Civil War Trails: Piecing Together Powers’s Lost Years

ECW welcomes guest author Chris Brown from Civil War Trails

With the great upheaval that the Civil War brought, we often find the stories of combatants that found themselves in circumstances that would likely have been unimaginable in their pre-service lives. Recently the Civil War Trails team undertook updates to one of our sites in Asheville, North Carolina. In doing so we got a chance to dive into the life of one North Carolina volunteer, whose story we could use your help finding the end of.

Born in Buncombe County in 1837, William Riley Powers spent his early years growing up and farming in the mountains of North Carolina. With the outbreak of war, Powers almost immediately enlisted in Company F of the 14th North Carolina Infantry in May of 1861. His service with the 14th brought him east to Virginia, largely in and around the Hampton Roads area. However, Pvt. Powers’s time with the 14th would not last. Before the unit was involved in defenses during the Peninsula Campaign, the actions at Seven Days, Antietam, or any of the other hotspots they would find themselves in, Pvt. Powers was mustered out to embark on a duty for which his life experience amongst the North Carolina mountains had not prepared him for.

Powers and another of his comrades from the 14th (William Pleasant Craig) were discharged from the infantry in February 1862 and assigned to one of the first ironclad warships the world had ever seen. In his early 20s, likely never having been onboard a vessel of any large size, Powers found himself aboard CSS Virginia at the lowly rank of landsman. Landsmen were tasked with hard, repetitive, and often filthy manual labor. As an indicator of the quality of life of landsmen, we can look to a statement that the ship’s surgeon, Dinwiddie Phillips, wrote about the readiness of the crew: “Most of our crew being volunteers from the army and unused to ship-life, about twenty per cent of our men were usually ashore at the hospital.”^[1]

We know that Powers served aboard Virginia for its entire active life, from commissioning through the battles in Hampton Roads in March to the eventual scuttling of the ship in May. However, we have no clear record of what happens to William Powers between May 1862 and July 4, 1865, when he signed a loyalty oath in Asheville, North Carolina. Our team was able to find two possible leads as to where our soldier turned sailor goes, but neither are fully confirmed.

First, the most likely next step for Powers was to join the rest of Virginia’s crew in the defenses around Drewry’s Bluff. We have seen some records to suggest this, but could not find Powers on any rosters or payrolls for the units involved. The other, perhaps unlikelier possibility is that our landsman continued his naval service on another vessel. In 1950, Mrs. Ruffner Jones of Canton, North Carolina was searching for what happened to Powers and wrote to Adjutant General Edward F. Witsell. He replied that though records are scant, there is a William Powers who served on the CS Gunboat Sumter, though he doesn’t mention which Sumter. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find the records that Witsell was referencing.

Here’s where we could use some help. Our team has found all that we currently can on Powers. But we know there are sleuths out there that know about untold sources that we haven’t seen. If any of you come across anything indicating where he went between May 1862 and July 1865, let us know at CivilWarTrails.org so that we can better tell the rest of his story. In the meantime, feel free to visit our current site dedicated to telling his story at the South Buncombe Library (260 Overlook Rd., Asheville) just across the street from William Riley Powers’s final resting place.

Chris Brown is the assistant director of Civil War Trails. Utilizing a background in Public History, Chris works with communities across six states to help them tell their stories right where they happened.

Endnotes:

^[1] Dinwiddie B. Phillips, “Notes on the Monitor-Merrimack Fight,” Robert Underwood Johnson, and Clarence Clough Buel, eds. Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York: The Century Company, 1887), Vol. 1, 718.