About the time that Chang and Eng set sail to return home from California, the United States cracked and began to come apart. South Carolina, which had threatened to leave the Union if a Republican were elected President, had seen Republican Abraham Lincoln win the presidency on November 6, 186o. On December zo, the Convention of the People of South Carolina had unanimously voted to secede from the Union. Other Southern states quickly followed. Then, in the first week of February, the Confederate States of America was formed. The terrible schism was under way.
After two ocean voyages totaling twenty-six days and the journey south from New York, the Siamese Twins were finally back in Mount Airy, North Carolina. They had most of March 1861 and the first week and a half in April to reacquaint themselves with their families and organize their business affairs before the last peace they would know for four years would come to an abrupt end.
On April 12, 1861, the army of the two-month-old Confederate States of America fired upon the federal garrison at Fort Sumter outside Charleston, South Carolina. Following thirty-four hours of bombardment, Fort Sumter fell. The Civil War had begun. The twins, like all Americans, saw the conflict rapidly intensify. On April 19, Lincoln ordered a blockade of the Southern ports; on May 3, Lincoln called for volunteers that would bring the Union Army up to 157,000 men; on May 6, the Confederate Congress declared that a state of war existed between the South and the North.
Then, what Chang and Eng and their neighbors dreaded most came to pass. On May 20, following a convention in Raleigh, the twins watched their beloved North Carolina become the eleventh state to secede from the Union, join the Confederacy, and enter the war.
Neither side would acknowledge that slavery was the cause of the conflict.
A regional account, History of Surry County by J. G. Hollingsworth, gave the Southern viewpoint on the cause of the war, and it certainly was the viewpoint of Chang and Eng:
The immediate cause of War Between the States was not primarily over the question of slavery. It is true that in the years preceding the struggle sectional differences had arisen over the hostile conception of slavery. The immediate cause of the war was over the right of states to withdraw from federal union. It was the all-important question of state rights. The people of the South upheld the early conception of the union that the states were older than the national union...
The large slave owners of the state were conservative in their views and when the crisis arrived threw their influence on the side of Union loyalty. The slave-holding class in North Carolina in 1860 represented only twenty-five percent of the white population of the state. The Democratic party, chiefly small farmers, merchants, manufacturers, and professional men was the noisy element that demanded hasty action and immediate withdrawal from the Union following the election of 1860.
The first convention which was called to consider the state's withdrawal voted against the proposal. But when Lincoln declared the seceding states in rebellion and issued a decree of blockade, the coast of North Carolina was included in the region to be patrolled.
And this inflamed North Carolinians and sent them to war.
The North agreed with the South on the cause for conflict. On July 25, 1861, the United States Senate passed a resolution "that the present war was being fought to maintain the Union and Constitution and not to interfere with established institutions such as slavery."
Even though North Carolina had joined the Confederacy, sympathies in Surry County and in Mount Airy, where Chang and Eng dwelt, were split. There was a good deal of support for the North, although soon much of it would go underground, but still the state had joined the Confederacy, and the majority went along. During the war, the twins' home area contributed 700 soldiers to the Confederate forces and more than 100 to the Union forces. In all, North Carolina contributed 111,00o regular troops, 19,000 of them draftees, to the Confederate Army, and lost 40,275 of these men, half dying in battle, half dying from disease, the greatest loss of lives suffered by any Southern state.
There was some speculation on what would have happened if Chang and Eng, caught in an atmosphere of conflicting loyalties and unable to secede from their union, had supported different sides. Actually, to those who knew them, it was never an issue. Judge Graves reported:
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. And in their troubles in the Northern states during the periods of intense excitement caused by the attempted enforcement of the "Fugitive Slave Law" and the still more alarming and angry passions exhibited in the winter preceding "The war between the states," it was with the greatest difficulty that they could control their feelings of indignation. . . .
When the final conflict came, they took sides with their own section, with their neighbors and friends, in defense of what they believed to be their right. Always and under all circumstances true to friends, faithful to all engagements, sincere in all things, warmly enlisted for whatever cause they espoused, they sustained "The Lost Cause" with unflinching fidelity to the last. As soon as their sons were old enough, catching the enthusiasms of their fathers, they enlisted in the Confederate service and proved their courage in the field. At all times noted for their hospitality, their generous and kindly feelings opened the doors of their mansions wider and more cordially to the weary and hungry soldiers than to any other persons . . .
Although North Carolina was a vital supply link to the rest of the Confederacy, it was a minor arena for the warring armies. Only seventy-three skirmishes and eleven battles were fought in the state. And in the northwest corner of the state, the twins saw no enemy invaders for three of the four years of the war. In fact, in the first two years the twins and their families were not directly affected by the conflict, except as everyone on the home front was affected by the nearness of danger and the change in living conditions.
At the outset of the Civil War, Surry County records showed that Chang and Eng were comfortable both in their family and financial situations. On June 1, 186o, the county census taker visited Eng and noted: "Living under the Eng roof Eng Bunker, age 49, male. Value of real estate $1100. Value of personal estate $16,000. Place of birth: Siam. Sarah Bunker, age 4o, female. Place of birth: N.C." Then were listed all of Eng's children to that date: Kate, 17; Julia, 16; Stephen D., 14; James, 13; Patrick, 12; William O., 6; Frederick, 5; Rozila, 1.
Next, the census taker visited Chang and noted: "Living under the Chang roof Chang Bunker, age 49, male. Value of real estate $6,000. Value of personal estate $12,000. Place of birth: Siam. Adelade Bunker, age 37, female. Place of birth: N.C." Then were listed all of Chang's children to that date: Josephine, 17; Chris, 15; Nancy, 13; Mary, 11; Victoria, 9; Louisa, 6; Albert, 3.
In 1862, after a full year of war, the twins were still financially comfortable. The "Tax List for Mount Airy District" listed their individual assets. For Eng: "300 acres, valued at $1,000/ 1 town lot, valued at $300/ 19 slaves, valued at $6,000/ debts and interest [owed him], $1,975/ carriages $30/ household property $150/ other property $125/ plate & jewelry $100." For Chang: "425 acres, valued at $6,000/ 11 slaves, valued at $4,000/ household property $400/ other property $25/ plate and jewelry $l00/ gold watch $150."
In 1863, the second year of the war, a document of tax assessments showed that the twins were continuing to prosper. The first entry read: "Eng Bunker Acreage 300 Value $1000 No. slaves 21 Value $17850." Eng was worth $18,850. The second entry read: "Chang Bunker Acreage 425 Value $6000 No. slaves to Value $10130." Chang was worth $16,130.
By 1864, the third year of the war, both twins were maintaining their assets, although Eng's slaveholdings were worth almost twice Chang's. For Eng, the tax summation read: "300 acres $1,000/ 1 lot $250/ 21 slaves $17050/ money $1400/ debts [owed him] $1000/ C.B. $50/ gold plate $100/ household property $400." For Chang, the tax summation read: "475 acres $6000/ 12 slaves $9500/ C.B. $40/ gold plate $100/ H.P. [household property] $300/ brandy 35 gallons."
But the cold figures did not tell the entire story of the twins' lives during the early war years—the strain on family relationships, the sufferings under excessive taxation and inflation, the pressures of home-front activity, the ever-present danger to those living in the leading blockade-running state.
With the coming of war, Adelaide and Sallie were under additional stress, more and more at odds with one another—the peculiar arrangement that required each of them to live with her husband and his brother was a permanent irritant—and they frequently had angry differences.
Like their neighbors, the twins suffered from the higher taxes imposed to help finance the war. They were forced to use newly issued Confederate money and to buy war bonds, both of which sharply depreciated in value as the war wound on and the prospects for victory dimmed. Prices for staple foods soared out of sight. In three war years, the price of flour rose from $i8 a barrel to $500; the price of wheat jumped from $3 a bushel to $5o; the price of bacon leaped from 33 cents a pound to $7.50. By the time the war was over, the twins were paying $70 for a bushel of salt and $100 for a pound of coffee. Throughout these trying years, substitute foods came into use: parched corn replaced coffee beans, and molasses was used instead of sugar. Since salt was so expensive—but a necessity for the preservation of meat—new factories were built to produce salt by evaporating seawater.
While Adelaide and Sallie were exempt from many of the hardships other North Carolina women underwent—farming the fields for their absent husbands, worrying whether their husbands were alive, suffering loneliness—they still worked hard sewing clothes for the soldiers, preparing refreshments for troop trains, nursing the wounded.
There was constant fear of Union cavalry raids. Efforts were made to mount some protection. According to a local history:
"The entire region began to resound with the tread of men being trained in the arts of war. In at least three places in Surry county military companies were organized and preparation made to get them in serviceable condition. . . . At one time during the struggle efforts were made in the county to organize a company of cavalry but when application was made to the Confederate government at Richmond for equipment the plan fell through because of the scarcity of saddles and swords."
Yet North Carolina's home population contributed mightily to the Southern war effort by blockade-running. At the start of the war, Lincoln had determined that the most effective means of undermining the Confederacy would be to blockade its 3,000-mile coastline with Union vessels that would halt all importing of food, clothing, and firearms, and all exporting of home produce to raise money abroad.
To counter this strangulation, North Carolina's witty, eloquent Governor Zebulon Vance, pro-Union before the war but a patriotic Southerner after secession, established a fleet of speedy, light-draft vessels, camouflaged gray to run through fog or black to travel by night. These vessels picked up firearms and food from British steamers in Bermuda, hurried the goods 674 miles past Union lookouts, past the protective artillery of Fort Fisher, and upriver to the port of Wilmington, North Carolina, "the most important blockade-running port in the Confederacy." On their trips out, the little vessels slipped through the blockade with their cargoes of cotton to be delivered to British steamships in Bermuda to build up cash credits in Europe for more imports. One North Carolina ship, the Advance, whose chief engineer was an Irishman who had voted for Lincoln, successfully ran the blockade eleven times before it was captured.
Since much of the blockade-running throughout the war originated in Surry County, Chang and Eng had at least a peripheral involvement in this risky but successful war effort.
Then, on April 1, 1863, a member of the Bunker families, the first in either family, got directly involved in the Civil War, and through him Chang and Eng themselves became more closely involved in the conflict raging about them. Having just turned eighteen, Christopher Wren Bunker, Chang's second oldest child and first son, enlisted in a Confederate cavalry battalion.
Young Christopher went across the North Carolina state line into Wythe County, Virginia, and offered his services to Company I of the 37th Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, whose commanding officer, Captain E. Young, had organized the company that day and been elected by the men to head it. Captain Young swore Christopher Bunker in as a private "for the war."
Of Christopher's early activity in the Civil War, little is known except for the remark of one descendant who said that "Chris Bunker was only a water boy in the war." Water boy or full-fledged Confederate soldier, Christopher was called up for service on September 14, 1863, and did not return home to Mount Airy until March 15, 1864. Later, his younger sister Nannie noted in a diary she kept that after a two-and-a-half-week furlough Christopher had then returned to the battlefield. "Left again Apr. 3rd 1864."
There is no doubt that, during his second and final stint with the 37th Battalion, Christopher saw active service and was constantly in combat. On April 12, three months after Christopher returned to his unit, his first cousin, Stephen Decatur Bunker, Eng's third child and oldest son, came of age and enlisted in the Southern cause on July 2, 1864. Altogether, Christopher and Stephen had fought on the same side for only one month when Christopher's role as an active participant in the war came to an abrupt end.
The series of incidents that were to lead to the termination of Christopher Bunker's part in the conflict began with the all-out war being waged by a Union commander, General David Hunter, who was invading Virginia towns, attacking nonmilitary targets, burning civilian homes, and treating unarmed Southern citizens like enemy soldiers. The Confederate high command considered Hunter's tactics "barbarous," and General Robert E. Lee deter-mined to put a stop to them. Lee ordered Lieutenant General Jubal A. Early to go after Hunter.
General Early, among whose units was the Virginia Cavalry in which the Bunker cousins were serving, pursued Hunter, driving him westward. Then General Early and his troops marched through the Shenandoah Valley, crossed the Potomac River, and approached Washington, D.C. But General Ulysses S. Grant and his troops quickly came to the defense of the Union capital, and General Early pulled back to Virginia again.
Now, General Early ordered Brigadier General John Mc-Causland and Brigadier General Bradley T. Johnson, who was under McCausland, to invade Pennsylvania and take the city of Chambersburg. Proceeding with 2,600 cavalrymen—Chang's son among them—McCausland moved across the Potomac River, went through Clear Spring, Maryland, and headed toward Chambersburg. Several groups of Union cavalry, operating out of their headquarters at Hagerstown, Maryland, under a West Pointer, Brigadier General William Woods Averell, tried to resist but were swept aside.
On July 30, 1864, the Confederates reached Chambersburg, took over control of the community, and demanded either $100,000 in gold coin or $500,000 in United States currency within three hours if the city was to be spared. The townspeople were unable to meet the ultimatum, and General Johnson disgustedly recounted what happened next:
Every crime in the catalogue of infamy has been committed, I believe, except murder and rape. Highway robbery of watches and pocket-books was of ordinary occurrence; the taking of breast-pins, finger-rings, and earrings frequently happened. Pillage and sack of private dwellings took place hourly. A soldier of an advance guard robbed of his gold watch the Catholic clergyman of Hancock on his way from church on Sunday, July 31, in the public streets. Another of a rear guard nearly brained a private of Company B, First Maryland Cavalry, for trying to prevent his sacking a woman's trunk and stealing her clothes and jewels. A lieutenant at Hancock exacted and received $1,000 in greenbacks of a citizen; a soldier packed up a woman's and a child's clothing, which he had stolen in the presence of the highest officials, unrebuked. At Chambersburg, while the town was in flames, a quartermaster, aided and directed by a field officer, exacted ransom of individuals for their houses, holding the torch in terror over the house until it was paid. These ransoms varied from $750 to $150, according to the size of the habitation. Thus the grand spectacle of a national retaliation was reduced to a miserable huckstering for greenbacks. After the order was given to burn the town of Chambersburg and before, drunken soldiers paraded the streets in every possible disguise and paraphernalia, pillaging and plundering and drunk.
Following the destruction of Chambersburg, General McCausland ordered his subordinate, General Johnson, to move on to Moorefield, West Virginia, and wait there, promising to rendezvous with him within a day. Johnson, whose brigade included Christopher Bunker, went south, reaching Moorefield on August 5. Meanwhile, McCausland had been engaged by units of General Averell's 1,300 cavalrymen, fought his way free, and arrived at Moorefield on the heels of Johnson.
McCausland, feeling certain that Union troops were far behind them and that there was no immediate threat, set up his camp three miles outside Moorefield, and ordered Johnson to establish his own encampment on a grassy level area beyond. While this was good grazing land for the horses, Johnson worried that, because it was so flat, it would be militarily indefensible. Still, he obeyed. The tents of his soldiers went up along the road for three-quarters of a mile. McCausland also told Johnson to set up pickets—detachments of lookouts or guards—some distance away on three roads. However, McCausland felt it was not necessary to send out any scouting parties, still certain that Union troops were nowhere near them.
Thirty hours later—it was two hours after midnight on a Sunday morning—as his men slept, General Johnson was awakened by a courier who brought a message from McCausland. There was word that three brigades of Union cavalry, led by General Averell, had been seen passing through Romney, twenty miles away, the night before. Johnson was ordered to get out a scouting party on horseback fast and send it up the road to Romney to verify whether the enemy were really in the area or not.
By three o'clock that morning the scouts, members of the Eighth Virginia Cavalry, passed their lookout pickets and continued up the road to Romney. Suddenly, in the dark, they were surrounded and ambushed, trapped by Averell's cavalry. Losing no time, the Union soldiers stripped the Confederate scouts, removed their own blue uniforms, and donned Confederate gray. Then, two of the disguised Northern soldiers rode toward Johnson's camp. Soon they came on two Confederate sentinels. The gray-clad Union soldiers were routinely challenged. They replied that "they were scouts from the Eighth Virginia." The sentinels passed them, but one of the disguised Union soldiers said he had lost something on the road and wanted to retrieve it. He backtracked into the darkness, then suddenly reappeared with twenty more Union cavalrymen who took the sentinels prisoner. The Northerners moved on until they came across a small reserve detachment on night duty. "Get your horses," the Northerners called out, "you are relieved." As the reserves prepared to leave their posts, they were taken by surprise and overwhelmed.
"Thus," wrote General Johnson later, "scout, picket, and reserve were captured by the enemy uniformed as Confederates, who then rode in my camp without giving any alarm. . . . This great disaster would have at once been retrieved but for the insufficient armament of the command. Besides the First and Second Maryland and a squadron of the Eighth Virginia there was not a saber in the command. In that open country, perfectly level, the only mode to fight charging cavalry was by charging, and this the men were unable to do. The long Enfield musket once discharged could not be reloaded, and lay helpless before the charging saber. With an equal chance the enemy would at once have been driven back. The largest portion of the command remained steady, and after passing Moorefield were held in hand with ease. I reached the Valley with about 30o men missing . . ."
Among those reported missing, on August 7, was Chang's son Christopher Bunker, who had been captured by the Union troopers.
Shortly afterward, a friend of Christopher's brought his bloodstained rider-sless horse back to Mount Airy. When Chang's Adelaide saw the horse, she went back into the house, pulled a drawer out of a small table, and wrote on the bottom of the drawer, "Christopher Bunker was either killed or captured August 4 [sic], 1864."
As his parents would eventually learn, Christopher was alive but wounded, and now a prisoner of war. Three days after his capture, Christopher was in Atheneum Prison in Wheeling, Virginia. There his vital statistics were recorded: Age: 20; Height: 5'8"; Complexion: dark; Eyes: brown; Hair: black; Occupation: farmer.
After staying in the prison overnight, Christopher, along with other Confederate cavalrymen in his battalion who had been captured at Moorefield, was sent from Virginia to one of the largest of the federal military prisons, Camp Chase, four miles west of Columbus, Ohio.
Camp Chase, on one hundred acres of farmland, was originally established as a training ground for the thousands of Union recruits being prepared to fight in the Civil War. But when Major General George B. McClellan's Ohio regiments began to capture numerous Confederate soldiers in western Virginia, it was decided to convert a portion of the camp into a military prison housing 450 inmates. The first prison, enclosed by a twelve-foothigh wooden wall, contained three single-story frame buildings, each partitioned into rooms with tiered bunks and mess-hall accommodations. In the months to follow, as more and more Confederate captives were shipped north, the facilities were greatly expanded, with two more military prisons crowded with barracks being added. Noncom Confederate officers and political prisoners were kept in the original prison, and enlisted men in the other two.
For a period in 1862, due to overcrowding and a lenient administration, many of the Confederates were allowed to leave the camp on parole and live in nearby Columbus, where they strolled the streets in full-dress gray uniforms, wearing their pistols and swords. As curiosities and romantic figures, these Confederate parolees were entertained by leading Ohio citizens and given much attention by some of the city's women.
"But it was not these practices that provoked the greatest wrath among loyal Unionists," wrote Philip R. Shriver and Donald J. Breen in Ohio's Military Prisons in the Civil War. "Rather it was the fact that nearly a hundred Negroes, most of them slaves, had been sent with their masters from Fort Donelson to the prison compound at Camp Chase, there to continue to serve their masters as slaves. In the midst of a war brought on by the slavery issue, in the center of a state that had contributed John Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Benjamin Lundy, Joshua Reed Giddings, Benjamin F. Wade, and a legion of others to the abolitionist crusade, it most certainly did not make sense that slavery could exist but four miles from Ohio's capitol building."
After two government investigations, Confederate parolees lost their side arms and freedom, and the outrageous practice of slavery inside the prison walls was brought to an end.
Laxity at Camp Chase was struck a further blow after a sensational escape was made from another state prison, the Ohio Penitentiary, by a famous inmate and his aides. In July 1863, Confederate General John Hunt Morgan and six of his men dug a tunnel down under their cellblock and beneath the courtyard, penetrating twenty feet of earth and four feet of rock, to emerge at the prison wall. Using bed sheets attached to a grappling hook, they scaled the wall and escaped to Tennessee. This feat inspired the organization of an effort for a mass breakout at Camp Chase. Had the loose administration of the camp continued, the effort might have succeeded. However, the camp commandant decided to tighten his entire security system. To prevent any escapes, the administration hired private detectives who, disguised as Confederate prisoners, spied upon and informed on suspicious inmates. The inmates caught tunneling were hung by their thumbs from the ceiling, or made to wear ball and chain while performing hard labor, or were thrown into a windowless dungeon four feet by eight.
But by the time Christopher Bunker had reached Camp Chase in August 1864, conditions had been somewhat liberalized again. Six months earlier, a new commanding officer, Colonel William F. Richardson, had been placed in charge of the prison. He felt that religious reading matter would be "beneficial to the prisoners and have a tendency to prevent attempts to escape." As a result, Christopher was able to read the Bible. He was allowed to spend his spare time carving boats and musical instruments out of wood. He was also allowed to shop in the sutler's store, and with money that Chang sent him he was able to purchase a wide variety of items, from cigars and underclothes to pocketknives and smoked beef. And he was permitted to receive packages from home.
Still, it was a lonely, primitive life. During his seven months in Camp Chase, Christopher was housed in a small wooden barracks with 197 other prisoners, slept on a straw-covered bunk, and ate meager rations (once being reduced to eating cooked rat).
There was a shortage of clothing, and many of the inmates were in tatters and barefoot. Most of the men were infected with lice. And all were weakened by bouts of typhoid fever, pneumonia, dysentery. Two months after Christopher's arrival, 168 prisoners were stricken with smallpox, some winding up in the pesthouse and then the cemetery. Christopher did not escape the hospital. On September 9 he fell ill and was hospitalized. His records show that he was suffering from "variola"—a virus disease that could have been either smallpox or the less serious chickenpox, since he was listed as not having been vaccinated prior to the war.
Probably the most difficult part for Christopher, and for his fellow inmates as well, was the enforced introspection during those long months in Camp Chase. This was voiced by a Surry County neighbor of Christopher's, William M. Norman, who was a prisoner of war in nearby Johnson's Island, outside Sandusky, Ohio. In his diary, Norman wrote:
The mind of a prisoner is wandering. He studies over his past life and talks over most everything he has ever done. Political questions are fully discussed and everyone seems to adhere closely to the merits of his own native state, however recreant that state may have proven to her trust. Religious principles come up often for discussion, in which almost everyone expresses his way or his mode of living, or what he considers the true principle of fundamental or practical religion. Farming, too, comes up for discussion and embraces a large scope of argument and pleasant imaginations, as the winding up of such a discussion results in repeating the whole catalogue of the comforts of life and the imagined luxuries he expects to enjoy. . . . The subject of exchange of prisoners is talked of much. It would take volumes to contain all that is said on this point. We are ready to catch at the least glimmering hope or least insinuation on the subject. Everyone has his time set when he thinks an exchange will be effected.
At last, the subject of so many conversations, of dreams and hopes, became reality.
On the morning of February 5, 1865, a Union lieutenant mounted the parapet between the enlisted men's prisons and bellowed, "Attention prisoners!" When he had their full attention, he announced, "Parole exchange of prisoners has been agreed upon between the United States and the Confederate States!"
There were 9,045 Confederate prisoners in Camp Chase that day, and for the first time joy was unanimous among them.
A month later, on March 4, 1865, Christopher Bunker took the oath of allegiance to the United States, then was transported to City Point, Virginia, where he was exchanged for a Union prisoner of war. Freed more than five weeks before Lee's surrender at Appomattox, Christopher made his way back to Mount Airy and to a warm welcome from Chang and Eng and his mother Adelaide.
For Christopher the war was over. For his cousin Stephen, Eng's son, it was not.
Stephen had managed to escape the debacle at Moorefield, in which so many Confederate soldiers, among them Christopher, had been captured. Less than a month later, on September 3, 1864, fighting beside his comrades with the 37th Battalion of the Virginia Cavalry near Winchester, Virginia, Stephen Bunker was wounded. Apparently, the wound was not serious, for soon he was back in action again---"and bore himself gallantly," Judge Graves noted.
A short time after Christopher had returned home on April 17, 1865, eight days after Appomattox but before the last of the fighting had ceased, Stephen was wounded a second time. With the Civil War ended, Stephen was sent home to Mount Airy to be with his father and mother once more.
According to Eng's grandson Joffre Bunker, it was believed that Stephen Bunker had also been a prisoner of war sometime during his service. Said Joffre Bunker, Stephen's "two sons claim he was a prisoner of the Northern army. They have a bullet about .44 calibre size they claimed the Northern doctor took from his shoulder—I have seen this many times."
Only once were Chang and Eng themselves threatened with physical involvement in the Civil War, and that was in the last month of the conflict when Eng—ludicrous as it may sound—was drafted to serve with the Union forces.
Major General George H. Stoneman, who had fought under McClellan and Sherman, headed a veteran division of 6,000 battle-hardened men. Each of his cavalrymen carried carbines as well as haversacks containing one hundred cartridges, bacon and coffee, and an extra set of horseshoes and nails. In these last days of the war, Stoneman was ordered to dash into North Carolina and destroy the tracks and facilities of the North Carolina Railroad and the Piedmont Railroad, as well as military stores. He was also expected to liberate Union prisoners from the Confederate prison at Salisbury.
After a successful sweep through the state, General Stoneman reached Mount Airy on April 2, 1865. Pausing in the area, General Stoneman decided to draft some of the locals—no matter what their sympathies—into his division. The names of all males over eighteen in that part of the country were put into a lottery wheel. What happened next was reported by the Philadelphia Times: "Into the fateful wheel went the names of Chang and Eng. But one name, that of Eng, was drawn. The gallant Stoneman was nonplussed. Eng must go, but Chang would not. Stoneman dared not take both. So he resigned his claim to Eng."
Of course, the Siamese Twins were known to most of the invading troopers. According to one descendant, "Yankee soldiers had been told not to harm Chang-Eng's places. The Bunker family sat on the porch, and a soldier grabbed one of the daughters—and she slapped him. The other soldiers all laughed and nothing more happened."
It was in this period, while the Civil War was winding down, that Chang and Eng, reconstructed Southerners, were supposed to have been officially forgiven for their personal secession from the Union in the war years by being summoned to the White House for a meeting with President Abraham Lincoln. Just before his death in 1976, Joffre Bunker recalled, "The twins met President Lincoln and he told them the story about the Illinois farmer who owned a yoke of oxen that found it hard to work in tandem"—implying that the twins' physical predicament probably made it difficult for them to pull together on some occasions.
Finally, the Civil War was over. On April 9, 1865, General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia—but not his sword—to General Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. On April 12, the last major city in the Confederacy, Mobile, Alabama, fell to Union troops. On April 14, the Stars and Stripes were once more raised over Fort Sumter, South Carolina—and that night John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln. On April 15, Andrew Johnson became President of the United States. On April 26, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to General William T. Sherman. On May 10, President Andrew Johnson proclaimed that "armed resistance to the authority of this Government in the said insurrectionary States may be regarded as virtually at an end." On May 29, President John-son granted amnesty and pardon to all who had taken part in the "rebellion." The war was ended.
The South was left a shambles, and so were the prospects of Chang and Eng Bunker.
One of the twins' major sources of income during the war years had been the interest from loans that they had made. They lent money to their friends and neighbors, including Mount Airy merchant Robert Gilmer and even Dr. Joseph Hollingsworth. Unfortunately, they had not anticipated the defeat of the Confederacy and the collapse of its currency. According to The Sun of New York, the twins "had a good deal of money loaned out on the best securities in the early part of the war when Confederate money went down to about 150 a bushel. Their debtors hastened to liquidate their obligations and redeem their securities with the worth-less stuff which they [the twins] then could not refuse. Any per-son wishing to purchase a huge quantity of Confederate notes at very low rates will do well to address Chang-Eng Bunker, Esqs., Mount Airy, Surry County, North Carolina."
But the sound money that the twins had loaned out, which had been repaid with worthless money, was not their greatest loss.
In earlier assessments of their financial worth, the twins' most valuable possessions had been their holdings in human property. According to Surry County tax records of 1864, Chang owned twelve slaves worth $9,500 and Eng owned twenty-one slaves worth $17,050.
Now, a year after the Civil War, in 1866, the Mount Airy tax assessor made new listings of the property owned by the Siamese Twins. Chang was credited with 425 acres of land worth $6,000, as well as "Money $600, G[old] Plate $100, 1 Pistol." Eng was credited with 300 acres of land worth $1,000, as well as "Money $1,500, Gold Plate $100, 1 Pistol."
For each of them, for the first time, one item was omitted from their list of assets. There was no mention of slaves as assets.
With the Union victory in the Civil War, the Southern institution of slavery was abolished and all slaves were liberated. Chang and Eng were forced to tell their thirty-three slaves that they were free. As Bunker family descendants remember the story, all the former slaves cast aside their hoes and shovels, formed lines, and marched off the farms to enjoy their new-found equality and freedom. A few days later, one of the former slaves returned, pre-pared to resume his old job but as a paid employee. In the weeks that followed, most of the freed slaves came straggling back to the Chang and Eng farms, after discovering for themselves that they had no place to go. No jobs were awaiting them, there were no other houses to live in, no food to eat, and they had no money at all. They were ready to go to work on salaries. Chang and Eng hired as many as they could afford to support. The rest drifted away, desperately seeking employment elsewhere.
The loss of their slaves almost mined Chang and Eng financially. Not only were they stripped of assets but, to make matters worse, some of these slaves were now paid employees, adding a new expense to the twins' overhead.
In the years after the war, many journalists would report that the twins had been left bankrupt. While this was not true—they still owned their land, their houses and furnishings, and were able to dig a daily living out of the soil—they were desperate to provide security for their large families.
They had also suffered other losses in the year the war ended. Judge Graves presented a somber record:
"Hitherto nothing has been said of death. The families had been singularly fortunate, for except for the little Rosalind who died in infancy, there had been no death until the 27th of February 1.865 when Julia A. Bunker [Eng's second child] departed this life before she had completed her twenty second year. She was an intelligent good and pious woman and by her gentleness won many friends. She died quietly and calmly as the good should die and her friends have the hope that she rested. Death having found entrance soon returned, and on the 28th of September 1865 little Georgianna C. Bunker [Eng's tenth child, aged two] was taken to rest with her sister."
Mutually grieved by these losses, the twins knew that nothing could be done about them. But their financial losses were another thing. There was a possibility they could be repaired.
"The slaves which had formed a considerable part of their estate and especially of Eng were freed and their investments were all lost," Judge Graves recounted. "So the brothers at this late period in life found themselves so much reduced in property that they were under the necessity of again going into the laborious business of public exhibition. In the fall of the year 1865 they engaged to travel again ..."
Actually, a onetime wealthy railroad investor and native of Baltimore, along with a youthful Civil War veteran and fellow North Carolinian, were partly responsible for encouraging the twins to return to show business. Simon Bolivar Zimmerman, who had lived in Baltimore, had made a fortune through investments in the ever-burgeoning railroad industry. He had been socially prominent, and had spent his annual vacations at the fashionable spa of Cape May, New Jersey. Before the Civil War he had married and moved to North Carolina. The war had divested him of his fortune and plunged him into bankruptcy. It was Zimmerman who had the idea of recouping part of his wealth by enticing Chang and Eng back into show business and managing them.
For this enterprise, Zimmerman wanted a partner, and he turned to his brother-in-law, eighteen-year-old Henry Armand London, a war veteran. Young London had recently served as a private in the 32nd North Carolina Regiment and had been selected at Appomattox as the courier to carry General Lee's last order of the war, an order stating that Lee was surrendering and that all troops must cease-fire. Upon leaving the service, London returned to Chapel Hill to pick up the college degree he had been obliged to postpone when his entire senior class had enlisted. In later years he was to gain renown as a lawyer, state senator, and editor of the Chatham Record. But now, in June 1865, he was ready to join Zimmerman in undertaking another career.
According to Henry London's daughter, Camelia London Jerome, in a letter to Dr. Worth B. Daniels, a cousin who was writing a medical paper about the twins in 1962:
"After the War Between the States, my father, who was eighteen years old, and his brother-in-law [Simon Bolivar Zimmerman], went to see the Siamese twins in Mt. Airy to see if they would be interested in making some money (as everyone in the South was broke) and be exhibited again in the North. They were delighted over the idea, so father and Mr. Zimmerman became the advance press agents, going to various organizations and displaying the pictures of the Siamese twins, etc. When they came to Baltimore and the fashionable resort of Cape May, Mr. Zimmerman would stay in his room as he was so afraid he would be seen by some of his friends. They did this for a season and all made some much needed money."
Chang and Eng were fifty-four years old when they set out on this comeback trip through the Eastern and Midwestern sections of the United States. The tour led to a series of short trips out of Mount Airy, not for just one season as Judge Graves stated, but extending over a period of three years.
The Siamese Twins opened at the Smith & Nixon Hall in Chicago on November 1, 1865. In the months preceding the twins' appearance, the theater had successfully featured such attractions as Christy's Minstrels, a play called The Phantom Traveler based on the late President Lincoln's dream that he would be assassinated, and Campbell & Castle's Opera. The opera, according to a local history, "was replaced by the famous Siamese twins, Chang and Eng. This attraction . . . proved to be a poor drawing card."
Chang and Eng continued to do poorly in the Midwest. Part of this failure was due to the ineptness of their managers. When the twins' six-month contract ended, they returned to Mount Airy for a brief rest, then resumed their exhibitions under the auspices of a new team of managers. Wrote Judge Graves:
"They soon set out again under an engagement [with] Messrs. Shepherd [sic] and Bird. During this trip while in Kansas, Chang had an attack of sickness in consequence of which his hearing was very greatly impaired. This was the first serious attack of sickness either of them had suffered in a long time. Eng was not affected as he had been in 1833 when they both had chills and fever. Then the augue coming on each at the same time and the fever affected them at the same time and in the same manner and they seemed to suffer precisely alike. About the time of Chang's sickness Mr. Sheppard was called to New Orleans and was killed there. This accident terminated their engagement."
Now the twins sought another manager, and chose the man who had earlier replaced Zimmerman. He was Judge H. P. Ingalls, who operated out of Nassau Street in New York City. Ingalls, apparently feeling the twins were too familiar an attraction to carry a show by themselves, booked them into Union Hall in New York City with another act. On February 12, 1866, Chang and Eng appeared along with "Hoonio and Iola, 'wild Australian children,' possessed of long, sharp teeth, very small, curiously-shaped heads . . ."
This was still not enough. As he went on booking the twins, Ingalls sought other means of improving their box-office draw. By the summer he was struck with a brilliant idea for a return performance in New York City. He broached it to the twins almost casually in a letter he wrote them on July 3o, 1866:
I have decided on a opening day which is to be the 31st of August that comes on Monday you had better get here on saturday before if you want to get some things.
I shal commence to advertise you on Monday I shal spare no pains or money to make the show a sucess, you had better send me a picture of your wives & your selves also one of those group & I will have a lot ready when we open I shal try to make the Pictures a big atraction & I think if they are worked up well we can make a big thing of them
Write just as soon as you get this
I think you had better bring two of your children you can chose any of them you like I would like Albert & it mite be well enough to bring a girl be sure & let me here from you by return mail
Ingalls had revived a winning formula. By reminding the public that the joined twins were married to two normal sisters, that this strange marriage had actually produced offspring, that the children might be seen in person with their fathers, the manager was able to pique audience curiosity anew.
Chang and Eng had no objections to publicizing their wives and exhibiting their children again. During earlier American tours, Eng had brought along his sons, Patrick and James Montgomery, or his daughter Katherine, while Chang had been accompanied by his oldest son Christopher or one of his many daughters.
In fact, while in New York City, probably in the spring of 1865, Chang and Eng brought their wives, Adelaide and Sallie, and two of their children, Patrick and Albert, to the renowned photographic studio of Mathew Brady to pose for a group picture that Judge Ingalls might use for his publicity campaign. The bespectacled, goateed Brady—who had photographed Abraham Lincoln, P. T. Barnum, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Walt Whitman, and Brigham Young, and had lost $100,000 covering the Civil War with his camera—welcomed the twins inside his studio at Broadway and Tenth Street. Brady led his visitors into his glass-lined photography room, seated them in a comfortable group, Chang and Eng in the center, each flanked by his wife, with Patrick and Albert at their feet. Minutes later, the camera's shutter snapped, and Chang and Eng had joined Brady's gallery of immortals.
In their travels, Chang and Eng were constantly preoccupied with how things were going back home. On October 31, 1866, from Cincinnati, Ohio, one of Eng's children who was on the tour wrote to a sister in Mount Airy:
"We have been travelling with the Carolina Twins [Millie and Christine, black joined twins] since we left Xenia but I dont know how long they will be with us, [maybe] not longer than this week. Pappa says he hope you are done sowing grain by this time, and have commenced to pull corn put the corn in the loft not the crib it will not be safe Pappa says get the hogs in good order before you kill them. . . . You say corn will be one dollar per bu—Pappa thinks it will be cheaper than that and not to be in a hurry to buy at that price. Let us know when you write again how much corn you have made if as much as last year. and also if the sweet Potatoes are good we think there will be some stealing going on there this fall and winter so tell Montgomery & Patrick to notice every thing."
A year later, in 1867, there was a tragic happening in Mount Airy. Judge Graves recorded it:
"Up to the 16th August 1867 there had been no death among all the children of Chang; but on that day his oldest and favorite daughter who had become a tall fine looking woman with dark and flashing eyes and hair as black as jet died suddenly and most unexpectedly. In apparently as good health as ever she had gone on her favorite gray to visit a sick friend and on her return fell lifeless to the ground about a half mile from home. That is all that is known of her death. It was said she died of heart disease. Some say that there is a sad romance connected with her history and that she died of a broken heart."
The Chang daughter who died so "suddenly and unexpectedly" was Josephine Virginia, age twenty-three.
A month later, Chang and Eng were unhappily on the road again. But now their letters were filled with fewer apprehensions about their crops and more about the good health of their wives and children. To allay their fears, Katherine was forced to write her brother Decatur a reassuring letter:
"You said you was uneasy about home—there is no use for you to be so uneasy for Mama and myself will try and do the best we can & I think the children will do the same. . . . Tell Papa if he does not come home before the end of seven weeks that I do not think he will get many of the grapes to eat but I am going to save him some any how. I can put up a big bottle full in liquor & sugar. I have already put up a jar of peaches in brandy and they are keeping nice. De [Decatur] I do not want you to forget to get me that under skirt, but don't get a costly one. Old Aunt Grace [the former slave who had helped raise the children in both families] is here yet and does very well. Bobie is as well as ever and we are all about as usual. We hope this will find you all in good health, and don't be so uneasy about home, for nothing has happened since you left."
Friends and neighbors in Mount Airy also joined the family, from time to time, in writing to Chang and Eng and reassuring them that their loved ones were well. Typically, before Josephine's death, a Mount Airy merchant and old companion, Robert S. Gilmer, had written the twins at St. Louis: "I was at your house yesterday found your family all well and took a splendid dinner with Engs family and had two or three drinks of excelant brandy I tell you we have abundence of good things to eat in this countary which your table shows abundent proof of yesterday when was at your house—Changs family are all well and in fine spirits . . ."
Meanwhile, Chang and Eng, in their exhibitions, were drawing larger crowds. Discussing the period when Ingalls managed them, Judge Graves wrote:
"In all these engagements they went for a weekly compensation to be paid at the end of each week, partly in gold. As they were at no expense whatever and received very good salaries, usually $50.00 per week, it was to them a source of very considerable profit. They had gained so much that by the end of 1868 Eng was able to buy a very good farm adjoining his home tract by which addition his farm was now made at least as valuable as Chang's."
It was in 1868 that Ingalls contrived to bring Phineas T. Barnum back into the lives of Chang and Eng.
On March 3, 1868, Barnum's New American Museum in New York City caught fire and by the following morning it was a charred ruin. At least $228,000 in curiosities was lost in the flames. A rival showman, George Wood, who was the proprietor of Wood's Museum, approached the dispirited, ailing, fifty-eight-year-old Barnum about a partnership. Barnum was not too interested in being overly active, but at last, after some negotiations, and in return for three percent of Wood's box-office receipts, Barnum agreed to allow Wood's Museum to advertise that it was the successor to Barnum's New American Museum, to lend Wood some of his exhibits, and to act as an adviser to his onetime competitor.
Ingalls was determined to get to Barnum because he needed him. For some months, Chang and Eng had been talking about taking one more trip abroad, visiting England, Scotland, and Ireland, not only because they thought business would be good there, but because Eng's daughter Katherine was mysteriously unwell and they wanted to consult physicians in London and Edinburgh. Apparently, Ingalls was unsure about managing a trip abroad, and Barnum had been extremely successful in sponsoring foreign tours and was talking about another one late in the year. Ingalls decided that, no matter how much Chang and Eng despised Barnum, he must bring them together with the renowned showman.
With Barnum as his associate, George Wood was opening a renovated Wood's Museum and Metropolitan Theatre at Broadway and Thirtieth Street on August 31, 1868. Ingalls went to Wood and arranged to book the Siamese Twins for the opening night's show, agreeing that they would appear for three weeks. The first night started with a personal appearance by Barnum himself, who delivered a speech. Chang and Eng were also on hand, performing on the bill with General Grant, Jr., and Sophia Ganz, two midgets.
That night, Chang and Eng had their reunion with Phineas T. Barnum. Shortly afterward, Barnum announced two new enterprises he was sponsoring. First, he was sending a group of mid-gets, led by General and Mrs. Tom Thumb, on an around-the-world tour. Second, he was arranging for the Siamese Twins to make an extensive tour of Great Britain.
In the nine versions of his autobiography and the numerous other books that he published, Barnum made only one passing reference to Chang and Eng—and that concerned his promotion of what proved to be the twins' last trip to Great Britain.
"I sent them to Great Britain where, in all the principal places, and for about a year, their levees were continually crowded," Barnum wrote. "In all probability the great success attending this enterprise was much enhanced, if not actually caused, by extensive announcements in advance that the main purpose of Chang-Eng's visit to Europe was to consult the most eminent medical and surgical talent with regard to the safety of separating the twins."
Barnum, as usual, was exercising his infallible eye for seducing the public. He saw in the twins' predicament a titillation which he knew the paying masses could not resist. Because much of the Western world had seen Chang and Eng, and England had seen them thirty-eight years before, Barnum needed a gimmick. Only this time, the gimmick was real. What Barnum thought was only a ploy was very vital to Chang and Eng. For they still nursed a secret dream—to be separated, at long last. Some say it was Eng who urged the separation, because Chang's drinking had become so torturous for him.
No American surgeon would perform the unique operation of severing their band, but perhaps there would be one in Europe willing to take the chance.
Chang and Eng were ready to face the risk—the risk of being disappointed yet again by a refusal, or the risk of dying in the attempt.