30 
In the wee hours of April 12, 1861, when shots were fired at Fort Sumter outside Charleston, South Carolina, the Siamese Twins were sleeping in bed in Mount Airy, likely next to one of their wives. Recuperating from their recent California trip, they were at that moment about three hundred miles from this flashpoint of history.
Their subsequent wartime experience, however, was not so peripheral. Indeed, no one in the country could escape the impact of the fraternal bloodbath that would cost 620,000 lives, the rough equivalent of six million in proportion to today’s population. To quote again from the Baltimore American, the newly waged war was like the Siamese Twins being violently ripped apart, “fratricide and suicide” all at once.
Just days after the Confederate attack, President Lincoln called for volunteers to form an army to restore the Union. He also ordered a blockade of the Southern ports. In response, the Confederate Congress declared war on May 6. North Carolina, where the sentiment for secession was far from unanimous, joined the Confederacy on May 20 and became, in fact, the last state to secede. Both Union and Confederate sides were confident about victory, anticipating a conflict of only transitory duration. In fact, the first Union soldiers were recruited for just three months, whereas North Carolina’s first troops were signed up for only six months. In Surry County, Chang and Eng’s home area, citizens congregated at the courthouse in Dobson to volunteer for fighting the Yankees. One militiaman, boasting of the skills of his pals in hunting and riding, claimed that “Southerners could whip the Yankees with cornstalks.” Another local boy, joining the new cavalry company and marching through the main street, bragged about bringing back “Abe Lincoln’s ears.” Reminded of his boast after the war, the militiaman, who miraculously was still alive, laid the blame squarely on the darn Yankees: “But they wouldn’t fight with cornstalks.” As for the local farm boy who wanted to clip Honest Abe’s ears, his body was shipped back home, having given what Lincoln would solemnly call the “last full measure of devotion,” albeit to “The Lost Cause.”1
It was to the same Lost Cause that Chang and Eng would devote their resources, loyalty, and manpower. As slaveholding landed gentry, they sided steadfastly with the Confederacy. Since acquiring citizenship, they had taken a lively interest in national politics and local elections. They were described as “zealous followers of Henry Clay and the Whig party,” although they felt threatened by the members of the anti-Catholic and xenophobic wing of the party who would later reinvent themselves as the Know-Nothings.2 When journeying in the Northern states prior to the war, the twins often had had trouble controlling their indignation against the Fugitive Slave Law, passed in 1850 and enforced by the federal government. When the final conflict came, as Judge Graves put it, “in all questions of a sectional character the feelings and sentiments of Chang and Eng were all strongly with the South, with whose people and institutions they had become so thoroughly identified.”3
Living in a remote area of the country, however, the twins were not directly affected by the bloodshed during the first two years. North Carolina proved to be a minor arena for military conflicts, having witnessed only seventy-three skirmishes and eleven battles during the Civil War. One year into the war, the twins, according to county records, were still financially stable and comfortable, with Eng possessing 300 acres of land and nineteen slaves, and Chang owning 425 acres and eleven slaves. By 1863, tax records showed that Eng was still worth $17,850 and Chang was worth $16,130. And during these war years, Chang and Adelaide gave birth to two more children, Jesse Lafayette in April 1861 and Margaret Elizabeth in October 1863. Never far behind, Eng and Sarah also had two children, Georgianna Columbia in May 1863 and Robert Edward in April 1865. The last one was born just days after the war ended and named after the Confederate hero General Robert E. Lee, whom the twins greatly admired.4
While Chang and Eng continued to enjoy financial prosperity and domestic bliss, they could not avoid the impact of the war on the community. To finance the unexpectedly protracted conflict, the state levied an increasingly heavy tax on the citizens. The Conscription Act, passed by the Confederacy on April 16, 1862, also threatened the peace of mind in every household. North Carolina contributed a total of 111,000 troops, 19,000 of them draftees, to the Confederate Army. For western North Carolina, a region known for its economic self-sufficiency, with scant need for external goods and services, the loss of manpower was disastrous for its way of life. As a result of volunteer enlistment and a compulsory draft, the community was in dire need of artisanal workers, “men whose skills as blacksmiths, millers, carpenters, tanners, and shoemakers could be dispensed with or readily imported.” In nearby Ashe County, citizens of the Horse Creek district had to petition the governor to release Morgan Testerman, a local craftsman, from conscription. “Arguing that the Confederacy would be better served by employing Testerman as a carpenter than as a soldier,” the petitioners detailed the tasks for which Testerman’s specialized skills were required, including “the manufacture of spinning wheels, chairs, tables, bedsteads, farming tools, and in particular the construction of a new gristmill, of which, they contended, the Horse Creek neighborhood was urgently in need.”5 The Union blockade created other hardships, particularly when salt became unavailable. An essential dietary condiment, salt was also needed for the preservation of pork, beef, and vegetables. By the end of 1862, the staple was selling for $30 a bushel in the local market. To make matters worse, the mountain region was hit by near-drought conditions in the summer of 1862, leading to a scarcity of corn and other necessary staples. As winter set in, famine suddenly loomed as a real possibility. Compounding the misery, fugitives, draft dodgers, and deserters of all stripes and convictions found a haven in the remote mountain ranges lying between North Carolina and Tennessee. The “bushwhackers” constantly rampaged through the area, robbing, looting, and even murdering defenseless citizens.
The psychological effects would be even harder to handle. The scale of carnage was shocking—the Civil War is often regarded as the first warfare of the modern era, pitting mechanized weaponry against human flesh. The reports from the battlefields were gruesome and chilling. In a two-day battle at Shiloh, Tennessee, in April 1862, a total of twenty-four thousand soldiers died, surpassing the combined American casualties in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War. Ambrose Bierce, who fought at Shiloh on the Union side, described the battlefield as a smoking jungle covered in pools of blood, with trees reduced to blasted stumps, and “knapsacks, canteens, haversacks distended with soaken and swollen biscuits, gaping to disgorge, blankets beaten into soil by the rain, rifles with bent barrels or splintered stocks, waist-belts, hats and the omnipresent sardine-box.” A seemingly endless wasteland of dead horses presented a horrific tableau, the stench of rotten flesh making the scene that much more horrendous. But most appalling of all was the human suffering. Bierce went on: “Men? There were men enough; all dead apparently, except one, who lay near where I had halted my platoon to await the slower movement of the line—a Federal sergeant, variously hurt, who had been a fine giant in his time. He lay face upward, taking in his breath in convulsive, rattling snorts, and blowing it out in sputters of froth which crawled creamily down his cheeks, piling itself alongside his neck and ears. A bullet had clipped a groove in his skull, above the temple; from this the brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings. I had not previously known one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain.” One of Sergeant-Major Bierce’s men, not usually known for his courage, asked whether he should put his bayonet through this “fine giant,” the dying fellow soldier. Bierce was “shocked by the cold-blooded proposal.”6 It is this kind of reprehensible cruelty of war and unspeakable human misery that has led one historian, Drew Gilpin Faust, to call America during the Civil War a “republic of suffering.”7 Out of the 111,000 Tar Heelers who went to war and “saw the elephant,” 40,275—or more than one-third—would not return. It proved to be the greatest loss of lives suffered by any Confederate state. Apparently it was far from a barnyard fight with cornstalks, as some Southerners had expected.
While “seeing the elephant” was a popular phrase signifying a battle-tested experience, the soldiers fighting the War Between the States would have seen real pachyderms stomping the battlefields if President Lincoln had accepted a generous offer from the king of Siam, a bizarre interlude in the goriest chapter of American history. Before the war, King Mongkut—better known to Americans as the Asian monarch who hired the British governess Anna Leonowens to educate his harem of concubines and kids—had addressed two letters to President James Buchanan, along with gifts that included a sword, a photograph of His Majesty and one of his favorite princesses, and two long tusks from Siamese elephants. In the letters, the king expressed wishes to send over a stock of elephants to be raised in America and deployed as means of transportation in war or peace, as they had been used in Siam for centuries.
Arriving too late for the intended addressee, His Majesty’s gifts and missives fell into the hands of the bachelor president’s successor, Abraham Lincoln. On February 3, 1862, three days after issuing General War Order No. 1, calling for all United States naval and land forces to begin a general advance by George Washington’s birthday, Lincoln replied to King Mongkut and declined the generous offer. With a hint of condescension, the president touted the superiority of steam power over animal strength: “I appreciate most highly Your Majesty’s tender of good offices in forwarding to this Government a stock from which a supply of elephants might be raised on our own soil. This Government would not hesitate to avail itself of so generous an offer if the object were one which could be made practically useful in the present condition of the United States. Our political jurisdiction, however, does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant, and steam on land, as well as on water, has been our best and most efficient agent of transportation in internal commerce.”
This friendly exchange has elicited some fanciful what-ifs from Civil War buffs: What if the Union or the Confederate Army had used battalions of war elephants? Could there have been herds of angry pachyderms at Pickett’s Charge or emerging from the forest lines at Shiloh? In ancient Siamese warfare, elephants were indeed mighty weapons for frontal assaults and for cleaning up battlefields by stomping the life out of the luckless and wounded.8
While Lincoln employed his presidential jurisdiction to prevent the military use of Siamese elephants, thus consigning them to circus rings and menageries, he could not stop a sprinkling of Siamese-descended men from entering the war. On April 1, 1863, a week before he turned eighteen, Christopher Wren Bunker, Chang’s first son, enlisted in the Confederate Army to fight for a cause that his father and uncle cherished. On that spring morning, Christopher said teary farewells to his family and rode across the state line into Wythe, Virginia, where he joined the 37th Battalion of the Virginia Cavalry as a private.9 Unlike Union cavalrymen, who were usually provided with a government-owned horse, Confederate officers and mounted troopers were required to bring their own animals, for which they were partially reimbursed. Always fond of horses, Chang and Eng had quite a collection of steeds from which Christopher could choose. The Bunkers would also have to pay for the upkeep of the horse, costs that would rise to a few hundred dollars in Confederate money by the end of the war.10 They also gave Christopher a rifle with the initials “CWB” inscribed on the stock.
Christopher would not be the last Bunker to join the war, nor was he by any means the only Asian soldier involved in the conflict. The Civil War has always been remembered as a struggle between the Union Blue and the Confederate Gray, a fratricide committed by white brothers and aided by black soldiers on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon line. But, as recent research reveals, there were at least several hundred soldiers of Asian descent who participated in the bloodbath. The real number perhaps was higher, but anglicized names have made it hard for historians to identify and track them down in the records. In fact, the Civil War was not the first time we saw Asian participation in the nation’s military affairs. During the War of 1812, several Filipinos had fought in the Battle of New Orleans against the British, a dramatic episode that turned Major General Andrew Jackson into a folk hero and paved his way to the presidency.
There were, however, fewer than forty thousand Asian men and women living in the United States during the Civil War, a small number in a nation that by the 1860 census had a population of 31,433,321. This figure included more than thirty-seven thousand Chinese living in California and fewer than a thousand living east of the Mississippi. Judging by this ratio, as Ruthanne Lum McCunn points out in her pioneering research, “The number of Asian men who volunteered to serve in the [Civil War], proportionately speaking, is remarkably high.”11 Most of the Asian volunteers served in the navies—prior to the war, many had already been working on ships as stewards, cabin boys, cooks, and sailors. Among those whose identities have been verified, many had adventuresome life stories that could have been fine fodder for historical fiction.
Take, for example, Thomas Sylvanus, whose Chinese name was Ah Yee Way. Born in Hong Kong, he was rescued from an orphanage by an American missionary and brought to Philadelphia for schooling at the age of eight or nine. The 1860 census showed his age as fifteen; for the question of race, the census taker “made something akin to an exclamation mark.” Still a minor, he enlisted in Company D, 81st Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, on August 31, 1861. Repeatedly battle-tested at Fair Oaks, Allen’s Farm, Savage’s Station, Charles City Crossroads, and Malvern Hill, he went partially blind and was discharged on December 10, 1862. Living in Philadelphia, he heard that the city was threatened by a possible Confederate victory at Gettysburg. He immediately reenlisted, joining the 51st Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry on the third day of the famous battle that ended with a victory for the Union, albeit a Pyrrhic one, given the tremendous cost in loss of lives. Desperate to replace fallen troops, Congress enacted conscription and drafted men between the ages of twenty and forty-five. Anyone whose name was drawn by lottery could be exempted by paying a commutation fee of $300 or finding a substitute. Sylvanus ended up enlisting again as a substitute for an umbrella merchant in New York on September 11, 1863. Despite his parlous vision, Sylvanus fought valiantly and was promoted to corporal after four months in Company D, 42nd New York Volunteer Infantry. Injured in the leg, he was taken prisoner at Cold Harbor, along with seventeen hundred other Union soldiers. After the war, this twenty-year-old Chinese veteran—vision impaired, leg injured, and health damaged—was denied a pension. Adding insult to injury, when he reapplied for a pension in 1877, the doctor appointed by the Bureau of Pensions attributed his bad vision partially to inflammation caused by manual labor and partially to “the peculiar look characteristic of his race.” Even though he was eventually granted a far smaller pension than he deserved, his common-law Irish wife, Mathilde, could not get the widow’s pension to which she was entitled after his death at the age of forty-six in 1891. She ended up having to send two of their children to an orphanage, thus bringing a tragic end to the Sylvanus story, which itself had begun in an orphanage in Hong Kong.12
Like Thomas Sylvanus, Siam-born George Dupont also was underage when he enlisted. While working at a foundry in Jersey City, Dupont was enticed by the $75 enlistment bonus. On August 12, 1862, though only fifteen, he was accepted into a White unit, Company B, 13th New Jersey Volunteers, even though he had a dark complexion. The recruitment officers, eager to meet the quota imposed by the federal government, entered Dupont’s age as eighteen and doctored the “CONSENT IN CASE OF MINOR” form by crossing out his purported guardian’s name. Together with his regiment, Dupont fought in the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest one-day conflict in American history, and then at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Taking part in General Sherman’s merciless campaign in Atlanta, Dupont was injured at Kolb’s Farm on June 22 and hospitalized until the war’s end. In 1869, like his fellow countrymen Chang and Eng, Dupont vacated his oath to the king of Siam and became a naturalized American citizen.13
And then there was John Williams, a five-foot-tall, brown-eyed, black-haired Japanese samurai, who served as a substitute for a Brooklyn man. A soldier in the legendary 1st New York Cavalry, comprising mostly immigrants of German, Irish, and English extraction, the pixie Japanese enlistee fought hard for three years in various battles, ranging from the Peninsula Campaign to the Shenandoah Valley Campaign. As we saw earlier, the racial category for Asians at this time was still unsettled in the United States, so some of these Asian soldiers were able to enlist in the White units and received the monthly pay of $13, while others had to join the Colored regiments and received the lesser pay of $10. Either way, they caused bewilderment and confusion on both sides of the fighting line. When John Tomney, a Chinese soldier in the Union Army, was captured, a Confederate general wondered whether he was “a mulatto, Indian, or what?”14
The same question could have been put to Christopher Bunker by any of the military men who saw his mixed physical features. They might have been even more curious if he had told them about his origin. At eighteen, Christopher was “a handsome blend of Chinese and European”: five-foot-eight, slender, black-haired, with a neatly-trimmed moustache, a strong nose, a broad forehead, brown eyes, and a tinted skin color. It would have been hard to figure out his race from his appearance. But no one could question his pride as a Southerner and his devotion to the Confederate cause. His most noteworthy war experience was his participation in the raid of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. In July 1864, in retaliation for the damage done by General David Hunter’s federal troops in the Shenandoah Valley, Brigadier General John McCausland led twenty-four hundred Confederate cavalrymen as they moved toward Chambersburg. Along the way, they swept aside Union cavalry and captured many of them, as Christopher described in a family letter about similar encounters earlier:
About two weeks ago we all went out on a scout and was gone about five days we travelled three nights and days before we made a halt. The second night got me it rained all night as hard as it could pour and we had to travel over the rockiest and the muddiest road that I ever saw and the next morning we ran up on the Yankee pickets and captured them and went on to a little town called Rogersville and there we saw a little fun catching Yankees, we captured about 150 Yankees and started back about twelve o’clock and travelled all night that night and in the whole scout we did not take our saddles off of our horses but once or twice and did not feed but once or twice a day and when we got back to camp every horse in the battalion had scratches so bad that they could hardly travel.15
On the morning of July 30, the Confederate brigade reached Chambersburg. McCausland issued a proclamation to the townspeople, demanding $100,000 in gold or $500,000 in greenbacks within three hours or the city would be put to the torch and its leading citizens arrested. “When its inhabitants failed to raise the money, McCausland destroyed it, and while the city burned, drunken soldiers plundered freely, even tearing brooches, rings, and earrings off women in the streets.”16 Chambersburg was the only town in the North destroyed by Confederate forces.
Fleeing from pursuing Union troops, McCausland got as far as Moorefield, West Virginia. Mistakenly thinking that he was in the clear, he ordered his men to set up camp in a level field that was militarily indefensible. A special unit of Union troops known as the Jessie Scouts disguised themselves in Confederate gray and pretended to be a relief column. In a surprise predawn attack, they routed the Confederates. In the mayhem, Christopher was shot out of his saddle, becoming one of the more than four hundred Confederates wounded or killed in that battle.
Earlier, prior to the raid on Chambersburg, Christopher had told his family in the same letter we saw earlier, “My horse corked himself and became very lame and I had to leave him with a gentleman who lives five miles this side of Lexington . . . and if I should get killed or captured on this raid you can send and get him.” After his capture, Christopher’s blood-spattered horse was brought back to Mount Airy. Seeing the riderless steed, Chang and Adelaide felt certain their first son had died.
Fortunately, however, Christopher was only wounded. He was taken to Camp Chase near Columbus, Ohio. One of the largest military prisons, Camp Chase was infamous for its lax policy of allowing Confederate inmates to be accompanied by their former household slaves. But by the time Christopher arrived, the prison had discontinued such hospitality. On October 12, more than two months after his capture, Christopher was finally able to write home:
Dear Father, Mother, Brothers and Sisters: It is with pleasure I take the present opportunity to drop you a few lines to let you know how I am getting along. I was captured the 7th of last August and brought to this place. I have no news of interest to write to you as there are none allowed to come in prison. You must write to me as soon as you get this and let me know how you are getting along. I would like to hear from you all as it has been a long time since I heard from you. But I hope it will not be very long before I hear from you and see you too although I see no chance for an exchange. I have not seen many well days since I came to this place. I have had the smallpox and now got the diareea [sic] but I hope that I will be well in the course of a week. . . . We are drawing very light rashions [sic] here just enough to keep breath and body together.17
Nothing could have brought more relief and elation to the Bunker household than this plainly worded epistle. From this point on, “packages from home supplemented his meager rations. His father, Chang, also sent him money so he could buy items—such as cigars, underclothes, pocketknives, and smoked beef—from the prison store.”18 Christopher remained a POW until a parole exchange of prisoners was agreed upon between the Federal Government and the Confederate States in March 1865. On April 17, he arrived home, a hero to the family.
Family lore holds that Christopher’s cousin and Eng’s oldest son, Stephen Decatur Bunker, also enlisted in the 37th Battalion of the Virginia Cavalry after he turned eighteen in July 1864. This would mean that the two Bunker cousins had fought side by side for almost a month before Christopher’s capture. But no record has been found to confirm Stephen’s enlistment in the unit; in fact, there was no trace of Stephen at all in the Compiled Service Record, except that a D. C. Bunker was listed in the Confederate Cavalry. As one historian puts it, “It is possible that the clerk got the name confused or maybe misunderstood the accent of the part Chinese cavalryman.”19 To strengthen the family’s claim, a North Carolina pension record does exist for Stephen. According to the later testimony of his sons, Stephen eluded capture at Moorefield but was wounded a month later, on September 3, 1864, near Winchester, Virginia, when Sheridan’s fifty thousand Union troops clashed with the Confederate Army led by Lieutenant General Jubal Early, forcing the latter to retreat. In April 1865, as the Union victory was all but set in stone after Appomattox, Stephen was wounded again and taken prisoner. A Northern doctor plucked from his shoulder a .44 caliber bullet, a bloody souvenir that would become a family heirloom for generations.
While two of their adult sons “saw the elephant” with their naked eyes and proved their gallantry with their battle wounds, Chang and Eng themselves were said to have been almost drafted—ironically, not by the Confederate Army but by the Union. In the last days of the war, as the armies of Sherman and Grant were delivering the death blows to the South, a division of six thousand Union troops, led by General George Stoneman, moved into North Carolina across the mountain ranges from Tennessee. A former West Point roommate of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and the future governor of California (1883–1887), Stoneman up to this point had held a mixed record in the war. He had earlier launched a failed raid in Georgia, during which he was embarrassingly captured by home guards. And then later he led a successful raid against the saltworks in Virginia, winning back some lost glory and respect from his peers. The move into North Carolina in 1865 would be Stoneman’s last raid. His original instructions were to “penetrate South Carolina well down toward Columbia, destroying the railroad and military resources of the country . . . to return to East Tennessee by way of Salisbury, North Carolina [and] release some of . . . [the Federal] prisoners of war in the rebel hands.”20 But fast-developing events, especially Sherman’s swift capture and punitive burning of Columbia on February 17, changed the course of Stoneman’s movements, unexpectedly bringing the Union blue to the door of the Siamese Twins.
Stoneman’s Raid, as it is known in history, a two-month campaign tearing up rebel havens in western North Carolina and southwest Virginia, commenced on a rainy day in late March. As one of the soldiers in the 15th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry wrote in his diary, “We started from Knoxville in an ordinary rainstorm, which increased in intensity during the day, and at night had developed into a furious hailstorm. We are in the lightest marching order, and our shelter tents are a poor protection at such a time.”21 The dirt roads cutting across the gaps in the Blue Ridge Mountains were in poor condition, now made worse by the storm. For each company, only two pack mules were allowed—one for carrying ammunition, the other for absolute necessities, such as food and cooking utensils. No baggage was allowed except overcoats.22 On March 28, the advance guard of this force, a detachment of the 12th Kentucky Cavalry under Major Myles Keogh, entered Boone, the county seat of Watauga, taking the citizens by surprise. “We arrived here this a.m.,” read Stoneman’s official mention of his first hit in the state, “captured the place, killing nine, capturing sixty-two home guards and 40 horses.”23 After burning down the Boone jail and destroying all of the county records, Stoneman divided his forces and led a brigade himself eastward, through Deep Gap to Wilkesboro, where Chang and Eng had first settled. Along the Yadkin River, Stoneman’s forces left behind a bloody trail of dead home guards, looted houses, burned factories, and stolen horses and mules.
On Sunday, April 2, Stoneman’s cavalry forded the Yadkin and turned north toward Virginia. At nightfall, more than four thousand blue-uniformed men on horseback rode into Mount Airy, which the troopers described as “very ordinary.” They picked up, or, “liberated,” the mail at the post office and read the letters for amusement. They also hit the homes of prominent citizens, such as Gilmer, Hollingsworth, Prather, and Graves, pilfering additional horses. Cavalryman Frank Frankenberry, tired of camping but too chivalrous to foist himself upon the locals, took a room at the Blue Ridge Hotel. At midnight, word of a seventeen-wagon Confederate train passing through sent some of the troopers scurrying out of town to capture it. When they did, “animals were turned over to the quartermaster’s department and the wagons were burned.” According to Thomas Perry in Civil War Stories from Mount Airy and Surry County, the only injury that Stoneman’s cavalrymen suffered in Mount Airy was at the hands of the Bunkers: Knowing of the presence of the famous Siamese Twins, Stoneman ordered his men to leave the family alone. But one foolish Yankee trooper, out of curiosity, ignored the order and visited one of the Bunker homes, where he grabbed a Bunker daughter. He “received the only wound the cavalry got that day when he received a slap across the face from the same daughter.”24
It was also said that when Stoneman decided to draft some of the locals, the name of Eng Bunker was drawn from the lottery wheel. When Stoneman saw the conjoined twins, he had to let Eng go, because he could not take both. While most biographers have dismissed this story as apocryphal, some are willing to accord family lore a special place in history, including Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace, who seem to cherish this too-good-to-be-true yarn.25
Either way, the impact of Stoneman’s Raid on the area was palpable for years to come. A local schoolgirl, Bettie Dobson, wrote in a letter to her sister, “I expected they would destroy every thang and burn the houses.”26 When that did not happen and Stoneman’s cavalry moved on to Hillsville, Virginia, western North Carolinians, thinking that the raid was over, breathed a sigh of relief.27 But the relief was short-lived, or simply an illusion. Not only did Stoneman’s forces, after wreaking havoc in Virginia, make a U-turn and return to North Carolina for more killing, looting, burning, and other wartime atrocities, for which the infamous raid on Salisbury is the best example. But also, the real consequences of the war would be felt only after the military conflict was over.