Complexities of the Home Guard

   One of the most popular posts I have written over the years is “Was the Home Guard Really That Bad?” It was published in September 2014 and has had several thousand hits. You can read it here. Since the home guard is little understood, I would like to expand on its involvement during the war, based upon some current research I am doing into the War in the Toe River Valley area of North Carolina (present-day Yancey, Mitchell, and Avery Counties).

Brig. Gen. John W. McElroy,
Home Guard commander.

   1870 was an exciting year in North Carolina history, for lack of a better word. U.S. Grant was in the midst of his first term. W. W. Holden was serving as governor of North Carolina. The state was in the midst of the Kirk-Holden War. Holden would be impeached by the end of the year, and the Democrats would gain control of the General Assembly. In the middle of the year, a local Mitchell County resident, Gutridge Garland, wrote a letter that appeared in The Daily Standard, outlining the murders committed by the Home Guard during the war. After praising the qualities of George W. Kirk and stating that he himself had been driven from his home during the war, Garland laid out the atrocities committed by the home guard:

   “I will commence with old Sam Baker, Esq., of this county, over fifty years old. When the war began he volunteered in the service of the Home Rogues [sic] of Mitchell County as Lieutenant, and wished to be promoted. He gathered a crowd and went to Joseph Byrd’s, a peaceable citizen of this county, and shot him down and went off and left him. The next morning he went back and enquired how he was, and his wife told him he was dying. He said it was his business to kill him. So he died. The next brave act he did was to order a young man by the name of Right Hutchins to shoot a prisoner by the name of William Pritchard. The order was promptly obeyed. He was shot dead in the road near Baker’s house. Some boys hauling wood rolled him off as they would have done a beast, and he lay there some days. The people were afraid to go there and bury him. The next brave act of the Baker command was his son Washington meeting a young man by the name of William Matthes in the road near Baver’s [Baker’s?], and shooting him dead. The next act done by the party, which would promote an officer in the rebel service, was to go to the farm of David Huse, a peaceable man, while he was hoeing a little corn in the field to try to make a little bread for his children, as starvation stared us all in the face in this country. He saw the brave fellow coming, and tried to make his escape, but was shot dead in the presence of his wife and nine little children. The same brave command went to William Hughes and shot him dead. They also came across Daniel Wright in the woods and killed him and cut off his head. One of the honest saints said they had left him for the buzzards. They also went to the house of Thomas Miller, as inoffensive a man as ever lived, and two brothers quarreled as to which should have the honor of killing him. A crowd of the same gang went to Jackson Tipton, a man over fifty years old, and marched him before them and shot him dead in the road. Another crowd of the same game [sic] took a boy thirteen years old, by the name of James Butler, and persuaded him to break and run, and as he did so shot and killed him.”[1]

   That is all pretty atrocious, I think we would all agree, and enough to turn local people, even to this day, against the home guard (although I can’t actually prove any of these events really took place). But what if the “Home Rogues” were actually serving as a haven for Unionists? Does that change the narrative?

   As mentioned in the earlier post, the Guard for Home Defense was created in July 1863. Instead of going into the long history of it, we will just look at the Toe River Valley. Yancey County’s home guard, the 72^nd Battalion, North Carolina Home Guard, was assigned to the 1^st Brigade North Carolina Home Guard on September 26, 1863. Samuel D. Byrd, a former lieutenant in the 16^th North Carolina State Troops, was assigned command at the rank of lieutenant colonel.[2] From the surviving records, the home guard company/battalion in Mitchell County was never organized. Records for the 72^nd Battalion are scarce and were probably burnt by Union raiders in the last days of the war.

   William Renfro, a middle-class 38-year-old farmer, was living in the Red Hill area of Mitchell County when the war began. How he avoided Conscription is unknown. He did, however, serve in the home guard. At some point, Union soldiers visited Renfro’s farm, taking livestock. After the war, Renfro attempted to claim compensation for what was taken, and had another local man testify via sworn affidavit as to his loyalties. S. B. Slagle testified that Renfro “was in the Home Guards a portion of the time, but a great many Union men were in this organization and it was not then considered a mark of disloyalty to the Union cause as we were forced to join this organization or be sent off to the Confederate army or leave our homes and try to get to the Union army…”  There is a lot to unpack in Slagle’s testimony. “a great many Union men were in this organization.” While Garland was praising Kirk and former Union soldiers who were fighting once again for Kirk, and decrying the “Home Rogues,” the “Home Rogues” were actually composed of these same “Union” men. However, instead of crossing over the mountain like so many others did and joining the Union army, Renfro and some of the others served in the Home Guard, whose purpose was to round up deserters and Unionists. And according to Renfro, they were accepting of their assignment, as long as they were not shipped off to join the Confederate army, or forced to take that dangerous trip over the mountains to join the actual Federal army. William Renfro never made that trip. And his claim for compensation was rejected.[3]

   Jonathan Tipton was a landless and almost penniless 35-year-old farmer living in the Ramsey Town area of Yancey County. Like Renfro, it is unclear how he avoided Conscription. Unlike Renfro, Tipton did cross over the mountain and, in June 1864, joined the Union army. Prior to that time, Tipton apparently joined Renfro in the 72^nd Battalion North Carolina Home Guard.  Tipton’s widow received a pension after the war, for Tipton died in a hospital in Knoxville in January 1865. There were several who testified against him as being a “Bush Whacker” and a “Notorious rebel.” One area resident, in his affidavit, testified that Tipton, “in the beginning of the late war he was a bitter rebel. That he belonged to the rebel home guards of Yancey County. That affidavit thinks he belonged to Capt. Peak’s Company of Yancey County Home Guards. That affidavit was arrested by the company that said Tipton was with and saw him at the time. That just before affidavit was captured he saw said Tipton shooting at Union men who had been hiding in the mountains and were at the house of Timothy Miller getting provisions at the time the Home Guard came upon them. That it has always been understood that he voted for the ordinance of secession and his only reputation up to the time of his going into the 3rd NC was that of a rebel.” Based upon this testimony, Jonathan Tipton’s widow lost her pension of $8 a month. Was Tipton truly a Unionist at heart? According to George Ragdale, who provided the above testimony, Tipton was not. Maybe Tipton had a change of heart, or, maybe he had fooled his neighbors all along regarding his Unionists sympathies.[4]  

   We can not say that all home guard members in the Toe River Valley were Unionists at heart. There is not even a roster of home guard members from Yancey and Mitchell Counties to analyze, only a scattering of names from pension applications, affidavits, and family histories. What we cannot do is believe that the home guard members were all pro-Confederate zealots, hell-bent on advancing Confederate ideology. Some might have been. However, history is not that simple (it never is). William Renfro, according to the testimony of his neighbor, was trying to avoid service in both armies. His neighbor believed that many in the home guard were “Union men” like Renfro. Jonathan Tipton might have been one of those zealots, but he decided to cross over the lines and actually join the Union army. It cost him his life, and his Home Guard involvement cost his widow her pension. There are probably more cases like this out there to examine. One might be the nearby Cranberry iron mines. There were several self-proclaimed Unionists (or later family-proclaimed Unionists) who spent the war mining iron ore for the Confederacy to use to produce weapons for killing Union soldiers. They seemed to be agreeable with that, as long as they did not have to leave home and serve in either army. Probably the only untapped resource in learning more about the men who were home guard members and Unionists are Federal pension applications. Maybe in time, more of this will come to light.  

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[1] The Daily Standard, July 20, 1870.

[2] Brown and Coffey, NC Troops, Vol. 21, 657/

[3] William Renfro, Southern Claims Commission, Disallowed and Barred Claims, M1407, RG233, National Archives.

[4] Jonathan Tipton, Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War Veterans, ca.1861-1910, RollWC76865-WC76882, National Archives.