Essay --

Dylan KippolaAMH2010Feb, 2014Kinston HangingsIn the early hours of February 2, 1864, fifty-three North Carolina men were captured by attendant forces under the command of Major General Pickett. Within quaternion months of their capture, more or less would be dead. Most would fall victim to the diseases acquired in Confederate P.O.W camps in Richmond, Virginia, and Andersonville, Georgia. However, twenty-two were publicly hanged in Kinston, North Carolina. The wives, neighbors, friends, and former br others in blazonry in the cooperator army were forced to watch the death penaltys. From the Confederacies point of view, the penalise men were Union soldiers because they deserted. Once captured, they deserved to be treated as prisoners of war. President Abraham Lincoln mentioned this on July 31, 1863. He ordered retaliation on the enemy prisoners in the Norths possession. His response was to kill a Southern P.O.W for every P.O.W the Confederacy killed. The Confederates argued tha t the men were simply deserters and therefore execution was a legitimate punishment for them. Desertion was most apparent in North Carolina. North Carolina was contradictory in both providing more soldiers to the Confederate army than any other state and of having more deserters from the army than other states. Although North Carolinian disloyalty to the Confederacy was not any worse than other Southern states, it was more publicly pronounced. North Carolina was the croak to secede and did so notwithstanding after a statewide vote of the people. Because desertion was not a crime in the state, citizens who housed and protected deserters felt safe from arrest for hiding them. It was said that the deserters could band together and defy the officers of the law who came after them because of t... ...e put over the heads of the condemned and they were hanged. Joining their other deserters. The thirteen remaining condemned men had four days to sit in the jails dungeon to think about th eir deaths that would make up place on Monday, February 15th. Chaplain Paris described the slam in a letter that appeared shortly afterward in the North Carolina Presbyterian and the Wilmington Journal I made my first visit to them as chaplain on Sunday morning. The scene beggars all description. Some of them were comparatively young men. But they made the black mistake. They had only twenty-four hours to live.... Here was a wife to say good-by to a husband forever. Here a mother to take the last look at her ruined son, and then a sister who had bring forth to embrace for the last time the brother who had brought disgrace upon the very differentiate she bore by his treason to his country.