1863 photograph by Alexander Gardner
Library of Congress, American Memory Collection

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This Week's Story

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Petty Shore
August 14, 1863

To: Isaac Pierce, Co. G, 31st Infty:

Dear Isaac:

I hope this letter finds you and your friends well. I hope you are still in Raleigh and not on the way to Virginia, because down here on the river we have been hearing some unsettling stuff about the men of the southern states' armies. We really don't know if it's just more lies and tall tales or not, but we have seen some of it in newspapers that some of the Pennsylvania men brought over in their recent visits from Plymouth. They say that the CSA Gen'l Lee took most of his men all the way up into Pennsylvania in early July and got clipped hard by the Yankees at some little burg that had a big boot and shoe factory.

The worst part of what we are hearing down here is that Gen'l Lee took a whole lot of North Carolina men with him on that long run up there, trying to get something to wear on their feet, and that practically every one of our boys was either killed or shot up bad. I hope this turns out to be not so true, because there must have been 300 fellows from around here that were with the CSA in Virginia. It would be terrible if we were to find out that we not only were fighting for the wrong things, but that we also were marching along behind men who didn't even know where to fight, and were getting us all killed.

If this stuff is true, I would have to ask what in the name of the good God did all those men go away up into Pennsylvania for if all Jeff Davis wants to do is steal shoes and shoot Yankees. It's pretty clear down here by the river that if it's Yankees he wants to fight, he could probably find just as many of them around here as he could by wagon-training a whole army all that long way to Pennsylvania. I'm here to tell you, there are a whole passle of Union-blue men roaming around our neighborhood. They usually don't stay on our side of the river more than a day or two, but they sure do come and go just about like they please. And you can't find any Gen'l Lees or CSA around here to keep them chased back to Plymouth.

And not only that, nowadays if we need a pair of boots, all we have to do is go down to the riverbank, hail a boat and make some kind of a trade. I stay all mixed up about what I'm going to have to do. I know how old I am. I'm still out here with mama and Abigail, cropping, and I would really want to go back with Job and Priscilla this winter and get another term at the Academy with Mr. Sharpe. But I don't know if that will be possible for me.

There sure are a lot of strangers passing through mama's fields and woods down to the river nowadays. It's not just the coloreds – there are a whole lot of strange white faces coming along, too. We don't try to stop any of them, because they don't bother us much and they mostly stay out of the crops and the chicken pen, but it does make you wonder what is really going on in our part of this Old North State. If we did try to stop them, it might cause more trouble than if we just turn our heads and let them pass on. And what we're doing, I guess, is what most everybody else on this side of the county is doing.

I talked to a few of the white trampers in the field the other day – I never like to have much truck with the coloreds anywhere – and they seem mostly to be coming straight across the county – coming from around Scotland Neck and Tarboro, and all heading for our river. We know why they're going there. The big Union boats are running up and down out there all day and most of the nights. These people are bound to be getting on the boats and barges and going somewhere. I would expect it's either Plymouth or Elizabeth City. We hear they don't have much of a place for any more strangers around Edenton and Rocky Hock, and Plymouth is mostly an army camp, so the thinking is that the Union men have set up some kind of a receiving place around Elizabeth City, which location is their big back-up supply station for this part of the country.

We never get any mail from you any more. Do you know anything? If you do and if you get the time, I certainly hope you will sit down every chance you get and put it on paper and send it our way. It might not get here, or we might be gone when it does, but at least somewhere along the line somebody around here might find out that you and yours are still alive and kicking. I keep trying to send my letters to you by giving them to folks going toward Murfreesboro or Jackson or Garysburg. It's no use to try to send anything west from Windsor any more. How close they're getting to you I have no way of knowing, but at least writing to you and thinking I'm telling you things helps keep me from going completely daft.

From the words in the Union papers we saw, not only did our folks take a kicking in Pennsylvania, but the Union men now have taken control of the whole Mississippi River and its valley, all the way from the Big Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. If all that is true, even more than Pennsylvania it means that the CSA cause is lost, because it means that Texas is out of it and the CS government doesn't have a usable rowboat left anywhere now, and I'm telling you I have learned right here at Petty Shore in the past few months what it means for one side to have all the boats. In this world today, if you don't have the boats, you don't have a chance, I don't think.

Along about the end of July, several big CSA forage parties – some people said they saw boys from the 17th – hit the eastern part of the county, stealing cows, pigs, corn, cotton and meat. They didn't come through mama's fields; mostly they went through above Winton and through Christian Harbor down near the Bertie line. But it sure did put a short stopper on the visits from Abigail's friends down at Plymouth.

We heard that it was all part of a big plan to set up a raid on Jack Fairless across the river at Wingfield. The CSA boys started rowing across the river from around Swain's Mill one night and hit the swamps hard in the south part of Gates. Word that got back was when they got down to Fairless's place in Chowan County, they found practically nothing there and also practically nobody, just one old white woman that said she had been cooking for the buffaloes and an old colored man who they couldn't get to say much of anything. Now everybody's wondering if Jack even had a military camp there, or if the whole thing was just talk. Or if somebody let him know the CSA was rowing the river in plenty of time for him to pull back up Bennetts Creek into the deep swamps.

Milly and her kids, Elizabeth and Sarah and their waif and Priscilla have all been out here at mama's place for the past some days, helping her and Abigail and Margaret put up vegetables for next winter. The corn and butterbeans and snaps and tomatoes are coming in good now and they have been busy boiling and packing it all away. The vegetables came in so good this year that we all are expecting this winter won't be as hungered as last. Another thing that will help is that the herring-run this past spring was better than it has been for many a year, and there are a lot of barrels of herring salted away. Also, we've got a lot of good-eating shad-roe put aside and we've even still got hocks and chitlins left from last fall's hog-killings. If the Confeds don't steal it and the Yankees don't buy everything they've got, these hard-working women around here are not going to be starving come the snow. And they've put up Lord knows how much watermelon-rind pickle. All last year's is gone, and I can't wait for this batch to set.

I've got to quit writing now, and get to doing something more useful, like splitting kindling. The Lord knows that right now there's not much that I like to be doing better than setting pen to paper – unless it's reading something. But I'll tell you, I've been through the Bible enough and I'm still looking around but can't find anything else to read that might help me find some of the answers I need to know.

Brother, if you've got any answers for me, please put them on paper somewhere, sometime, and send them this way. I sure miss talking to you.

Affectionately yours, James

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The foregoing is a selection from the eBook "Petty Shore ~ Letters from James." The eBook is based on the written records and oral history of a family living near the Chowan River between Winton and the Wiccacon during the 1800s. The "Letters from James," based on events during the Civil War, were written by James Pearce in January 2000, and no claim is made that they are literally factual.

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This Week's Verse

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I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple blossoms fill the air ~
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand,
And lead me into his dark land,
And close my eyes and quench my breath
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .

But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

(Alan Seeger wrote this poem in 1915. A 28-year-old
American in the French army, he was killed
in action on July 4, 1916.)

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Last Week's Mail

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To The Poor Town News ~ I have just read and printed the article on The Chowan River. I have always thought it was the most beautiful river I have ever seen, and my Dad would have enjoyed reading this, so I printed it in his memory. He loved that river and Hertford County. I can't seem to stop printing "The Poor Town News." I am afraid I will miss out on something. ~ Regards, Gerri Overton Abrahamsen, North Carolina.

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To The Poor Town News ~ Technology, I guess, has changed newspapers the way it has everything else. And when you consider Rudolph and his talent ("The Doctors Say I'm Getting Better") you can only guess at what this country lost by dividing its citizens into the two groups. ~ Betty, New York.

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To The Poor Town News ~ I love The Poor Town News! Greetings to the editors. ~ Roy Parker Jr., North Carolina.

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