26 Norta Carotina Troops, 1861-65.

The fall of 1864, this battalion spent at Weldon. On 4
October Captain W. S. Flynn’s company was added and on
10 October this battalion and the First Regiment of Re-
serves united in an offer of their services to go to Virginia.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCES.

The writer, in August, was assigned to duty as Adjutant of
_the post of Weldon and filled that position until called to the
command of his company by the subsequent retirement of
Captain Hicks and Lieutenant Draughon. The following
personal experiences may be of interest. On 31 August, a
dispatch came that the enemy had burnt Winton and New-
som’s and were advancing. The commander of the sub-de-
partment issued an order to Major Walter Clark, of the Sev-
entieth Regiment (First Junior Reserves) to go to the front,
and take command of the scattered companies, infantry,
cavalry or artillery in that section and keep the enemy in
check till he could send back authentic information. The
writer was ordered to accompany him as Acting Adjutant-
General. An engine and a box car containing our horses, were
obtained by an order for them from General Arnold H. Elzey,
commanding at Richmond, who happened to be passing
through Weldon. The engine ran down the Seaboard road,
ear in front, till we reached Boykins, where Lieutenant Bien-
venu, of the Louisiana Artillery, was on post with a section
of his battery. He and some of his men armed with rifles
were taken on board. Lieutenant Bienvenu and his men,
took post with us on the top of the front end of the car and
we ran down to the end of the track at Nottoway river. The
enemy had burnt a few houses but our pickets reported they
had left. Returning to Boykins the special train was sent
back to Weldon while we saddled our horses and reached
Murfreesboro by 10 o’clock at night. Off at daylight next
morning, we went to Winton to find the enemy had burnt
houses there and withdrawn. Thence we went on in the Cole-
raine section towards Pitch Landing, everywhere visiting
our cavalry outposts. Nothing more being left to be done,
we got back to Murfreesboro by dinner and here a singular
thing happened. Major Clark seeing a soldier sitting on

SEVENTY-First REGIMENT. 27

the porch with a Spencer seven-shooter, captured from the
enemy, reached out his hand to look at it, when to his sur-
prise the soldier held on to one end of it and declined to
let it go out of his hand. When we went to the stables to
order our horses, he kept at a respectful distance, but in sight.
Soon after Captain Hugh L. Cole, enrolling officer of that
district, whom we knew, came over to the hotel, and at sight
of us seemed much amused for some unknown cause, while
the soldier suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Not till
after the war did we learn the solution. The sight of two
boys of 17, one wearing the stars of Major and the other the
bars of a Lieutenant together with our very rapid movements,
had caused some of the cavalry the former had been sent
to command to suspect we were spies and we had been vir-
tually prisoners in the hotel ‘unbeknownst to ourselves’ till
Captain Cole raised the blockade. That evening we reach-
ed Jackson, having ridden that day 72 miles, capturing on
the way a Yankee straggler and a Confederate deserter, both
of whom, with the aid of two cavalrymen, picked up by us,
we carried into Weldon next day as the sole result of our
commission to “take command of our forces on the Chowan
and skirmish with the enemy, falling back if necessary, but
sending all the information to be gathered.”

PLYMOUTH.

After this, in October, the Seventieth Regiment and An-
derson’s Battalion were ordered to Tarboro and thence to
Plymouth, where the “Albemarle” had just been blown up
by Lieutenant W. B. Cushing, of the Federal Navy. After
a forced march, just as we were nearly to Plymouth, we met
the Fiftieth Nerth Carolina, which had been forced to evac-
uate the town by the Federal fleet now that their dreaded en-
emy, the iron-clad “Albemarle,” was out of the way. An-
derson’s Battalion returned to Tarboro and thence to Wel-
don, leaving the First Regiment at Fort Branch near Ham-
ilton.

SECOND REGIMENT ORGANIZED.

On 7 December the company of Captain W. R. Williams
was added, making a full regiment, of which Jno. H. Ander-