1864 — Apr 20-22, Rebels kill black soldiers, runaway slaves, others, Plymouth, NC–300-400
Last edit by Wayne Blanchard January 20, 2024 for upload to: http://www.usdeadlyevents.com/
–300-400 Blanchard.
There is a very large difference between 100 and approximately 600 murdered people noted by sources cited below. We are uncomfortable at just safely “letting it go” by noting a range of 100-600 murders. Instead, we choose to rely on the very detailed Burkhardt account below, noting 300-400 murders.
— <600 Blair. “Plymouth, Battle of.” Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 2006; revised 10-2023.
— ~600 Durrill. War of Another Kind. Cited in Jordan and Thomas. “Massare at Plymouth…”, p.125.[1]
–300-400 Burkhardt. Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War. 2007, 141
— >100 Cecelski. “‘We Take No Negro Prisoners:’ Remembering the Plymouth Massacre.” 10-21-2021.
–~25 black prisoners “executed.
— 40 blacks “as they sought to escape the battlefield…”
— 40 blacks “who had taken refuge in the swamps nearby…” Some women & children.
Narrative Information
Blair. “Plymouth, Battle of.” Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 2006:
“….The 40 to 300 Black soldiers and Unionists, as well as other Black people freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, present at the Battle of Plymouth were in particular danger after Wessell’s surrender. According to a March 1864 Charlotte Daily Bulletin article, “Ransom’s brigade never [took] any negro prisoners. Our soldiers would not even bury the negros–they were buried by the negros.” Since Confederate policy differed across the levels of political administration, the fate of captured Black soldiers and Unionists was largely at the discretion of the capturing soldiers. Their treatment could range from being “restored to their” enslavers or being summarily executed. Confederate policy dictated that they were not to be treated as “prisoners of war” as white Unionists or white Union soldiers were. Massacres of Black soldiers and civilians occurred, and Confederate soldiers had massacred Black soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tennessee only eight days prior to the Battle of Plymouth. Black soldiers and emancipated people displaced by the fall of Fort Williams were treated similarly. Accounts from both Black Unionists, like that of Sergeant Samuel Johnson (Company D, Second U.S. Colored Cavalry), and Confederate occupants, like that published in the May 3, 1864 edition of the Raleigh Daily Confederate, conclude that Confederate soldiers massacred Black captives during and after the battle. Death tolls range as high as 600 and include Black Unionists, Union soldiers, emancipated laborers, and women and children….”
Burkhardt: “April 1864 set the war’s record when a third major atrocity took place within a few days of Fort Pillow and the Camden Expedition. On North Carolina’s coast…Confederates again demonstrated their deadly intolerance for whites or blacks who defected to the North. This third massacre also provided more evidence, if any were needed, that this reaction was not a regional quirk but systemic. On April 20, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia troops overwhelmed the Federal enclave at Plymouth and then methodically killed black soldiers, white Unionists, and refugee contrabands.[2] This last, the slaughter of runaway slaves, was a repetition of what had happened at Marks’ Mills in Arkansas or Mounds Plantation in Louisiana and what would happen later at other places….
“Early in the war, Federal forces had seized beachheads on North Carolina’s coast, including Plymouth, Washington, and New Bern, towns stretching in a slant line from north to south on Albemarle and Pimlico [Pamlico] sounds. As elsewhere in North Carolina, many people along the coast held strong pro-Union sentiments, and much animosity existed between the factions. Soon these enclaves became havens for Unionist families, fugitive slaves, deserters, and men evading Confederate conscription. Federal authorities aided and sheltered ‘Buffaloes,’ men who actively resisted the Confederacy or who joined special regiments filled with turncoats and Unionists. Recruiting officers for black regiments vied with one another to enroll runaway slaves. These outposts affronted Southern pride, increased strife and dissension in the region, and, in time, became festering cankers….
“On the eve of the Union’s great 1864 spring offensives planned by ‘Grant the hammerer,’ Richmond decided to eradicate those irritants….the ambitious Brigadier General Robert F. Hoke planned an attack on Plymouth….With six thousand men, including artillery and cavalry, Hoke began besieging Plymouth on April 17. At the same time, the ironclad CSS Albemarle, two years under construction, started down the Roanoke River. Hoke needed the Albemarle to dispose of four Federal gunboats patrolling offshore from Plymouth. With their firepower, the gunboats could interdict approaches to the waterfront town and block a land attack.
“….Brigadier General Henry W. Wessells, Plymouth’s commander, nominally had twenty-eight hundred troops but probably had no more than twenty-two hundred men available to man the defensive works that ringed the town in a two-and-a-half-mile perimeter. In addition to four infantry regiments with about 1,550 effectives, he also had 166 men of the 2nd North Carolina Union Volunteers, some armed refugees, and perhaps 200 black soldiers and recruits. Wessels, a Regular Army veteran of the Seminole and Mexican wars, also had to contend with the many panicky civilians, including Northern teachers, officers’ wives, deserters, Unionist North Carolinians, and hundreds of contrabands. He sent a large number of white women and children, the sick and disabled, and some blacks to Roanoke Island aboard the army transport Massasoit….
“Although Hoke’s artillery and an armed steamer, the Bombshell, and captured one redoubt at great cost on April 18, the garrison had taken only a few casualties and had firmly held the main defenses. Everything changed in the early morning hours of April 19, when the Albemarle steamed out of the night. Gliding silently downstream like a nightmare specter, the ironclad avoided river obstructions and mines and shrugged off artillery fire. Quickly, the Albemarle rammed and sank the USS Southfield, then drove away the other gunboats so essential to Plymouth’s defense….
“At dawn the next day, April 20, Hoke launched his final onslaught, and soon Confederates overran all Federal positions except for Fort Williams, though they suffered heavy losses. Calling a truce, Hoke demanded unconditional surrender from Wessells and said that if he had to assault, he could not be responsible for the consequences. Lieutenant Colonel Henry T. Guion, 1st North Carolina Artillery, reported that Hoke also warned that waving a white flag would not necessarily same them. Lieutenant Alonzo Cooper, 12th New York Cavalry, wrote, ‘This Gen. Wessells construed as a threat of a repetition of the Fort Pillow massacre.’ Wessells refused and fighting resumed, but not for long. Under heavy fire from all sides, Federals soon yielded, whereupon Hoke chose not to carry out his no-quarter threat and Federals said they were ‘treated very kindly.’….
“Hoke soon lined up captives so citizens and soldiers could identify turncoats, deserters, Buffaloes, and black soldier recruiters for the hangman….That winnowing process continued during the march to a railhead to entrain for prison camp. Sergeant Major Kellogg recalled that ‘the ranks were searched for deserters from the rebel army, a number of whom were detected and taken away. We never knew their fate, but suppose them to have been shot.’ Warren L. Goss, a Massachusetts artilleryman, said he knew exactly what happened to some. He related, ‘On our way from Plymouth to Tarboro I saw several of our North Carolina men selected out…and, without even the ceremony of a drum-head court-martial, strung up to the limb of trees by the roadside.’….At Tarboro, Confederates reportedly identified fifteen men as turncoats and hanged them….
“No screenings were required to identify black Federals, and Confederates immediately began shooting them. But there is no way to determine how many were executed or, for that matter, the number of black soldiers and recruits present at the surrender. Wessells officially reported 244 unattached recruits, many of them blacks, and about 100 of them fought in Plymouth’s defense. Several black regiments had recruiters working there, and one, the 10th U.S. Colored Infantry, apparently had a sizable detachment. Those men and their recruits may have added another one hundred men to the black soldier total. By one Confederate estimate, Federals had seven hundred uniformed blacks at Plymouth but considerably less than half that number is more likely the correct figure….
“Federals said blacks, civilians and soldiers, died in a ruthless pogrom. A New York soldier charged that Hoke’s men raised the black flag against black soldiers, and Captain Donaghy wrote, ‘They were shot down in cold blood after they had laid down their arms; some rushed to the river and tried to escape by swimming across, but few, if any, succeeded.’ Shunning haphazard killing, some Confederate officers turned to more efficient methods. They used firing squads to execute batches of black prisoners. Lieutenant Cooper reported, ‘The negro soldiers…were drawn up in a line at the breastwork, and shot down as they stood. This I plainly saw from where we were held under guard, not five hundred yards distance…When the company of rebs fired, every negro dropped at once, as one man.’ Sergeant Johnson, the black recruiter, witnessed the same or a similar mass execution and artilleryman Goss related that men who had ‘surrendered in good faith…{were} shot down like dogs.’
“By far the greatest slaughter occurred when hundreds of blacks, mostly civilians, and some Unionists suddenly rushed from Plymouth for the supposed safety of nearby wooded swamps. Confederates quickly pursued them, beginning a relentless butchery. Confederate Lieutenant William I. Clopton wrote home that ‘several hundred negroes…attempted to escape when the town fell but were pursued & all most the last one of them killed.’ Lieutenant Cooper, a prisoner, noted that ‘we could hear the crack, crack, crack of muskets, down in the swamp where the negroes had fled to escape capture, and were being hunted like squirrels or rabbits.’ The hunters had it all their way, for few, if any, of their quarry carried weapons. An 11th Virginia officer related that those ‘who took to the swamps, were pursued by Dearing’s Cavalry and left in the swamp, dead or alive; none of them were taken prisoners, or brought out of the swamp.’ They tracked and killed members of a disorganized, defenseless rabble blindly thrashing through mire and swamp water in desperate flight. ‘It was a massacre,’ said a New York soldier.
“Confederates continued to scour the swamp for days. Chaplain Billingsley, who remained in Plymouth, reported, ‘For two days after the surrender, I heard very frequent firing in an adjoining swamp.’ From all accounts, most of the victims were black males, runaways from area farms and plantations. Estimates of the number killed in the murder spree vary wildly, ranging from three hundred to six hundred. Allowing for exaggeration and for minimizing, Confederates probably slew between three hundred and four hundred. Benjamin F. Blakeslee, a 2nd lieutenant with the 16th Connecticut, wrote that ‘three or four hundred negroes’ were slain. Four days after the slaughter, a twelve-year-old boy and some friends inspected the killing ground. With the scene still vivid in memory, the boy said he had seen hundreds of unburied blacks….
“Plymouth’s fall delighted the South. President Davis congratulated Hoke and promoted him to major general; Congress passed a joint resolution of thanks to Hoke and the Albemarle’s captain….” (Burkhardt, George S. Chapter 10, “The Plymouth Pogrom,” pp. 135-143 in, Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007.)
Cecelski: “….Drawing in large part from the work of Jordan and Thomas, this is how I described the Plymouth Massacre in my book The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War.[3]
The wartime atrocity that hit closest to home for [Abraham] Galloway occurred in Plymouth, North Carolina…. Late that April, black refugees from Plymouth began to straggle into New Bern. They reported the loss of the town to Rebel forces and a massacre of black soldiers, civilian and white southern Unionists by Confederate troops commanded by Major General Robert F. Hoke. Leading some 7,000 Rebel troops against approximately 3,000 defenders, Hoke had taken the town after a four-day siege.
Galloway must have winced when he heard that Confederate brigadier general Robert Ransom’s brigade had played a leading role in the Battle of Plymouth. Only a month earlier, Ransom’s Brigade had taken no prisoners after encountering black troops of the 2nd Regiment, United States Colored Cavalry, at Suffolk, Virginia.
“Ransom’s Brigade never takes any negro prisoners,” one of Ransom’s soldiers declared in the Charlotte Observer after the incident at Suffolk.
One of Ransom’s officers, Major John W. Graham, made the same declaration in a letter to his father the month before the Battle of Plymouth. At Suffolk, he wrote, the “ladies. . . were standing at their doors, some waving handkerchiefs, some crying, some praying, and others calling to us to ‘kill the negroes.’”
He confided to his father, parenthetically, “Our brigade did not need this to make them give ‘no quarter,’ as it is understood amongst us that we take no Negro prisoners.”
A conservative evaluation of the eyewitness reports and a cautious reckoning of the death toll in Plymouth indicate that Rebel soldiers killed more than 100 black people that day. Confederate troops, mainly Ransom’s Brigade and cavalrymen led by Colonel James Dearing, executed approximately 25 black prisoners. They also killed 40 other blacks as they sought to escape the battlefield and murdered 40 more who had taken refuge in the swamps nearby. At least a few of the victims were women and children. Several eyewitnesses, including the only African American to leave a firsthand account of the massacre, indicated that the number of victims was much higher.
(Cecelski, David. “‘We Take No Negro Prisoners:’ Remembering the Plymouth Massacre.” 10-21-2021.)
Jordan and Thomas: “….Oliver R. McNary’s….account, written in 1900, implies that black civilians as well as soldiers were killed. ‘Immediately after our men surrendered, the Rebel soldiers commenced firing on the negroes, shooting them down, old and young, wherever they found them; some ran for the timber and were pursued by Dearing’s cavalry and shot as they ran.’ Robbins, a private in the Sixteenth Connecticut, recalled in 1918 that members of ‘a Company of negroes {that} had been…armed and equipped {presumably meaning the eighty black recruits}…and had not been claimed by their former masters’ were ‘disposed of’ three or four days after the battle: ‘I heard volley firing in the town and asked a nearby guard the reason{.} {I} was told, ‘They lined up them d—–d niggers you all enlisted and are shooing ‘em off’n the dock.’”
(Jordan, Weymouth T. and Gerald W. Thomas. “Massacre at Plymouth: April 20, 1864.” North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. LXXII, No. 2, April 1995.)
Newspaper
April 22, NYT: “Details of the Capture. Newbern, N.C., Friday, April 22. The battle, which had been going on night and day at Plymouth, from Sunday, the 15th, to the 20th last, resulted in the capture of the city by the enemy on Wednesday noon, including Gen. Wessels and his forces – 1,500 men…. Two companies belonging to the Second North Carolina (Union) Volunteers, were among the captured at Plymouth, the most of whom were taken out and shot by the enemy after our forces had surrendered. All the negroes found in uniform were also shot….” (New York Times. “The Capture of Plymouth…Reported Murder of the Negro Troops.” 4-26-1864, p. 1.)
Sources
Blair, Dan. “Plymouth, Battle of.” Encyclopedia of North Carolina, 2006; revised by State Library of North Carolina Government and Heritage Library staff October 2023. Accessed 1-20-2024 at: https://www.ncpedia.org/plymouth-battle
Burkhardt, George S. Chapter 10, “The Plymouth Pogrom,” pp. 135-143 in, Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. Google preview accessed 1-20-2024 at: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Confederate_Rage_Yankee_Wrath/uaDEAAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Confederate+Rage,+Yankee+Wrath:+No+Quarter+in+the+Civil+War&printsec=frontcover
Cecelski, David. “‘We Take No Negro Prisoners:’ Remembering the Plymouth Massacre.” 10-21-2021. Accessed 1-20-2024 at: https://davidcecelski.com/2021/10/31/we-take-no-negro-prisoners-remembering-the-plymouth-massacre/
Jordan, Weymouth T. and Gerald W. Thomas. “Massacre at Plymouth: April 20, 1864.” North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. LXXII, No. 2, April 1995. Abstract accessible at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23521768
New York Times. “The Capture of Plymouth…Reported Murder of the Negro Troops.” 4-26-1864, p. 1. http://newspaperarchive.com/fullpagepdfviewer?img=7674211&sterm=plymouth
[1] Jordan and Thomas footnote: “In War of Another Kind, a study of the Civil War in Washington County (of which Plymouth is the seat), Wayne K. Durrill posits the murder of ‘roughly six hundred U.S. soldiers, most of them black,’ a figure that would make Plymouth the scene of the largest white-on-black massacre of the war.”
[2] Escaped or runaway slaves who reached Union forces.
[3] The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.