April 1
By: Megan Shepherd
On this day in 1865, Captain Joseph B. Cherry (1841-1865) of the 4th North Carolina Cavalry was admitted to the Petersburg hospital with a gunshot wound from which he would die later that day. The son of a merchant operating in Norfolk, Virginia, the 24-year-old Bertie County native enlisted as adjutant in the 8th North Carolina Infantry on May 16, 1861, before he was appointed Captain of Company F, 4th North Carolina Cavalry, where his brother served as 1st Lieutenant. Cherry’s regiment was heavily engaged in the defense of the vital railroad hub of Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864-65 during the last phase of the Civil War in the Eastern Theater. In the final weeks of the campaign, mounting Union pressure forced the cavalry regiment to serve in the trenches alongside infantry in Petersburg’s fortifications. On April 1, the 4th Cavalry fought dismounted behind a hasty barricade of fence rails and logs in the road near Five Forks. Captain Cherry was shot by charging Union cavalry who drove the regiment from its position. A comrade carried Cherry on horseback to the Petersburg hospital where he died later that evening. A little more than a week later, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Captain Cherry's death occurred during one of the most climactic moments of the war, amidst the final collapse of the Confederate resistance.
Captain Joseph Blount Cherry
* Editor's note: Joseph B. Cherry is misidentified as a 45-year-old planter of the same name in Neil Hunter Raiford's The 4th North Carolina Cavalry in the Civil War: A History and Roster (2006). The correct Joseph Blount Cherry is listed as 24 years old in his Compiled Military Service Record and is clearly a young man in his wartime photograph (shown above) published in Walter Clark's Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions of North Carolina in the Great War, 1861-65, Volume III (1901).
Sources
Louis H. Manarin, comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 2:309; 1850 U.S. Census: Norfolk County, Virginia; Compiled Service Record; Neil Hunter Raiford, The 4th North Carolina Cavalry in the Civil War: A History and Roster (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2006), 85-192; Walter Clark, ed., Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions of North Carolina in the Great War, 1861-65, Volume III (1901), 455-472.
