Joseph R. Hawley spends the first 11 years of his life in North Carolina, in Stewartsville – near Laurinburg- where his father is pastor of a Baptist church. He returns to North Carolina 28 years later as a brigadier general of the Union Army.
On February 28, 1865, Hawley writes to his wife, Hattie, “If I don’t write you a line or two, I shan’t be able to write you at all. We have been every moment active since Saturday the 19th when we started toward Wilmington.” While they are in route, Wilmington surrenders on George Washington’s birthday, February 22, to the commander of the troops that captured Fort Fisher. The surrender is seen as inevitable: in anticipation, confederate forces destroy the naval stores and the cotton and tobacco stored in Wilmington.
Hawley enters a city impoverished by war. And it gets worse. Official civil war documents recount:
“About 8,600 Union prisoners were released on parole at Northeast Bridge, ten miles above Wilmington, and cared for at Wilmington, and thence transported North; several thousand of them were put into hospital. This delivery was wholly unexpected, and the district was almost without proper material to care for them properly. They were in a frightful condition in all respects, and a camp or jail fever broke out among them.”
Hawley also describes the conditions to his wife.
“Gen. Schofield, under instructions from Gen. Grant agreed to receive 10,000 prisoners. They have been coming at the rate of nearly 2000 per day. Awful – awful-awful! I do assure you that nothing whatever has been exaggerated in the report concerning the treatment of our men – nothing whatever. I stood dumb before the great misery. Actually I literally, every few minutes for hours my throat would choke and my eyes fill as I looked on.”
As desperate as these conditions are, Hawley wants to be a part moving the city forward. He concludes his four-page letter to Hattie,
I want you to get permission to come down here immediately. I take great interest in North Carolina, as my native state. I would greatly desire to do much in reconciling it to the new state of affairs. There are many good Union people here: and there are others who will be such with good management. I think this is the place where my mixed legal political and military training will do most service to the country. Socially and in the hospitals and in various ways you can aid me greatly.”
And Hawley is given the opportunity. The next day, March 1, the following special order is issued:
Special Orders No. 18
Head Quarters, Dept of North Carolina
Army of the Ohio
Wilmington, N.C. March 1st 1865
Brig. Genl. Jos. R. Hawley is hereby assigned to the command of the District of Wilmington which will embrace all the territory under Military control in rear of the Army operating from Cape Fear River as a base.
Genl. Hawley will be responsible for the protection of the depot at Wilmington, Cape Fear Harbor and the line of railroad in rear of the Army. He will also perform the duties of Provost Marshall Genl. for the District under his Command.
By command of Major General Schofield
We can read this now with a sense of optimism that a native would be placed in charge of Wilmington. But that brings a sensibility that we are focusing on how we will move forward. History books exclude this kind of information, emphasizing instead the role of the surrender of Wilmington in the demise of the Confederate’s cause. An authoritative book on the Civil War in North Carolina closes this chapter on Wilmington with the following:
“The Federal soldiers took the fall of Wilmington as a good omen since it occurred on George Washington’s birthday. ‘I think we celebrated the day well, don’t you’ one of them wrote. But for the residents of Wilmington it was a time of sadness, not celebration. The omen was bad, not good. The Confederacy, without supplies from abroad, surely could not stand much longer.”
For the Constitutional Tales, we’ll pick up from here on what happens next in Wilmington. (There’s definitely more to come.)
And for Hawley? After Hawley leaves Wilmington at the end of the War, he returns to Connecticut where he is elected Governor. Over his distinguished career, he also serves as chairman of the Republican Party (“Lincoln’s Party”) in 1868, briefly as a U.S. representative and 24 years as a U.S. senator from Connecticut.
And for all of us? Perhaps we can all be inspired by the idea of finding service that is the best combination of our skills and passions.
Primary Sources:
Joseph R. Hawley, to wife, Hattie, Wilmington, N.C., February 28, 1865, Reel 6, Joseph R. Hawley Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Special Order No. 18, Wilmington, N.C., March 1, 1865, Reel 6, Joseph R. Hawley Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
United States War Department, The war of the rebellion: a compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies Series 1 – Volume 47 (part I), Chap. LIX, 164-65 (Washington Government Printing Office 1895), online(Ithica, New York: Cornell University Library), available at: http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moawar;idno=waro0098
Secondary Sources:
Barrett, John G., The Civil War in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press 1963), p. 284.
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