270 NortH Carorina Troops, 1861-’65.

railroad had been given up, and Sherman had made his mem-
orable march through Georgia to the sea, and through the
Carolinas, having as his objective point Goldsboro, where he
proposed to form a junction with Schofield, coming up from
New Bern via Kinston, and Terry, moving from Wilmington.
This was accomplished by him on 23 March, 1865. The giant
arms of an octopus were rapidly closing upon the Confeder-
acy in her final desperate but grand struggle for independ-
ence. Just one month previous to the junction of these three
armies, flushed as they were with victory, that old war-horse,
General Joe Johnston, had relieved Beauregard at Charlotte,
N. C., and was charged with the difficult task of collecting
and uniting in one army the scattered forces of Bragg, Har-
dee, Hood and Beauregard, for one supreme effort to stay the
tide of invasion, and he prepared, if necessary, to unite
his forces at Danville with those of Lee, who even then con-
templated abandoning his position around Petersburg for
that purpose, with the hope that the two armies might fall
upon Sherman and crush him before Grant could come to
his assistance. Vain hope, born of desperation, for Sher-
man, having reached Goldsboro, his next plan was not to fol-
low after Johnston, but to open communication with Grant,
so that the two might act together. This is shown by his
special order, issued about 5 April, at Goldsboro, which reads:
“The next grand objective is to place this army (with its full
equipment) north of Roanoke river, facing west, with a base
for supplies at Norfolk, and at Winton or Murfreesboro, on
the Chowan, and in full communication with the Army of the
Potomac at Petersburg; and also to do the enemy as much
harm as possible en route.” His army was to move on 10
April, in three columns of 25,000 each, with his cavalry un-
der Kilpatrick aiming direct for Weldon until it had crossed
the Tar, the general point of concentration being Warrenton,
N.C. But the whole plan was suddenly changed by the news
of the fall of Richmond and Petersburg, which reached him
at Goldsboro on 6 April. Inferring that Lee would succeed
in making junction with Johnston, with a fraction of his
army at least, somewhere in his front, he prepared on the day
he had appointed (10 April) to leave Goldsboro to move

BakeEr’s CoMMAND AT WELDON. 271

straight on Raleigh, which place he reached on 13 April, and
found that Johnston had moved further on.

Let us now leave Sherman at Raleigh, and go back to the
little force at Weldon. And in the outset, I take pleasure in
acknowledging my indebtedness for much I shall now recount
to my old commander, Captain L. H. Webb, than whom a
truer soldier never drew sword, and who has very kindly fur-
nished me extracts from his diary kept during this period.
I have also obtained valuable information from that gallant
soldier, Hon. Jas. C. MacRae, then Assistant Adjutant-Gen-
eral on General Baker’s staff, and since one of the Supreme

Court Judges of North Carolina.
The task imposed upon this small force, consisting of two

or three hundred infantry and our battery numbering about
one hundred and twenty-five men, was no light one. © For
weeks it had been in a state of constant activity and excite-
ment, enhanced towards the last with continual suspense and
anxiety. It had been constantly on the move to meet threat-
ened advances from the directions of the Tar and lower Roan-
oke, and the Chowan and Blackwater rivers. If I remember
aright, during the month of March, it had been sent upon
two expeditions through Northampton, Hertford and Bertie
Counties, to repel reported raids of the enemy’s cavalry from
the Chowan, one, to and below Tarboro to meet a threatened
advance from the lower Tar and Roanoke, and one, down the
Seaboard & Roanoke Railroad towards Franklin, to check a
cavalry raid from the Blackwater. This last expedition,
however, was in April, the command returning to camp there-
from the night of 6 April. It was under command of Colo-
nel Whitford, who had with him not to exceed two hundred
infantry, (about fifty of whom were members of our com-
pany, armed with inferior rifles), and two guns from our bat-
tery. I was with the expedition as a cannoneer of one of the
guns of the battery. I forgot to say that we were conveyed
down the Seaboard road upon two or three flat cars, and pos-
sibly a box car or two. Upon reaching Boykin’s Depot,
about twenty-five miles from Weldon, we discovered that, all
below that point, the enemy had torn up and burned the track
so that it was impossible for us to proceed further on the