The Johnnies blamed the Yankees
Even if there was strong evidence to the contrary, they blamed the Yankees.
That was how some Guilfordians reacted to the thieving and rowdy ways of vanquished Confederate troops at the end of the Civil War. In the spring of 1865, Union troops occupied Greensboro and thousands of Confederates roamed the city and country side looking for food and a way home.
Lee Kennett, a retired historian at the University of Georgia and Civil War authority who lives in his native Pleasant Garden, writes in a letter Jan. 3 to the newspaper:
"My widowed great-grandmother and her five children were visited by a party of pistol-waving Confedrates who took some sweet potatoes, but nothing else. For two generations, the family claimed the rowdy visitors had been Yankees."
Kennett was responding to a story in the News & Record on Dec. 26 about what Greensboro was like in 1865, when South Elm Street turned blue because so many Yankees guarded the street.
Relations between occupiers and townspeople were reasonably cordial.
But out in the countryside, the "Johnnies," as the Yanks called Southern soldiers, created trouble for the very people who had cheered them during the war, although Guilford had voted overwhemingly in 1861 against leaving the Union.
Kennett has studied dairies, memoirs and letters that Union soldiers wrote. They indicate, he writes, "the almost immediate decline or even collapse in discipline among the 'Johnnies,' who disregarded orders and argued with or even threatened their officers. There was also a rash of thievery that spread in the countryside."
Kennett says most paroled Confederate troops had to walk home. The war had destroyed parts of many rail lines. The Rebs looked for free transportation by stealing horses and mules from farmers.
"And, of course," Kennett says, "local farmers needed those same animals for spring plowing."
In Pleasant Garden, Kennett says, a woman named Letitia Ross "gained local fame when she stabbled her horse in a widowless room in her house."
She survived and no doubt helped continue the line of Rosses and related Hunts in Pleasant Garden.
The familes would produce, in 1961, a speaker of the state House of Representatives, Joe Hunt of Greensboro; and later a governor who served a total of 16 years, Jim Hunt. He was born in Wesley Long Hospital, when his parents lived in Pleasant Garden before moving east to Wilson County.
