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The Theater of War

As the Civil War drew to a close, a last stand at Waynesville proved more pomp than circumstance

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State Archives of North Carolina Photo

State Archives of North Carolina Photo

State Archives of North Carolina Photo

Callie Pruett Photo

One hundred-fifty years ago this May, the final battle of the Civil War east of the Mississippi broke out here in Southern Appalachia. The historic clash occurred at White Sulphur Springs, just outside the tiny mountain hamlet of Waynesville, North Carolina. 

By May of 1865, the Confederacy was falling apart. On Palm Sunday, April 9, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Less than three weeks later, near Durham Station, North Carolina, Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston followed suit by surrendering to Gen. William T. Sherman. On the run in Georgia, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was soon to be captured by Union cavalry. In late April, Northern troops had also occupied and then pillaged Asheville, a Confederate stronghold in a region bitterly divided by four years of war.

After the fall of Asheville, Confederate Gen. James Martin determined to move his headquarters to nearby Waynesville. Pursuing him and his men were two Union regiments. On May 6, one of these attacking columns—the Second North Carolina Mounted Regiment, composed in part by Carolina men fighting against the Confederacy and led by Col. William Bartlett—entered Waynesville, which one account described as a “dirty hamlet of 15 to 20 dwellings.” 

In opposition to this large force, Martin’s Confederates could muster only a meager, forlorn cadre, including the Cherokee Legion under William Holland Thomas. While maneuvering around Waynesville, Robert Conley—an aggressive and highly decorated Southern lieutenant—encountered part of Bartlett’s regiment at Sulphur Springs. Though outnumbered four to one, Conley ordered his men to volley-fire at the Yankees, and followed up with a bayonet charge that sent the Federals reeling back to Waynesville. 

This marked the last armed clash between these two forces. The only casualty, a Federal soldier by the name of Arwood, today lies buried in Asheville. 

BUT THE BATTLE HAD NOT ENDED. By that evening, Confederate forces controlled the hills around Waynesville and trapped Bartlett’s command in town. Martin, abetted by his two commanders, Cols. James Love and William Thomas, then gave a performance worthy of Broadway. He sent word into town that Confederates were converging from all directions on Waynesville. Bartlett dispatched scouts to confirm the reports. 

Even more effective than these false rumors, however, were the antics of Colonel Thomas’s Cherokee Legion. These men, who were devoted to Thomas, built scores of enormous bonfires on the hills around the town and then filled the dark night with war whoops. The Federal soldiers, including Bartlett himself, had heard tales of scalping by these fierce warriors, and believing themselves surrounded and outnumbered, surely passed an uneasy night. 

On the morning of May 7, Bartlett arranged for a truce and a parley with the Rebel commanders. Accompanied by bodyguards, Martin, Love, and Thomas marched into town. Thomas spent a good deal of time haranguing Bartlett, calling him, according to one report, a “horse-thief” and promising—if he did not surrender—to turn his Cherokees loose on the town to scalp every Federal there. Like his beloved Cherokees, Thomas had stripped to the waist for the occasion and was wearing the feathers and paint of a warrior. (Historians point to Thomas’s wild speech and dress as signs of the man’s impending madness. See “The Fall of Will Thomas,” page 50.)

Eventually, the disputants moved their discussion inside the Battle House, a local hotel. There, after another day of dickering and Bartlett repeatedly pointing out the hopelessness of the Confederate cause, Martin agreed to surrender his command. For his part, Bartlett promised to work to stop Union forces from ravaging the mountains and to withdraw his own men to Asheville. On May 9, the mountaineers and Cherokees signed their parole papers and began to go back to their homes while Bartlett and his troops returned to Asheville. 

And so it was that the last “battle” of the Civil War was more a skirmish than true warfare. Some might even interpret it as farce, what with the bonfires and the war-whooping Cherokee, the small number of men engaged, and the fact that war was already over. Nevertheless, it is heartening to remember that 150 years ago the commanders of both sides met, and after some rancor, agreed amicably to end the depravations suffered by their men and by the civilians of the region. They avoided unnecessary bloodshed and ended, at last, a conflict that had cost so many their lives and their fortunes. 

About the author: Asheville writer Jeff Minick has long been a Civil War buff, with ancestors who fought on both sides, including a Confederate doctor and Northerners active in the Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania.

Like a Good Neighbor: The Eastern Cherokee & the Confederacy

Not all the Eastern Cherokee supported the Confederacy. Several served with the Union army during the Civil War and were ostracized by the Confederate Cherokees after hostilities ceased. Some evidence exists that one of these Union soldiers brought smallpox back to the small band of Cherokees who survived the war, with devastating results.

Most of the Cherokee of Western North Carolina, however, supported the government of Jefferson Davis. Historians agree that the reasons for this support were complicated, yet if we look at the Cherokee in 1860, we may surmise some reasons for their loyalty.

First, they had suffered at the hands of the federal government, particularly during the Jackson administration with its Indian Removal Act. Though Southerners, particularly in Georgia, benefited from this opening of new lands, it was the federal government that enforced the act and drove so many Cherokee from their native lands. 

Motives of the human heart often drive unlikely alliances. The neighbors of the Cherokee in North Carolina—men such as William Holland Thomas—respected the Cherokee. Thomas’s adoration of the Cherokee and their reciprocal admiration for him and his efforts to help them retain rights and land are well documented. They were his friends in peace and his companions in war. These associations undoubtedly factored into Cherokee loyalties.

Finally, generally speaking, the South was often more receptive to Native American support than the North. Throughout the war, the North regarded the Cherokee troops, both those in the East and in the West, as “savages.” Thomas’s threat of unleashing his few Cherokee on a Union regiment in Waynesville played on this fear. An 1862 war against the Sioux in Minnesota, a barbarous conflict on both sides, may have contributed to this denigration of Native Americans.

With some exceptions, the South simply made more of an effort than the North to attract Native Americans to their cause. The Confederate government signed treaties with different tribes, encouraged enlistment, and paid those Native Americans who did enlist the same salaries as other troops. Unlike the commanders of the North, certain Southern politicians and military commanders actively sought the help of the Cherokee.

The Fall of Will Thomas

William Holland Thomas—a self-made, prominent businessman, a revered chief in the Cherokee tribe, a politician, and a colonel in the Confederate army—spent the final 20 years of his life fighting mental illness. He passed those years, as he put it, “in a mad man’s cell.” No diagnosis of his condition exists, though biographers E. Stanley Godbold and Mattie U. Russell contend that Thomas was possibly suffering the tertiary state of syphilis, which causes erratic behavior and bouts of insanity.

Perhaps. But is it also possible that Thomas simply broke under the hardships of his life? Consider his trajectory:

Thomas grew up fatherless on the frontier. He felt an enormous obligation to support his widowed mother and worked from his boyhood to assist her and to develop various businesses, including a store that served both settlers and Cherokees.

Thomas became a great friend of the Cherokee and was eventually adopted into their tribe. His unsuccessful efforts to fight the Cherokee Removal in the late 1830s must have broken some of his spirit. (To this day, some Cherokee refuse to carry a $20 bill with its picture of a fierce Andrew Jackson—the man who defied the Supreme Court, thwarted the efforts of men like Davy Crocket and Will Thomas to help the Cherokee, and forced the Cherokee and other Native Americans west). 

In his late 50s, Thomas served through the hardships of the Civil War in Western North Carolina. Once again, as with the Cherokee cause, he suffered defeat. This defeat cost him the fortune that he had built up over a lifetime. Slandered, hounded by creditors, and sometimes cheated, he was a broken man financially by the end of his life.

To have watched the destruction of his Cherokee friends, to have witnessed the chaos brought to his beloved mountains by war and invasion, and to have lost the work of a lifetime by the end of that war: Surely the stress of these events took their toll on his health and sanity.

Read All About It

History buffs interested in learning more about the Civil War in Western North Carolina might begin with William R. Trotter’s Bushwhackers: The Civil War in the Western North Carolina Mountains. Part of a trilogy—the other two volumes cover the Civil War in Coastal North Carolina and the Piedmont—Trotter writes engaging popular history. John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney offer the more academic The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War. E. Stanley Godbold Jr. and Mattie U. Russell give us an invaluable study of the life of Will Thomas in Confederate Colonel and Cherokee Chief: The Life of William Holland Thomas. Although out of print, W. Clark Medford’s The Early History of Haywood County is available in public libraries.

Affairs to Remember

Waynesville’s historic Shelton House, home to the Museum of North Carolina Handicrafts,     hosts four weekends of Civil War commemorations this spring. 

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