Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

North Carolina and Virginia, 1861–1864 321
In December 1863, Brig. Gen. Edward A. Wild led more than seventeen hundred
men from five black regiments through northeastern North Carolina, freeing slaves,
hunting Confederate guerrillas, and enlisting black soldiers. The greeting exchanged
between a soldier and civilian (right foreground) indicates that two of Wild’s
regiments had been raised in North Carolina and knew the country and the people
they were operating among.
“much indebted to General Wild and his negro troops for what they have done,
and . . . while some complaints are made of the action authorized by General
Wild against the inhabitants and their property, yet all . . . agree that the negro
soldiers made no unauthorized interferences with property or persons, and conducted
themselves with propriety.” 48
Just a month after Wild’s expedition returned, one of the participants wrote a
letter that showed how different the war in Virginia had been during its first three
years from the one waged elsewhere in the South. The nature of Virginia’s agriculture—which
concentrated on corn, wheat, tobacco, and livestock—meant that
although slaves constituted more than one-third of the population in the Tidewater
and Piedmont regions of the state, most of them lived in two- and three-family
groups, rather than on extensive plantations. The contending armies moved repeat-
48 OR, ser. 1, vol. 29, pt. 1, pp. 910–18 (“The guerrillas,” p. 912; “many,” p. 914; “the ablebodied,”
p. 913), and pt. 2, p. 596 (“Our navigation,” “done his work”). Browning, From Cape
Charles to Cape Fear, pp. 124–28; Wayne K. Durrill, War of Another Kind: A Southern Community
in the Great Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 145–53.