King hoods each man’s head in a corn sack, then pulls the lever that drops them into the next world. No one remarks that many of the officers present, including Pickett himself, once swore allegiance to the Union and are, at this very moment, guilty of “taking up arms for the enemy” - the same crime for which these men have been condemned to death. Justice, Hoke’s aide-de-camp, reads out the charges and the sentence. Another North Carolinian, 21-year-old Lt. Seth Barton’s brigade completes the hollow square of gray-clad soldiers surrounding the scaffold. General Hoke, their fellow North Carolinian, orders his brigade to form up in ranks to witness the hanging. The two unfortunates are marched outside to the gallows and mount the scaffold. There’s no rope to be had in the army, so he scrounges a coil from the C.S.S. The hangman is recruited from a gang of soldiers playing cards at the railroad depot: Their old company sergeant, Blunt King, volunteers for the duty. They had been raised up in ignorance and vice.” He reports, “They were the most unfeeling and hardened men I have ever encountered. John Paris, chaplain of the 54th North Carolina, a thin-faced man with close-set eyes. The next day, February 5, 1864, Jones and Haskett receive a visit in jail from The Rev. Outside on the sandy lot behind the jail, they hear the gallows being hammered together. The officers march the prisoners to Kinston and lock them up in the Lenoir County Courthouse, where they sleep on the floor without blankets and subsist on a diet of one cracker a day. Hanging is for cowards and criminals, not soldiers. Not by firing squad, the time-honored military method. The court finds them guilty and sentences them to death by hanging. But the outcome is never really in doubt. Jones and Haskett admit they are deserters, but they claim they were conscripted into the Union Army against their will. He turns to his subordinate generals and declares, “We’ll have to have a court-martial on these fellows pretty soon, and after some are shot, the rest will stop deserting.”īefore they leave the Dover camp, Pickett convenes a court-martial headed by a Virginia officer, Lt. On Pickett’s orders, soldiers take the men away. Jones, young and defiant, tells Pickett that he does “not care a damn” whether they shot him then, or what they did with him. “Damn you, I reckon you will hardly ever go back there again, you damned rascals I’ll have you shot, and all other damned rascals who desert.” The young soldiers, dressed in Union blue, don’t have a good answer. “What are you doing here? Where have you been?” He stalks out of his tent, where he has been conferring with Gen. “Good evening, boys,” King greets them, and, sullenly, they wish him good evening, too.īut Pickett, humiliated once again on the field of battle, is not in the mood for pleasantries. The lieutenant tells him that is exactly who they are. King asks his lieutenant whether these men are indeed Joe Haskett, a 26-year-old farmer from Carteret County, and David Jones of Craven County, just 21. They resemble two young men who used to be part of his own Company B. Blunt King, a 46-year-old veteran of the Mexican-American War. In the clearing beyond Pickett’s tent, his officers interrogate some of the Yankee prisoners beside a campfire. They halt on February 4, 1864, to spend a night at Dover, well beyond reach of the Yankees. Pickett withdraws his disorganized forces back toward Kinston, 53 prisoners from the 2nd North Carolina Union Regiment in tow. Fresh from his failed attack on New Bern, Maj.
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