May 21 

 

          On this day in 1862, Private John F. Crump (1841-1862) of the 22nd North Carolina Infantry died of severe bronchitis in a Richmond hospital. The only child living at home with his widowed, slave-owning mother in Caldwell County, Crump was one of hundreds of residents who flocked to the county seat of Lenoir on Saturday, April 27, 1861, “in a state of feverish excitement” as one resident put it, to attend a recruitment meeting in front of the Courthouse. He enlisted in the “Caldwell Rough and Ready Boys” along with 96 other young men that day. Like many others from the county, Crump would have been impatient to get started, “fearful,” as a comrade put it, “lest our troops in the field would whip the Yankees… before we got there.” The unit saw no fighting in 1861, but Crump was able to secure a furlough to come home and marry his sweetheart, Mary Sparks, on March 16, 1862. He returned to his unit soon after and encountered a grim foe. He was admitted into Chimborazo Hospital No. 3 on May 13, 1862 with what doctors thought might be typhoid fever; it actually proved to be a fatal case of bronchitis. Crump died eight days later, having never encountered a Yankee.

 

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Sources:

Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 7:15; 1860 U.S. Census: Caldwell County, NC; John F. Crump, Compiled Military Service Record; Judkin Browning, “In Search of All That Was Near and Dear to Me,” 113.