pickett’s strongest defender did not say Pickett was right. He said peace was worth more than a trial. There is an irony in that. Two years earlier, Grant himself had drawn the very distinction that could have saved many of the 22, between deserters who had actually been conscripted into Confederate service and men who had never joined it at all.
On March 29, the second board submitted its report. It agreed that the Confederacy could legally execute true deserters, but not the men of the local defense battalions or bridge guards, nor the men who had crossed the lines before being conscripted. The little evidence it found suggested that some of the executed men had previously served the Confederate cause in some capacity. But it could not prove whether that made every one of them a deserter. After diligent search, the board found sufficient grounds to charge only one man: George Pickett, the man Grant had just called honorable.
In July, Holt again recommended Pickett’s arrest and trial. Nothing happened. In December, the government told Congress that no proceedings had been begun. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton added another reason. He was waiting for the full opinion of the Supreme Court in Ex parte Milligan, a case that cast serious doubt on trying anyone before a military commission once civilian courts had reopened.
So why was he never tried? Not for one reason. Grant’s intervention carried great weight. But so did the lost court records, the unwilling witnesses, a second board that could only clearly identify one man, and legal ground that shifted beneath the whole idea of a military trial. Each problem made the others harder to overcome. The case simply stopped.
Pickett returned to his home in Virginia, entered the insurance business in Richmond, and died in 1875. His funeral in Richmond came the same week the statue of Stonewall Jackson was unveiled. According to Collins, the Richmond Dispatch delayed news of Pickett’s funeral by two days to give the statue more coverage.
Twenty-two men, in four groups, over 18 days. Two on February 5, five on the 12th, thirteen on the 15th, and two on the 22nd. They were not the only men of Company F to die. The rest went north to Confederate prisons, where death continued. The gallows were only the fastest of the ways available to them.
Two promises were broken to these men. The Confederacy promised the local battalions they would never be moved outside their homeland, then moved them. The Union promised its North Carolina recruits protection if captured, but could not protect them. Rush Hawkins, who made that promise, wrote that his grief and shame were boundless. In an account written in 1868 and finally published in 1897, he poured his anger on Grant himself for refusing to help bring Pickett to trial.
Each of the 22 men received a trial. Some trials took minutes, at night, in a camp in the rain, before officers who already knew what the general wanted. But the formalities were observed. The charge was read. The finding was recorded. Their names were entered into a record. The man who approved their sentences was never entered into any record. No charge, no verdict, no acquittal. No court ever decided whether they were deserters or prisoners of war.
Even their memory faded, and with it their features, almost immediately. Witnesses before the first board spoke of three groups of hangings, not four. The New York Times announced on March 18, 1864, that 24 men had been hanged at Kinston. A historical marker erected in Kinston listed 22 names but stated plainly that they had deserted the Confederate army, the very point that remained in dispute for some of them. Even their names survived in different spellings.
Here they are, as recorded by historian Donald Collins: Joseph Haskett, David Jones, John L. Stanley, Lewis Bryant, Mitchell Busick, William Irving, Amos Armitage, John Brock, Joseph Brock, William Hadock, Jesse Summerlin, Andrew Britton, Lewis Freeman, John Freeman, Calvin Hoffman, Stephen Jones, Lewis Taylor, William Doughtry, Charles Cuthrell, William Jones, Elijah Kellum, and William J. Hill.