April 24 

 

          On this day in 1865, Jefferson Wilburn Stewart (1840-1865), a private in Company B, 25th North Carolina Infantry, took his last, labored breath in a hospital ward of Elmira Prison in New York.                                                           An unschooled farm hand, Jefferson was just 21 when he left his father’s land                                                     in Jackson County, just north of the Tuckaseegee River, to enlist in the                                                                 “Jackson Guards” on May 30, 1861. His younger brother John joined                                                                   alongside him, and two more brothers followed in the coming months. After                                                       spending the first year of the war in the Carolinas, the regiment was ordered                                                       to Richmond just in time for the bloodbath at Malvern Hill on July 1, 1862.                                                         They suffered further at Antietam and Fredericksburg, yet Jefferson seemed                                                       to live a charmed life and emerged unscathed. In January 1863 the unit                                                               returned to North Carolina, where Jefferson found a brief respite, securing                                                         lighter duty as a wagon driver for General Robert E. Ransom’s headquarters for several months in 1864. That reprieve ended in May 1864, when the brigade was sent to Petersburg. Jefferson shouldered his rifle once again, and was captured in battle on June 17. From there his fate darkened. First came Point Lookout prison in Maryland, where he spent a miserable month before he was transferred to the notorious Elmira prison camp on July 27, 1864. Crammed into a 40-acre complex with 10,000 other prisoners, he learned two weeks after he arrived that the prison commander had reduced rations to bread and water in retaliation for the terrible conditions in southern prisons. Malnutrition, contaminated drinking water, and exposure led prisoners to dub the facility “Hellmira.” The emaciated, sickly Jefferson made a desperate bid for freedom. On March 31, 1865–one day before his 25th birthday–he informed officials of his willingness to take the oath of allegiance. He declared that he “has no interest at the South” and “desires to remain North.” But pneumonia overtook him before his paperwork could be processed. Like 3,000 other soldiers did before him, Jefferson died in Elmira’s prison hospital far from home–more than two weeks after Lee had surrendered, ending the war.    

 

Sources:

Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr., comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 6:376; 1860 U.S. Census: Jackson County, NC; Jefferson W. Stewart, Compiled Military Service Record; Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver, An Environmental History of the Civil War (2020), 155.