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Evacuating Elizabeth City and Leaving Nothing for the Rebels, to the Dismay of Freedpeople and Unionists |
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“this place is to be evacuated all the troops and the gunboats leave with us there is a general move of the darkeys they all want to go with us they do not dare to stay here after we leave for fear of the guerrillas I believe we are to take every thing with us that can be of use to the rebs”
THOMAS BOURNE.
Autograph Letter Signed, April 18, 1863, Elizabeth City, [North Carolina]. 2 pp., 8vo.
Inventory #21265.25
Price: $300
Complete Transcript
Elizabeth City April 18th / 63
My Dear Mother
We are under marching orders for New Bern to join the regt we recd the orders yesterday we leave here to day if nothing happens every thing is hurry and bustle here this morning so that it is rather difficult to write beside I have a very poor pen but I thought I must write you a few lines just to let you know of our movement this place is to be evacuated all the troops and the gunboats leave with us there is a general move of the darkeys they all want to go with us they do not dare to stay here after we leave for fear of the guerrillas I believe we are to take every thing with us that can be of use to the rebs there will be quite a large fleet of us as there is a number of vessels here I am sorry to leave our good quarters here just as we have got things fixted to our minds but that is the <2> fate of a soldier to be on the move I would liked to have stoped here about a month longer but for some reasons I had rather join the regt I want the company to be better drilled before we start for home we are behind the rest of the regt in that respect it could not be otherwise with the duties we have had to perform but I want to be equel to the best of them when we go home It has been quite a long time since I have been blessed with a letter from home I am getting anxious to hear how you all are I hope Rosalie is much better by this time we shall get our letters more regular after we get to Newbern give my love to one and all of the family yours in haste
with much love from your aff son
Thomas
[Envelope:] Mrs. Henry Bourne / Rochester / Mass.
Historical Background
Just days after a combined force of gunboats from the Union Navy and an army division led by General Ambrose E. Burnside captured Roanoke Island on February 8, 1862, the naval vessels steamed into Albermarle Sound and attacked the Confederate Navy’s Mosquito Fleet vessels guarding Elizabeth City, North Carolina, forty miles south of Norfolk, Virginia. With the destruction of the Mosquito Fleet on February 10, the southern army abandoned the town, and Union forces occupied it, quickly extinguishing fires set by the retreating Confederates. Union troops occupied Elizabeth City periodically through the rest of the war, but guerrilla activity continued.
Bourne’s letter reflects both the Union army’s concern that supplies not fall into the hands of the Confederates but also the panic among African Americans and local white Unionists who feared reprisals in the absence of Union military power.
Bourne’s Company I had been detached from the rest of the 3rd Massachusetts in November 1862 for service at Elizabeth City. The rest of the regiment moved one hundred miles further south to New Bern, North Carolina, on the Neuse River, which had fallen in March 1862 to the same expedition that captured Roanoke Island and Elizabeth City. In April 1863, Company I reunited with the rest of the regiment and remained at New Bern until June 1863, when it returned to Boston and was mustered out. Ten months later, Bourne reenlisted in the 58th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.
Thomas B. Bourne (1843-1931) was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts and enlisted as a private in Company I of the 3rd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in September 1862 for nine months’ service. Mustered out in June 1863, he reenlisted as a private in Company H of the 58th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in April 1864. He gained promotion to sergeant before being mustered out in July 1865. In 1868, he married Sarah Ann Tozer, but she died the following year, a week after the birth of their first child, who died later that same year. In 1870, he was a carpenter in Foxborough, Massachusetts, and owned $1,600 in real property. In September 1870, he married Harriet Alice Payson (1840-1899), with whom he had four children between 1871 and 1877.
Sarah Mears Haskell Bourne (1803-1872) was born in Rochester, Massachusetts. She married Henry Bourne (1795-1856) in March 1841, and they had two children, of which Thomas B. Bourne was the oldest. Henry Bourne was a farmer in Sandwich, Massachusetts before his death in 1856.
