May 14
On this day in 1863, Berry Robby Kinney (1834-1864) wrote to his family to tell them of his arrival at the 14th North Carolina Infantry, and explain the hardships of the army. The oldest son still living (with seven siblings) on his father’s modest farm in Jackson Hill (in southern Davidson County), Kinney avoided conscription by volunteering in May 1863 to join his younger brother’s unit and earn the $50 bounty offered as an incentive. He joined the unit south of Fredericksburg on May 7, just after the Battle of Chancellorsville, which had cost the regiment 142 casualties, ended. His brother, Alfred, had been slightly wounded in the chest. Kinney wrote home, “I like camp just as well as I expected and not very well at that.” He marveled at how devastating the losses were to the victorious army, which suffered over 13,000 casualties. “This is said to be the greatest and most compleat victory of the Confederacy and it want take many more such victories to finish our army,” Kinney noted sardonically. Some companies of the 14th North Carolina could field no more than 10 men. But perhaps the new soldier was most descriptive of the rations, of which “no body can eat much.” He wrote, “we have flys on our meat and never wash it. You can hear the sand crack” in each bite. As for the bread: “you can put it in your mouth clamp you teeth a bide it some half a dozen times” before breaking a piece off to chew. As a result of his experience he urged his sisters “to work & make corn & save the harvest.” He closed by noting that “we are so badly fixed here that I can not write to do any good.” Kinney endured his service and demonstrated his competence, earning a promotion to corporal in November. But he never returned to his father’s farm. He was killed at the Battle of Spotsylvania on May 12, 1864.
Confederate soldiers cooking
Sources:
Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr. North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 5:430; Christopher M. Watford, The Civil War in North Carolina: Soldiers and Civilians Letters and Diaries, 1861-1865, Volume 1: The Piedmont, 347-350; 1860 U.S. Census: Davidson County, NC; B.R. Kinney, Compiled Military Service Record
