© Copyright 2000 James David Pearce
Petty Shore
June 14, 1863
To: Isaac Pierce, Co. G, 31st Infty:
My dear brother:
I hope this finds things well with you and your regiment. We've had some good weather here this spring and that helps get the crops started.
There are a lot more interesting things going on around here that I need to tell you about. The whole family is still healthy and doing fairly well, but Robert Johnston, mama's neighbor on the Winton road, came down with the pleurisy and double pneumonia about a month ago and never did get well. They buried him on the farm, with the widow and all the girls there, but his boy didn't get to come home for the funeral. He is somewhere up in Virginia. Now we have one more farm where the women and little girls will have to do the man's work. Job certainly can't look out for them too, though he sure does for everybody he can. Mr. Johnston didn't own any colored folks either.
Something pretty big apparently is going on all around us. The Union men from Plymouth are coming by to visit more and more often, and I hear the same thing is happening around Winton and Colerain. Some people don't like it, but as long as they keep behaving themselves, most of the rest don't make too much fuss about it. We don't hear too much from the secessionists anymore. They say there still is a pretty big crowd of them over toward the narrow river, especially up around the CSA Fort Branch at Hamilton, but the ones nearer here are keeping kind of low.
More and more strange coloreds are passing through, I guess making their way to the wide river. They come mostly late in the afternoon, night and early mornings, but whenever we go down to the river bank and look around, we hardly ever run across any of them. It's like they were like those rats that just keep marching right on to the sea to drown themselves, but not many around here think they are drowning. We're pretty sure they are collecting in the swamps around the creek mouths, and that Union boats from Plymouth and Elizabeth City are coming by regularly to pick them up.
One thing we hear for sure that is probably drawing a lot of the young bucks is that the Unionists at Plymouth have started organizing colored soldier regiments. Ain't that another peck of peas? The word we get is that they don't let any of the coloreds have any ranks higher than privates. All their officers and overseers are white men, but the colored privates are getting PAID in USA money! What do you think of that? When the word gets around all the plantations that if they can get to the river they can get Yankee dollars to spend and a uniform and shoes to wear, there is no way the big folks are going to be able to keep them in the fields, not around here where the seceshes grab everything and everybody they can to send to Raleigh or to Virginia.
I don't really blame the coloreds for running. If I lived at one of the accursed places where my shanty had a dirt floor and I never had a second shirt to put on my back or a shoe to put on my foot, I'd run too. Not to mention having to work like a mule all hours of the day and a lot of the night, for no pay.
These runaways are making a lot of big farm owners mad, and also making some more of them move. Two families from close to Hamilton, in Bertie on this side of the narrow river, are said to have pulled up lock, stock, barrel, mules, family and slaves and moved to north Alabama, where they hope the Union men won't get to them. They say some of your state regiments gave them mule-and-wagon trains and escorted them most of the way.
They still think their slaves are valuable property, but they don't know exactly what to do about Mr. Lincoln's proclamation of last year and they want to move them to some place where they can hold on to them. I guess they feel that every young black buck that gets enlisted in the Union army is another 300 shin-plasters out of their pockets. Plus the danger that these runaways may be going to get their hands on some guns and may think about shooting some white men for fornicating with their women with the idea of breeding more farm hands.
I hate that I do it, because I am a white man and I want to be true to my kind, but I can't help but think about what I'd be doing right now if my mama had been an African. But my mama is not an African, and I'm still mixed up on what I am going to have to do before I get 18 years old.
One of the Union men that has been stopping by to see mama and Abigail and buy chickens and eggs etc. is a Sgt. Henry Brown, from Pennsylvania. I've met him a couple of times, and he seems like a decent fellow. He's always polite and the lieutenant who usually comes with him is really very courteous around ladies. ( I've been kind of wondering if Abigail is taking a liking to Sgt. Brown.)
Well, I was talking to Sgt. Brown a couple of weeks ago, and he was telling me about the big fires they had last year up at Winton and around the lumber mill further up the river, at Bartonsville. The word we'd had here was that both of them were burned on purpose by drunk Yankee soldiers, but Sgt. Brown denies that happened. He said he doesn't know for sure how the Bartonsville fire started, but he said that if the Winton fire wasn't set by people from Winton, then it certainly was an accident.
He said he was with the company that went ashore at Winton to see how much cotton was in the riverbank warehouses, and he said they found them jammed full. The Confederates wouldn't send any escorts down to haul the cotton to Weldon or Tarboro, and it evidently had kept piling up down by the river. The Federals got word of the situation, and went ashore to see if they could buy it, but the owners refused flat out to sell to them. The Union men said they would go back to Plymouth for further orders, but told the cotton men that if they didn't sell it, the Union army would probably declare it contraband and come back with barges to grab it in a couple of days, and pay nothing.
Brown said his company hadn't much more than got back in the channel and were passing Barfields when they spied smoke back in the direction of Winton. He said they suspicioned somebody might be burning some cotton, but they didn't have any idea until they came back two days later that the cotton warehouse fire had burned out of hand and took most of the town down with it, including the courthouse and all the county books.
I don't know if that's a lie or not, but to me it sounds just about as truthful as a lot of the other things that we have been hearing. I hope up in Raleigh your regiment has some better ways to get the news than we do down here. All we know is what every jackleg going through wants to tell us. Most of the news we get is what is passed around at Sunday meeting after the preacher shuts up, and what farmers put out while hanging around Job's wagon-shop or the store in Harrellsville.
Last winter you know the Confederates got enough brass to march through this county and Bertie to try to take a swipe at Plymouth, and hit the Yankees pretty hard for a couple of days before they had to back off. Well, just last month the Unionists must have decided to get even, because they sent one bunch ashore at Winton to forage up the road toward Weldon, and another bunch through Windsor to scratch at the secessionists around Fort Branch. None of this came to much, but I still wonder if it's going to be very long before the Union men decide to come on over and take this county over completely. They come and go around here now just about like they please, and I sometimes feel like it would make life a whole lot easier if we could be all the way on one side or the other, instead of always stuck in between.
We hear the Confeds are making noises about coming back toward Plymouth. The Union men moved up toward Williamston late last month and almost took that place, and I think the secessionists don't like having to be always wondering when they are going to be hit again. Also, word around here is that the CSA is thinking about coming through here, crossing the river and taking down Fairless and his crowd over at Wingfield. We just don't really know anything. If they do take out Fairless and the buffaloes, I don't know whether we are going to laugh or cry. The Yankees seem to think he is a Union man, but most of us around here are not so sure.
I sure hope you and your regiment can find some things to laugh about, or at least smile.
Your brother, James
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