By Daniel R. Glenn
A loud knock jolted Henry McCarthy from sleep at his home in a black community in New Bern, N.C., on the night of April 20, 1864. He made his way to the door and opened it. Four white federals stared back at him. They first asked him for liquor, and then, if there was “any woman there who would screw.”
Stepping outside, McCarthy replied nervously, “there was only one, and she was in old man Winn’s house and that if they went there the old man would kill them.” One of the soldiers grabbed McCarthy by the neck, pushed him back, and ordered him to return to bed.
McCarthy hurried inside, watched the group continue down the path from a window, and then lay down. About five minutes later, just as he dozed off, another noise—this time the crack of a gunshot—shattered the nighttime stillness.
At a nearby house slept old man Lot Winn. He did not hear the shot, but awoke to a desperate voice calling for him. Darting from his bed and stepping outside, Winn saw Edmund Smith, a neighbor, coming towards him, and screaming for help. Just as Smith reached the house, Winn glimpsed a shadowy figure 40 yards away raise a gun to his shoulder.
Moments later, a report echoed through the woods. Smith collapsed in his tracks with a bullet in his head, just a few feet short of safety.
Someone called for an ambulance, which rushed Smith to a nearby army hospital. The physician who treated him, John Gore Johnson, had only recently joined the army.
Johnson, 39, had come to medicine later than most. Back in his hometown of Worcester, Mass., he started his adult life as a cobbler in the family business. But his frail health could not endure the rigors of factory work, and he turned to teaching. He was good at it, and might have remained an educator for the rest of his days.
In 1847, however, after tuberculosis claimed a younger brother and sister, Johnson, then 22, heard the call to medicine. According to a biographer, “He purchased books, as he had the means, and studied privately until able to attend the medical college.”
Johnson graduated from Worcester Medical College in 1856, and settled into a successful practice. Soon, he and his wife, Sally, started a family that grew to include six children.
In November 1863, Dr. Johnson answered a new call—from the federal government. He entered service as an acting assistant surgeon, a contract position that entitled him to wear an officer’s uniform. He reported to New Bern, N.C., for duty.
In this capacity, he attended to the critically injured Edmund Smith on the fateful night. His head wound proved mortal, and Smith succumbed the following day around 3 p.m.
Meanwhile, the provost and other military authorities launched an investigation into Smith’s death. What they found related to the shooting of an unarmed black man was disturbing.
On June 10, Judge Advocate Edwin S. Jenney, major of the 3rd New York Light Artillery, convened a court-martial in New Bern. The tribunal tried Sgt. Arthur J. Woods of the 12th New York Cavalry for the murder of Edmund Smith. Woods, about 21 years old, had been arrested four days after the death of Smith, and confined until the trial date.
At the trial, Surgeon Johnson delivered barebones testimony regarding his care of Smith. The recollections of McCarthy and Winn though, proved much more relevant.
