John Buncombe Crowder entered the army in 1863 as a 38-year-old conscript, and as a good family man had proved successful; but it was hardly expected that a man of his age should enter enthusiastically into the strenuous life of a soldier in times of great stress. However, John was inclined to hold up his end and made a faithful record. But the long, cold winter of 1865 in the trenches in front of Petersburg tired out his patience and he got powerful hungry. He stood six feet three inches and his fighting weight was 205 pounds. When we surrendered together, on the 25th of March, 1865, in front of Petersburg, Buncombe thought it good policy to make friends with his captors, in the hope of getting more and better rations; so he said, “Yes, I’ve quit fighting you. I’ve been wanting to quit for some time, and I shore am glad you’ve got me, for I am nearly starved to death.” Loss Bridges, the little man with the hot-gun, said, “He’s lying to you, and at the same time showing a chunk of cornbread.” The Yankees said, “All right, Johnnie, you’ve got where there’s plenty now, and you shall have plenty to eat.” B.: “Now I believe that I just know you’ll treat me right.” Y.: “Ah, Johnnie, bet your life we will.” B.: “I’ve always thought you were clever fellows, and now I know it. I never did want to fight you nohow.” Y.: “Bully for you, Johnnie; you shall be taken good care of.” The men on the firing line who captured him would have done what they said; but prisoners are soon turned over to the bomb-proof brigade—coffee coolers and grafters—the kind of men who would get rich keeping the county poor-house. John Buncombe made a hard effort to get to the flesh pots and coffee cans of Yankeedom, but failed. He went up to Washington with the deserter volunteers, and was sent back to Point Lookout to starve with the rest of us. After he had been in a few days we asked him how he liked the fare, and he replied, “Very well; I don’t have anything to do, and it don’t take much to do me.” A few days more and he got so hungry he could hold his peace no longer and began to abuse the Yankees as the greatest liars and the meanest people in all the world, and he just wished he had held on to his gun and killed a few more of them anyhow. He had offered to go North and work for something to eat, and they would not let him, and were just holding to starve him to death for pure meanness. He said when he was at home it took a good-sized hen to make him a meal, and now we get nothing scarcely but bread, and he could eat four days’ rations—two loaves or three pounds at one meal. So he raged and lectured as a champion eater until two men who had a little money got up a fifty-cent bet on him. He was to eat two loaves, or three pounds of bread, in thirty minutes. A crowd gathered and much interest was manifested in the contest, and the eating began. In the excitement he took too much water. In ten minutes the first loaf disappeared and three canteens, or nine pints of water, with it. Then he said he did not have quite enough, but did not feel like he could eat all of the other loaf, so they need not cut it; that his stomach had shrunk up until he could not eat as much as he thought he could. After that he could no longer command a hearing, as his record as a champion eater was all he had to stand on. He is now—1907—living happily with his third wife and has plenty to eat, but says his appetite is not quite as good as it used to be.
Scenes at Appomattox—stragglers in the Union Army.
Dr. Thomas L. Carson, my mother’s youngest brother, who was in the Thirty-fourth North Carolina Regiment, Scale’s Brigade, tells the following:
“We had stacked our muskets in surrender in the open beside the road, awaiting our paroles, when a large column of Federal troops passed us in steady, quiet tramp, followed by the rear guard bringing up about 2,000 stragglers. These stragglers wore a conglomeration of every trashy type to be found in the Yankee army. Foreigners of every tongue, mixed with every American type—old gray-headed men, beardless boys, big, greasy Negroes, etc., etc., all with battered and tattered clothing, some bareheaded and barefooted, and many without coats; some only had one pant leg on—all under a strong guard of peart-proud soldiers marching beside them with fixed bayonets. As they came along one big, stout fellow exclaimed, “Oh, yes, Johnnies; we’ve got you at last.” A proud, peart-looking guard said, “Shut your mouth, you cowardly devil, or I’ll pop my bayonet in you. You want to crow over these men. If many of our men had been like you, General Lee might now have had his headquarters in Boston instead of this surrender.”
Dr. Carson says, as they started home, a young officer from Ohio walked along with him for half a mile and, talking of the situation, said: “It looks very hard to start you men home without rations, but we are on short allowance ourselves, on account of your General Hampton, who cut down and destroyed eleven miles of our supply train a few days ago, or we would have had plenty to feed you on.”
Once upon a time when the mulatto, Fred. Douglass, was orating, two Irishmen passing by stopped and listened a few minutes, then started on. One remarked, “He spaiks right well for a Nagur.” The other, “Oh, he’s no Nagur; he is only a half Nagur.” “Oh, well then, if a half Nagur can talk that way, then I guess a whole Nagur could beat the prophit Jeremiah.”
Once upon a time when North Carolina’s last Afro-American Congressman—George White—was State Solicitor, a young Negro was on trial for some misdemeanor, and a white man was called upon to prove the defendant’s character.
Solicitor: “Do you know this man?” Witness: “Yes, sir.” “How long have you known him?” “Oh, ever since he was a small boy.” “Well, sir; what is his character?” “His character is good; good as any Niggers.” “Maybe you don’t think a Negro has any character.” “Oh, I didn’t say that.” “Now, sir; I ask you a direct question: Do you believe a Negro has got a character?” “Oh, yes; he has a Nigger’s character.”
The Solicitor gritted his teeth and told the witness he could retire.