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CHAPTER 4 “May the Good Lord Take Care of the Pore Soldiers” Major JohnThomas Jones understood his enemy.The troops of the 26th North Carolina who were now kicking up the Virginia dust on the route of march had faced Northern troops before. But most were farm boys-turnedsoldiers who could not be expected to fully comprehend the powers now arrayed against them in this bloody war. One who did was the twenty-two-yearold Major Jones, who was third-in-command after Lieutenant Colonel Lane. Just two and a half years earlier in 1860, while a student at the University of North Carolina, Jones had joined a classmate for a Christmas vacation to New York City. He had been impressed: The sprawling metropolis with its crowded streets, bustling businesses and towering structures was enough to leave any country boy—even a college student—wide-eyed and slack-jawed. The North, Jones had come to realize, possessed the wealth, technology and manpower to be a mighty opponent—if the Northern people had the will to fight.1 His trip to New York City had been a genuine eye-opener and had proven to be as frustrating as it was enjoyable. After making a celebratory round of the city’s popular bars on New Year’s Eve, he had brought in the New Year by ice skating in Central Park with a bevy of adoring young ladies. Later, however , while visiting Barnum’s Museum, he discovered that his jacket pocket had been skillfully slit open by a pickpocket, who had lifted most of Jones’s vacation cash. Only when he was near broke did he learn why he had been so popular with the Yankee girls: His traveling companion had passed him off as a millionaire Southern planter. “I thought the young ladies paid me great attention, but for a long time did not know the reason,” he admitted in a letter to his father. “It would have amused you to see how those rich belles of 5th Avenue flew around me.”2 John Jones did enjoy a relatively affluent lifestyle while growing up, but his childhood had been marked by tragedy as well as privilege. His father, Edmund W. Jones, was a prominent planter in the Yadkin Valley of western North Carolina .The oldest of six children—five boys and one girl—John Jones had grown up at Cloverhill, the family plantation, located near Lenoir in the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains.The boys were bright, well-educated and rambunctious. All had nicknames—“Will,” “Wat,” “Coot,” “Pat” and “Knock.” John was “Knock”— so named for his scrappy childhood manner of settling disagreements . They were a close-knit family: Father and sons would routinely shoot up “a whole bag of bird shot” quail-hunting together. Then in 1856, baby brother Pat drowned in a well. Four years later, John’s mother died unexpectedly at age forty-seven. John, meanwhile, enrolled at the university in Chapel Hill to make something of himself. Despite his distance from home, he remained close to his father—who had lofty aspirations for his son. “John is my brag boy,” Edmund Jones told a relative, “and only hope for a judge in the family.”3 At Chapel Hill, Jones developed a friendship with another planter’s son: Henry K. Burgwyn Jr. The two had much in common—background, interests , ambitions—and so close did they become that one officer in the 26th compared their relationship to the Biblical friendship between David and Jonathan. When Burgwyn graduated and left Chapel Hill for V.M.I., Jones remained at the University—until North Carolina seceded. Then he beseeched his father to allow him to join the army. With his father’s consent, Jones enrolled as a private in the Orange Light Infantry, which entered Confederate service as Company D of the 1st North Carolina Infantry Regiment. He excelled in the military. “I am highly delighted with my life as a soldier,” he told his father. He developed a reputation as the “best-drilled man” in his company and saw action with his regiment at Big Bethal in the war’s opening days. In August of 1861, as the 26th was organizing at Camp Carolina, Jones engineered an appointment as second lieutenant of the Caldwell Guards, which became Company I in the 26th North Carolina. In April of 1862, he was elected company captain, and when the regiment was transferred to Pettigrew ’s Brigade under Colonel Burgwyn’s command...

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