In mid-February 1864, from his headquarters in Petersburg, Virginia, Major General George Edward Pickett replied to a Union general across the lines. Brigadier General John J. Peck, commanding the Union District of North Carolina, had written to him twice. The first letter protested killings mentioned in a newspaper.
The second concerned something Peck had only just learned. 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. They were, he wrote, loyal and honest citizens of North Carolina, officially mustered into the United States Army, and he expected them to be treated as prisoners of war.
Over two days and two replies, Pickett’s response was not courteous. He wrote that he was holding some 450 officers and men of the United States Army, and that for every man Peck executed, he would execute ten. Then he did something crueler. He thanked Peck for politely furnishing the list of names, because it would help his officers identify any deserters not yet recognized.
Then he told Peck what had actually happened. He enclosed a list of twenty-two men of the Second North Carolina Union Volunteers, and wrote they had been executed according to the laws and usages of war. The list was not entirely accurate on the day he wrote it. Letters exchanged across the lines traveled slowly.
By the time Peck read the reply, the argument was over. The men he sought to protect had been hanged in a field outside Kinston in four groups over eighteen days, before a Confederate brigade ordered to watch and before the townspeople, while their families waited to claim the bodies. Two of the twenty-two on Pickett’s list were still alive when he wrote it. Within a week, they were dead as well.
Here is the question that outlived every man in this story. They were Southerners. Many had worn Confederate uniform in some capacity, and for some, whether they were properly Confederate soldiers was the heart of the matter. They crossed into Union lines, took the oath, and put on 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, it made them soldiers, and soldiers captured in uniform were prisoners of war. Both sides made a promise to these men.
Neither side kept it. Both legal positions were arguable, and the argument continued for another two years while the United States 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 twenty-two men he condemned each received a trial. He never needed one. North Carolina was one of the last states to secede, and it did so only after its voters had once rejected the idea. By traditional counts, it sent more men to the Confederate armies than any other Southern state and also produced the greatest number of 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, singling out North Carolina men.
Nothing, he wrote, would stop it but the death penalty, applied uniformly and without mercy. 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, partisan guards, and bridge guards raised for home defense, whose men served for a week and returned to their homes in between. When they volunteered, the men would later say they were promised orally, and never in writing, that they would not be removed from their home county. That is the first promise in this story. Nethercutt’s Battalion, near Kinston, was one such unit, and many of the men who would hang had served in it.
In October 1863, Richmond consolidated these companies into a regular regiment, the Sixty-sixth North Carolina, prepared for service outside the district. Their commander, Major John Nethercutt, would later frame their reaction in a single sentence under oath. The men complained they had been treated unjustly. Fewer than half reported.
Some tried the courts. The rest went to the woods or went 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 of the men did return. But some never came back. They crossed to the Union-occupied 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 his recruiters were asked, Hawkins remembered decades later, was what would become of them if the rebels captured them. Hawkins promised them protection to the utmost extent.
That is the second promise in this story. There is no record Hawkins ever met the men 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, recruiting for the Union on the occupied coast was no longer strictly voluntary.
Peck himself confirms this in writing, naming two methods: actual impressment and draft. Many of the men who died at Kinston would say they were threatened into enlisting. They were told that if they did not join, they would be taken across the lines and shot. They were enrolled in Company F of the Second 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 buffalo. It was not a compliment. On January 18, 1864, Company F was sent to an advanced post called Beech Grove, near Bachelor’s Creek, west of New Bern.
It was a wooden fort hidden in the woods, held by the North Carolinians and a detachment of the 132nd New York under First Lieutenant Samuel Lyth. Inside Union lines, inside a hidden fort, the new recruits felt safe from the men they had once fought beside. Around the same time, Lee proposed an operation to retake New Bern. Davis approved and placed Pickett in command above Robert Hoke, the North Carolina brigadier who had drawn up the plan.
In late 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 advanced post in the woods. The Union tried to warn Beech Grove, but everything went wrong.
One messenger got lost in the swamp. Fog hid the signal stations from view. Other messengers were killed or captured on the way. The North Carolinians knew what capture would mean for them.
They offered to lead the garrison out through roads they had known since childhood. Lyth refused to move without orders. When the Confederate regiments appeared before the fort, he surrendered without firing a shot. Later accounts were harsh toward him, and most came from men with reasons to blame him, but the result is beyond dispute.
On February 2, the Confederates captured them. Fifty-three men, effectively 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 Dover Road, wet and exhausted after marching through rain and mud. Word spread that North Carolina men were among the prisoners, and soldiers came to look at them. Two prisoners were recognized, not by officers reading papers, but by men who had once stood beside them in the ranks of Company B of the Tenth North Carolina Artillery. A sergeant named Blount King, with Lieutenant H.
M. Whitehead, named two men from their old company. David Jones, about twenty-one, and Joseph Haskett, about twenty-six. 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 recorded memory long after the fact, not an official transcript. But this is what he said.
Pickett confronted the two men and asked where they had been. He listened to them. Then, according to King, he said: damn you, I don’t suppose you will ever go back there again, you damned rascals. I will have you shot, and all the other damned rascals who desert.
Jones replied that he did not care if they shot him now or whatever they did to him. Then King said Pickett turned to his generals, saying they should have a court-martial for these men soon, and after executing some, the rest would stop deserting. One of the generals, Brigadier General Montgomery Corse, replied as King remembered 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 some, the rest would 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 legal form to what had already been decided.
A court-martial was organized almost immediately. Its composition, its speed, and what it refused to hear would all be debated later. According to the most careful reconstruction, the court heard twenty-seven cases, all for desertion. Twenty-two of those cases would end at the rope.
One man would be acquitted of desertion. What happened to the other four, this story could not trace. The other twenty-six 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 Union recruiters had forced them to take the oath. Enlist or be shot. Their claim was ignored.
They were sentenced to be hanged on February 5 before Hoke’s brigade. Deserters from the Confederate army were usually executed by firing squad. These two would be hanged, a death usually reserved for something worse than desertion. Whether the court meant it or not, the method carried a message.
In its view, these two had not simply left. They had gone over to the other side. The prisoners reached Kinston on the fourth and were lodged in the county jail. Witnesses later described men sleeping on the floor, lacking food and bedding.
Those with families nearby fared better, wives and neighbors bringing food and quilts to the door when guards allowed it. On the morning of the fifth, 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 severe men I have met in my life.
That sentence tells us much about John Paris. It tells us almost nothing about what two young men felt on the last morning of their lives. Meanwhile, the army faced a practical problem. Hangings were rare.
No one had a rope, and no one had a hangman. Both were found at the railroad depot, where a sergeant was sent to get a rope from a shipment of pontoon bridge equipment and proceed to the execution ground. That 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. He is the chief 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 in view of the town. Hoke’s brigade was marched out and formed in a square around it. Hoke supervised the proceedings.
Pickett attended. A captain read out the findings. The nooses were placed. The two men were hanged.
Afterward, King was seen cutting the buttons from their uniforms. The deaths 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 left to the prisoners.
According to Walter Harrison, Pickett’s inspector general, a sergeant had a list of his company’s names in his pocket and used it to report the men who had deserted his unit. Harrison did not say who that sergeant was or what became of him. While the court sat at Kinston, it sentenced five more men to death: John L. Stanley, Louis Bryant, Mitchell Bussick, William Irving of Nethercutt’s Battalion, and Amos Armett 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 in a square around the first gallows, and asked if anything could be done. Hoke’s reply was curt. He had his orders, and the men would hang.
On the eleventh, at Goldsboro, the court heard thirteen more men, one by one. Families came but achieved nothing. Bryan McAllum later said he hired a lawyer for William Hadlock, but the court refused to let him appear. Other relatives later reported they were not allowed to bring witnesses.
Thirteen death sentences came out of that room. Hoke ordered the five previously sentenced to be executed the next day and ordered a large gallows built to accommodate the numbers to come. On the twelfth, the five men were brought out. The eldest, Amos Armett, forty-four and gray-haired, spoke for them.
He said he had done wrong in enlisting when he reached New Bern. Mitchell Bussick added that he had only joined because Union recruiters threatened to kill him. They ended with a message to their former comrades in the field. They had done 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 families who had to keep living in that county. No one in that field recorded which motive lay behind them. An aide read the sentence. The 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. And in the same narrative, he cast their grief as shame. The shame these men had brought on their family names. Paris does something else in that cell as well.
As the condemned men talked, 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 likewise passed the names of their neighbors to the general. His sympathy and his contempt sit side by side, and that is the true condition of the town.
Catherine Summerlin was allowed a brief farewell with her husband Jesse. While she was there, another prisoner, William Hadlock, 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 fifteenth, two more, John and Joseph Brock, were taken to the Neuse River and baptized there by the Reverend George W.
Camp. On the fifteenth, 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 in the center. 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 trap 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 them back had to ask. Bryan McAllum went to General Hoke to request the body of his brother-in-law so he could bury him in his United States Army uniform. According to McAllum’s account, Hoke asked him whether a respectable man would bury anyone in a Yankee uniform. Even in death, the question of what these men wore still divided them.
One widow testified she had no wagon to carry her husband home. So she sent her teenage son and a young nephew. They found the body and brought it home. Other widows lived inside Union lines and could not cross into Confederate Kinston at all.
Their husbands stayed 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 he 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 pass over.
He was a young illiterate farmer, and testimony later raised doubt about whether the Confederate army had ever accepted him for service at all. According to one account, he was rejected as physically unfit for Confederate service and only later accepted into the 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 have to 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 United States uniform.
He enclosed an order signed by Abraham Lincoln the previous summer, stipulating that for every Union soldier killed in violation of the laws of war, a Confederate soldier would be executed in return. He wrote as though the killing must have happened without Pickett’s knowledge, asked him to punish those responsible, and said 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 least about.
Then, around February 13, Peck first learned that Company F had been captured. He wrote again, including the names of the fifty-three men, calling them loyal and honest North Carolina citizens, regularly mustered into the Second North Carolina Infantry. When Peck wrote that letter, seven of those men were already dead. By the time it reached Pickett, twenty were dead.
It is easy to read Pickett’s thanks for the list and conclude 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 little for or against them.
On the sixteenth and seventeenth, Pickett wrote the replies with which this story began. The threat, the thanks, and the list describing all twenty-two men as executed, though the last two were still alive. Those replies were still on their way back when Peck learned, on the twentieth, 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 control of the prisoners in case retaliation escalated. He also stated the legal position as clearly as possible. These men were deserters from military service, captured bearing arms against their colors. If Pickett could prove the eight officers had deserted the Union army, he had the right to hang them.
If he could not prove it 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 unhappy men will rest on you and your associates.
On the twenty-second, Elijah Kellum and William Hill were hanged. The number on Pickett’s list was now accurate, and the ten-for-one principle never materialized. Pick raised the report to General Benjamin Butler, who passed it to Ulysses S. Grant, who in turn declined to authorize any retaliation.
He had already made his position clear in an earlier letter to Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, insisting he would claim no right to retaliate for the punishment of deserters who were actually mustered 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 twenty-two. On February 28, six days after the last execution, John Paris was given Hoke’s entire brigade as his congregation. He preached on the killing of the twenty-two, comparing the deserters to Judas and Benedict Arnold. The sermon was printed and distributed.
The purpose of the executions had been announced from the pulpit, not to achieve justice for twenty-two men, but to be a lesson to others. The lesson did not work. Later in 1864, men of 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 great fear and discouragement among the North Carolina soldiers still serving in his ranks.
Perhaps the executions did not stop Confederates from running. But they may have made Union sympathizers think twice before joining. Then the war ends, and the Kinston case does not disappear, because the people who witnessed it are still alive and living in the same county. In September 1865, Captain W.
H. Dougherty, an assistant quartermaster at New Bern, began pressing to bring Pickett and Hoke to justice for killing United States soldiers while in captivity. He is the main reason any investigation ever happened at all, more than anyone else. No one knows why he cared so much.
A board of inquiry heard the witnesses who had been there, the widows of the executed men, veterans of both armies, and 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. 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. Pickett, who confirmed the sentences. Hoke, who carried them out. The officers of the court-martial and the men who had served as hangmen.
The board’s recommendation was explicit. A military commission should be appointed to try them. Pickett did not wait to learn the result. With Jefferson Davis in a cell at Fort Monroe and charges against Lee 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 chief 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 examined too few witnesses. He described the dead as murdered men. And in the same report, he concluded that the evidence before his office could not yet support charges against those responsible.
Murdered men. Not yet a case. In the same report. That is only his first reading of the file.
The case was not closed. A second investigation was ordered. The second board convened at Raleigh on January 23, 1866, and hit a dead end. Witnesses did not want to talk, for fear of being seen as informers.
Memories, the investigators noted coolly, had become defective. They searched state records and muster rolls, and went looking for the records of the court-martial itself. They did not find them. This must be stated precisely, because many accounts go wrong here.
There is no proof 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 words. In the ten-for-one letters, in the thanks-for-the-list letters, Pickett declared his responsibility for the executions as the commander responsible for them. That, Holt concluded, is evidence upon which charges could be built. His recommendation changed completely.
Arrest Pickett. Hold him for trial. The letters Pickett had written 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 evil intent 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 sanctioned 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 severe, and that what Pickett had done could not be easily justified.
Then he made the argument that mattered to him most. 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 does not say Pickett was right. He says peace is 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 twenty-two victims, between deserters actually mustered into Confederate service and men who never joined it at all. On March 29, the second board submitted its report. It agreed the Confederacy could lawfully execute true deserters, but not men of the local defense battalions or bridge guards, nor men who crossed the lines before being conscripted.
The little evidence it found suggested 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 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 commenced. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton added another reason. He was waiting for the Supreme Court’s full opinion in Ex parte Milligan, a case that threw serious doubt on trying anyone before a military commission once civilian courts were reopened.
So why was he never tried? Not for any single reason. Grant’s intervention was weighty. But so were the lost court records, the unwilling witnesses, a second board that could clearly identify only one man, and legal ground that shifted beneath the whole idea of 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 wider coverage. Twenty-two men in four groups over eighteen days. Two on February 5, five on the twelfth, thirteen on the fifteenth, and two on the twenty-second. They were not the only men of Company F who died.
The rest went north to Confederate prisons, where death continued. The gallows were only the fastest of the ways to die available to them. Two promises were broken to these men. The Confederacy promised the local battalions they would never be moved outside their homeland, and then moved them.
The Union promised its North Carolina recruits protection if captured, and could not protect them. Rush Hawkins, who made that promise, wrote that his grief and shame were boundless. And in a narrative 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 those twenty-two men had a trial.
Some trials took minutes, at night, in 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 in a register. The man who confirmed their sentences had his name entered in no register. 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 at once. Witnesses before the first board spoke of three groups of hangings, not four. The New York Times announced on March 18, 1864, that twenty-four men had been hanged at Kinston. A historical marker erected in Kinston listed twenty-two names, but clearly stated they had deserted the Confederate army, the very point still disputed for some of them.
Even their names survived in different spellings. And here they are, as recorded by historian Donald Collins. Joseph Haskett, David Jones, John L. Stanley, Louis Bryant, Mitchell Bussick, William Irving, Amos Armett, John Brock, Joseph Brock, William Hadlock, Jesse Summerlin, Andrew Britton, Louis Freeman, John Freeman, Calvin Hoffman, Stephen Jones, Louis Taylor, William Dougherty, Charles Cuthrell, William Jones, Elijah Kellum, and William J.
Hill.