Thoughts About Civil War Ancestors
Awareness of the Civil War came to me early. I was born in Atlanta in October of 1942. My mother’s favorite book and movie was, of course, Gone With the Wind. During my childhood years feelings were still strong about General Sherman and the Yankees invading Georgia less than a hundred years earlier. My earliest impressions were that we thought of the Civil War as the “War of the Yankee Aggression.” I don’t think we could ever have been so forgiving as to speak of it only as “the Late Unpleasantness.”
I knew my great-grandmother on my father’s side of the family, Emma Margaret Evans Bowles, until her death in September 1953 at the age of 87 years, 7 months, and 9 days. She had become my great-grandfather’s second wife on 10 July 1890, when she was age 24 and he was age 50. My great-grandfather was Andrew Jackson “Jack” Bowles. He was born 17 May 1840 in Meriwether County, GA, and died 6 April 1913 in the same place. We have often visited his gravesite in Greenville, GA. The CSA grave marker tells us that he served as a private in Company F, 41st Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment, CSA. To the best of my knowledge Andrew Jackson Bowles was not a hero of the Civil War, except in the sense that all the soldiers of both sides were heroes, just for enduring it.
I have the impression that he never described his war experiences in any detail. Certainly his three daughters, my grandmother and her two sisters, did not hand down any stories he might have told. Yet because of the location where we resided the Battles for Atlanta in the summer of 1864 were the subject of many conversations. And we often went to Grant Park, in the center of the city to see the famous “Cyclorama,” a huge mural depicting the Battle for the city, along with its Civil War museum with the locomotive engine, the “Texas,” which was involved in the “Great Locomotive Chase” a couple of years earlier. We were proud of our Southern heritage.
It was only after I moved to Smithfield, NC in 1974 that I began to investigate my roots. I knew that Jack Bowles had surrendered with General Johnston’s Army of Tennessee in Greensboro, NC on 26 April 1865. I suspected that he had also participated in the Battle of Bentonville, just a few miles southeast of Smithfield. A wonderful lady in the Johnston County Room at the local library, Mrs. Margaret McLemore Lee, directed me to some local Bentonville and Civil War resources and to the State and National Archives, and I was hooked forever on the wonderful hobby of genealogy.
I learned that my ancestor Jack Bowles enlisted on 4 March 1862 and first fought at the Battle of Perryville, KY. He participated in the defense of the Confederate fortress at Vicksburg, MS, and surrendered there to Union troops in July 1863. He was paroled, and later returned to the Army of Tennessee in time for the defeat at Missionary Ridge, TN. He then participated in the battles through the North Georgia mountains down to Atlanta. After the battles for Atlanta he fought in the disastrous battles at Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville, TN., and then he was sent into the Carolinas to fight eventually at Bentonville, NC in March 1865. It is little wonder that by the age of fifty he was a very old man indeed, and a physical wreck, as his Civil War pension records indicate. How in the world did he endure it? And was it worth it?
Also during my childhood I had heard my mother mention her own grandfather, William Wehunt, from Dawson County, GA, who had also fought in the great conflict. My great-aunt Pauline Lingefelt Ragsdale, whose mother was William Wehunt’s daughter, lived until 1991. She told me of a story handed down that William had disappeared during the war, and was thought to have been killed, but that, quite a while after the war ended he came walking down the road to his home, bedraggled and barefoot. It was thought he had been a prisoner in a Yankee prison camp. A grave marker in a little Baptist church cemetery was said to indicate that he served with Company H of the 12th Tennessee Cavalry. Great-Aunt Pauline was always proud of her Confederate heritage.
I was curious about the story of William’s disappearance, and also about the fact that he had not served, to my knowledge, with a Georgia Confederate unit. Again, Mrs. Margaret Lee came to my rescue. Also, I took a short genealogy course in 1981, and again availed myself of the resources of the Johnston County room and of the State and Federal Archives. Early in the search I noticed in the census records the curious fact that the names of William Wehunt’s children included a son, William Ulysses S. Grant Wehunt! Also, William’s daughter, Dora Samantha, my great-grandmother, married James Jackson Lingefelt, who had a brother named William Sherman Lingefelt, and uncles named Abraham Lincoln Lingefelt and Ulysses S. Grant Lingefelt!
I learned about that time that James Jackson Lingefelt’s grandfather, John Lingefelt, who was a cousin of William Wehunt, had served in Company H, 5th Tennessee Mounted Infantry. I began checking into the military records at the Federal Archives. My search of Confederate records for William Wehunt and John Lingefelt was fruitless. But I soon found them both in the Union Army records! That explained why they went to Tennessee. And the reason for William’s disappearance soon became plain also. He had been ill for a time in a Union military hospital in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and then his unit, the 12th Tennessee Cavalry, soon after the end of the war, was ordered to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to support defenses against an Indian uprising in that vicinity. They were released from that duty in late 1865.
My great-aunt Pauline was mortified at this news. She had wanted to know about her Civil War ancestors, but she did not want to know quite that much! I tried to console her by saying that, at least, we had some ancestors on the winning side! I hope she has forgiven me.
I am proud to remember this heritage as Memorial Day nears, for I now know that I had ancestors who served on both sides of that conflict. To be sure, the specific ideals of Andrew Jackson Bowles of the Confederacy and William Wehunt and John Lingefelt of the Union were not identical. But what they had in common, was a love of country and a willingness, if need be, to die for that country.
I wonder if the choice of how and where to serve was easy for any of them. Perhaps my Confederate ancestor had his own reservations about slavery, but the community pressures where he lived in southwest Georgia may have been too strong, or maybe he just lived too far south of the Tennessee border to travel there to enlist in the Union Army. Or maybe, like Robert E. Lee, his love of his people and the country where he resided just impelled him to volunteer for the South despite any reservations he may have had.
And I wonder if the choice for the Union was really so clear-cut for William Wehunt and his cousin John Lingefelt. Perhaps their own community pressures and their own genuine love for the people and the region in which they resided made them hesitate to choose sides until late in the war. By that time Confederate Home Guard units had begun to ravage the mountain country by foraging for supplies and often robbing local farmers. There is a story that one of the Wehunt brothers, home on leave from the Confederate army, was killed by Home Guards trying to take his father’s horses for the army. Also, many of the mountain folk, including the Wehunts and the Lingefelts, had originally come down from the North to settle in North Georgia and may have had natural sympathies with the North. Sometimes the Home Guards brutally treated all of them as if they sympathized with the North. And by that time many could see that the Southern cause was lost anyway. Both William Wehunt and John Lingefelt had brothers and children who actually served with the Confederates. No, somehow, I’m sure that the choices for my two ancestors and for many others were neither obvious nor easy.
It is our privilege today, 140 years after the end of the Civil War, to reflect on the lives and deeds of our ancestors who served in that terrible struggle. I understand that, originally, Memorial Day, or Decoration Day, as it was first called, was a day to remember with gratitude those who had fought to preserve the Union. General John A. Logan, in his order of May 5, 1868, that “every post of the Grand Army should hold suitable exercises and decorate the graves of their dead comrades with flowers,” began an observance that has continued to this day. In our Southern states a Confederate Memorial day came to be observed similarly, about the same time of the year, though not usually on May 30. In North Carolina originally the day was May 10. But eventually May 30 came to be a time to remember all of those who served in all periods of our nation’s history who have gone on before us.
The closing words of General Logan’s original order are still appropriate today:
Let no ravages of time testify to coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.
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