|
Description |
John Keais Hoyt (1840-1912) was the second son and third child of James Edmund and Marina Keais (Brickell) Hoyt of Washington, N.C. On the eve of the Civil War young Hoyt appears to have been sent to learn mercantile theory and practice under Joseph C. Gwin, a merchant in Mobile, Alabama. When war broke out young Hoyt volunteered in the Mobile Guards and marched with them from the city on April 24, 1861, for Montgomery where they were organized as the 3rd Alabama Infantry Regiment. The regi�ment was immediately dispatched to Virginia where it was mustered into Confederate service at Lynchburg on May 4, 1861. The brigade to which the regiment belonged was assigned to the Department of Norfolk. In the spring of 1862 it was assigned to the Army of Northern Virginia and ordered to Richmond. Hoyt, in the meantime, had been elected captain of his company on May 15, 1862. He held his commission throughout the war. This collection includes originals and photocopied versions of a portion of Captain Hoyt's wartime letters, the whole collection having been divided among family members some years ago. All of the substantive letters in the collection were written by Hoyt to his mother and to his sister, Clara. A transcription, or a very full abstract, of all the letters is included in the collection. The letters written to Clara are more forthcoming and more candid than those written to his mother. The earliest of the letters (photocopies, rather than originals) date from the period when Hoyt's regiment was stationed in the vicinity of Norfolk--September 6, 1861, and April 28, 1862--and were written to his sister Clara. The former of the two describes a minstrel show, done in blackface, put on in the opera house in Norfolk by men of his regiment. The second letter describes two drawings Hoyt made of the battle between the two ironclads, the USS Monitor and the Merrimack (the CSS Virginia) which he witnessed. Captain Hoyt's letters of June 2 (photocopied) and June 6 (original), 1862, written from Richmond describe the Battle of Fair Oaks. The letter of June 2 was written to his mother, primarily to assure her of his safety, while the letter written to his sister on June 6 is a much fuller account of the battle in which Hoyt says his regiment lost half its men and officers as casualties in "that slaughter pen". A follow-up letter to his sister written on June 13 (photocopied) describes scrounging for food and performing picket duty while on bivouac. In a subsequent letter written to his sister on February 14, 1863 (original), Captain Hoyt describes his life in winter quarters on Rapidan River in graphic terms that make clear what field life was like during the bitter winter of 1863. The letter is illustrated by a skillful drawing portraying "My Little Cabin Home""--a small log structure nestled in a wooded hillside. In the autumn of 1863 Captain Hoyt appears to have been sent on a mission, or to new duties, in connection with the Confederate military depot at Salisbury, N.C. His letter to Clara dated from Salisbury on September 29, 1864 (original), describes the brief visit of President Jefferson Davis while passing by train through the town. Though written in a humorous vein, the letter, which describes one ludicrous blunder after another, conveys still the spirit of great excitement and enthusiasm among the crowd who came to see President Davis and to hear him speak. Hoyt appears to have remained at Salisbury during the last half year of the war. With the movement of federal armies into the state, particularly the movements of the forces under command of Major General George H. Stoneman, Captain Hoyt organized a company of mounted scouts to reconnoiter the country around Salisbury and to report movement of the enemy to CSA Brigadier General Bradley T. Johnson. While on a scouting expedition in the vicinity of Salem, N.C., on April 12, 1865, Hoyt heard artillery fire at daybreak that heralded the fall of Salisbury to Stoneman's forces. In a letter of September 10, 1865 (original), Hoyt, who in the days immediately following the peace had been looking after family mining interests in Chatham County, wrote to Clara describing his last days as a soldier, the fall of Salisbury, and the disgraceful way in which Mrs. Francis E. Shober socially noticed and entertained Yankee soldiers subse�quently. Non-epistolary Civil War documents in the collection include an original 1863 certification of Hoyt's promotion to captain of Company K, 3rd Alabama Infantry Regiment, on May 15, 1862. There is, in addition, an original Confederate imprint in the collection. This is a broadside printed on February 24, 1865, entitled "IMPORTANT APPEAL" asking Rowan County slaveholders to send their slaves to Salisbury for army use in obstructing roads, fords, and so forth. Two original documents in the collection relate not to Captain Hoyt, but to his mother's cousin-german, Lt. John Low Keais. The first is a letter dated August 4, 1829, signed by John H. Eaton, U.S. Secretary of War, and the other is a copy of a letter written by John Low Keais to the Secretary of War. Both relate to the young man's appointment as a cadet in the United States Military Academy. Subsequently commissioned a second lieutenant (artillery), John Low Keais was killed in Dade's massacre which sparked the second Seminole Indian War on December 28, 1835. |
