RALEIGH -- A tweet from my great-grandfather appeared on my screen the other day while I was looking up something else. I hadn't known he was using social media. He had been dead for 93 years, or so his headstone in Greensboro's Green Hill Cemetery attested.
But the Twitter message was still vivid. The division he was attached to had marched on Gettysburg that day and had just driven the Yankees 2 miles. Three officers he knew had been badly wounded.
"Col. Parker wounded in the face. The ball entered just below one eye and came out just below the other, cutting the nasal tubes," he wrote.
Another tweet: "When I knelt by him and prayed for him and his wife and children, he seemed about to strangle with the blood."
And another: "I stopped praying and held my arm lovingly over him till he was quiet."
These words came from July of 1863, when Alexander Davis Betts, a 29-year-old Methodist preacher, was serving the 30th North Carolina as its chaplain. He kept a diary of his war years, and it reposes with his other papers at Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. Savvy historians have made good use of it, turning entries into short bursts of what it was like to ride with and minister to the troops of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.
It's timely now as North Carolina and other states observe the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.
The N.C. Department of Cultural Resources has a long list of events, photos and even its own Twitter site (go to www.ncdcr.gov and follow the Civil War prompts).
It was 150 years ago this month, his diary notes, that the war began for A.D. Betts: "One day in April, 1861, I heard that President Lincoln had Called on the State troops to force the seceding States back into the Union. That was one of the saddest days of my life. I had prayed and hoped that war might be averted. I had loved the Union, and clung to it. That day I saw war was inevitable. The inevitable must be met. That day I walked up and down my porch in Smithville (now Southport) and wept and suffered and prayed for the South.
"The drum and fife were soon heard there, and all through the Old North State companies of our best men, young and middle aged, offered themselves to the Governor of the State."
Betts, who would live to be 85, was commissioned in October. Over the next four years he rode, usually on horseback, with his regiment through battles at Gettysburg and Antietam Creek and Mechanicsville and a dozen other places before making the long retreat back home. He visited with troops, nursed the wounded, preached to the men, wrote letters home to newly made widows and occasionally came across the corpses of friends he had gone to college with at Chapel Hill.
"A fearful fight from 3 til 9 p.m.," he wrote at Gettysburg.
Some bear grief: "Preach in the morning. Hear that Lieut. Cain died at 9 a.m. and Lieut. Pitt about to die. Ride anxiously to Hospital, and find Pitt died at 5 p.m. Return to Richmond sad at 9 p.m."
Some of it was heartbreaking. He came across a badly wounded Federal soldier and did what he could to comfort him. "As I was about to hurry away to overtake my regiment he asked me to lay him down! .....I did the best I could. As I took him by the hand and commended him to God, I think my heart was as tender as it ever was. His bones may be in that field now. I hope to meet his soul in Heaven in a few years."
In his last years, A.D. Betts lived with my father's family on Elm Street in Greensboro. At his knee my father heard tales of gallantry and hardship as great armies and barefoot soldiers fought and died. And he heard stories about A.D.'s love of the saddle from his circuit-riding days preaching in scores of little churches across the state.
Shortly before A.D.'s death in 1917, my father told me, he somehow hobbled out to the stable, saddled one of my grandfather's hunting horses and rode north, alone. They found him safe a few miles away, still atop his mount and smiling sweetly, drawn by ghostly bugles that had last blown more than a half century before.
My grandfather was furious, worried that he might fall and suffer injury. But he just wanted, my Dad said, to take one last ride.
