Lowry War
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The Lowry War is considered one of the most important and controversial events in North Carolina history. Led by Henry Berry Lowry (also spelled as Henry Berry Lowrie), a 17-year old Tuscarora Indian boy whose father and brother were murdered at the hands of the Confederate Home Guard, a clan of North Carolinian Indian and African-Americans waged a seven year war against the Old South from 1861 to 1874. Along the way, Lowry and his wife, Rhoda Strong, became Robin Hood figures to the poor families of Robeson County, North Carolina, and are still honored and remembered to this day by rural inhabitants of North Carolina.
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[edit] History
Approximately 42,000 North Carolinians lost their lives in the Civil War, and Native Americans in North Carolina had varying experiences during it. Many Cherokee in Western North Carolina supported the Confederacy, and Thomas’s Legion, the 69th North Carolina Regiment (a well-known Confederate fighting unit led by Cherokee Colonel William Holland Thomas), had two companies of Cherokee soldiers, (including Captains Campbell Harrison Taylor and his brother, James Taylor).
However, the free people of color in Eastern North Carolina were treated quite differently. They were forced to work on Confederate fortifications near Wilmington at Fort Fisher, and many fled and formed groups resistant to impressment by the Confederate Army.
Henry Berry Lowry was one of twelve children in the family of Allen and Mary Lowry. At the start of the Civil War in 1861, this population was viewed as a potential danger to the Confederacy, as well as a potential source of forced labor for Confederate military projects. In Robeson County, the Confederate Home Guard accused some locals of harboring escaped Union prisoners and Confederate deserters, hiding guns, and stealing meat from smokehouses. As elsewhere in the South during the Civil War, the Home Guard supported the Confederacy and maintained law and order at home while the war was being fought. Henry Lowry's first crimes occurred when he murdered James P. Barnes on December 21, 1864 and James Brantley “Brant” Harris on January 15, 1865 as a result of ongoing disputes with both men.
With Sherman's army a few miles from Robeson, the Home Guard accused Henry Berry Lowry’s father, Allen, and brother William, of various crimes. After a hastily prepared trial, Allen and William were convicted and executed on March 3, 1865.
For the next decade, Southeastern North Carolina knew terror and bloodshed as Lowry became the most hunted outlaw in the state’s history. During the war, Henry Berry Lowry often flouted the authorities who hunted him for over eight years. He murdered John Taylor, the “presumed head” of the local Ku Klux Klan, after which Lowry and many others escaped into the surrounding swamps, a tactic that they would use over and over again and which would prove highly successful at helping them avoid capture.
As the war dragged on, food became scarce as more outliers (including escaped slaves, Confederate deserters and Union prison escapees) fled to the sanctuary of the swamps. As such, the rebel band were forced to change tactics and decided to live off the wealthy class of people instead of the poor. The band raided plantations and distributed food to the poor in Pembroke, North Carolina which was known then as "Scuffletown" or "The Settlement".
In 1872, Henry Berry Lowry disappeared without a trace. The reward on his head was never collected, and the legend of his actions grew and grew to mythic proportions. In 1874, after the death of Steve Lowry at the hands of bounty hunters, The Lowry War ended. For present day North Carolinians, Lowry is a controversial figure. He was thought by his defenders to be a hero, and by his critics to be a common criminal.
[edit] The legend
Since 1976, Lowry's legend has been presented every summer in the outdoor drama Strike At The Wind in Pembroke. Set during the critical Civil War and Reconstruction years of Lowry's career as outlaw-hero, the play portrays Lowry as a cultural hero who flouts the South's racialized power structure by fighting for his people's self-determination and allying with the county's downtrodden citizens, the blacks and poor whites.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- William McKee Evans, "To Die Game: The Story of the Lowry Band, Indian Guerrillas of Reconstruction", Syracuse University Press, 1995
- Adolph L. Dial, David K. Eliades, "The Only Land I Know: A History of the Lumbee Indians", Syracuse University Press, 1996
- Karen I. Blu, "The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian", University of Nebraska Press, 2001
- E. Stanly Godbold, Jr. and Mattie U. Russell, "Confederate Colonel And Cherokee Chief: The Life Of William Holland Thomas", University of Tennessee Press, 1990
- Townsend, George Alfred. The Swamp Outlaws: or, The North Carolina Bandits; Being a Complete History of the Modern Rob Roys and Robin Hoods. The Red Wolf Series. New York: Robert M. DeWitt, 1872.
