April 20
On this day in 1864, Captain James Oliver Blackburn (1837-1864) of Company G, 21st North Carolina Infantry fell in battle while storming a fortified Union position at Plymouth, NC. The eldest of five children, the precocious James had managed his widowed mother’s farm in Stokes County since his father’s death in 1849. Devoted secessionists, James and his two brothers enlisted in the Confederate army in May 1861, leaving their mother’s two enslaved laborers to maintain the farm. James and his youngest brother, John, both enlisted in the 21st North Carolina, where James rose from 2nd lieutenant to captain after his company commander’s death at the Battle of Winchester, Virginia, on May 25, 1862. Blackburn ably led the company through the brutal campaigns of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862 and 1863, emerging unscathed, though he tragically lost his brother John at the 2nd Battle of Bull Run. Ordered to North Carolina in December 1863, the 21st North Carolina spent the next several months trying to reclaim coastal strongholds occupied by Union forces. April 20, 1864, marked the fourth and final day of the battle of Plymouth, NC, in which Confederate forces under General Robert Hoke successfully recaptured the Roanoke River port town. While attacking one of the last forts in the Union defensive line that morning, Blackburn was wounded in the arm and called a lieutenant to take over command. But upon examining his wound more closely, Blackburn decided it was not serious, and remained in the fight. Moments later he was shot through the head, becoming the second of Margaret Blackburn’s sons to die in the war (her third son survived). A fellow officer recalled years later that Blackburn “fell far in advance of our line,” and General Hoke remarked in his official report that “he was a very brave man.” Blackburn was one of a generation of young men who “gave their last full measure of devotion” for a cause that ultimately failed.
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Sources:
Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr., comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 6:589; Fayetteville Observer, May 9, 1864; 1860 U.S. Census: Stokes County; Lee W. Sherrill, Jr., The 21st North Carolina Infantry: A Civil War History (2015), 324-328.
