Amazing North Carolina by Theresa Jensen Lacey

Author:Theresa Jensen Lacey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

The Tale of an Officer and a Gentleman

During the surrender to Union forces, Confederate Major James Reilly, the last commander of Fort Fisher, handed over his saber to Captain E. Lewis Moore from Massachusetts.

After the loss of Fort Fisher, Reilly was a prisoner of war for four months in Fort Delaware. Upon taking the Oath of Allegiance to the federal government, Reilly returned to the Wilmington area and spent his remaining years farming and enjoying a celebrity status for his courage during the fight over the fort.

In 1893 he unexpectedly received a special gift from the captain to whom he had surrendered thirty years before. Lewis had located Reilly through newspaper inquiries, and returned what Reilly had given him as he stood at Battery Buchanan and surrendered Fort Fisher.

Reilly died peacefully the year after receiving the saber he had relinquished to Lewis at the end of the battle of Fort Fisher. The saber, on loan from Reilly’s descendants, is on exhibit at the Fort Fisher State Historic Site.

Hard Times in the Carolinas

During the Civil War, civilians as well as soldiers had to make do with what was on hand, or create substitutions. What’s amazing is that some of these remedies and recipes are still in use today.

Women made apple pie without apples by mixing any kind of sweetener, butter, and nutmeg with a bowl of moistened crackers (that’s where that recipe came from!). Coffee substitute was made from roasted acorns and a small amount of bacon fat or lard, or dried sassafras leaves and ground okra seeds. Coffee drinkers in the Confederate states stretched that bean by adding wild chicory—and you can still find some brands of coffee-chicory blends on grocery shelves today.

Dysentery could be cured with salt and vinegar, boiled together. One grandmother remembers that old folks in her family used charcoal cooled from the fire, then pounded and mixed with milk and turpentine to treat scarlet fever and diphtheria.

Did You Know? “Swoosh” or “sloosh” was an unusual campfire concoction made by Confederate soldiers: they ground corn with their rifle butts, mixed the corn with bacon drippings, molded it around their bayonets, and baked it in the campfire.

When Even the Bravest Man Wept

General Braxton Bragg assigned Confederate Major Pollock B. Lee the emotionally charged task of surrendering the city of Charlotte to Federal troops at the end of the war. Lee had always been a stalwart soldier, not given to emotional outbursts, but a comrade wrote of him that day, “It was the only time I ever saw him let fall a tear.”

Sunken History

Of all the Civil War sites in the Tarheel State, perhaps the most historically valuable is under water—three hundred feet of water. On New Year’s Eve 1862, the Union’s first ironclad ship, USS Monitor, sank along with many of her crew off the coast of Cape Hatteras.

The Monitor had recently battled the Confederate ironclad the Merrimack (also known as the Virginia), off the coast of Hampton Roads, Virginia. The battle ended in a stalemate, and the Monitor set sail for Beaufort to help the Union blockade beat back the Confederate blockade runners.

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