A Civil War Escape

Written By: Jane Gibson Nardy - Cashiers Historical Society | Issue: 2021/05 – May

The photograph above was taken at Knoxville, Tennessee on January 1, 1865.

It shows a group of nine Union Army officers who had escaped from Confederate prisons and the three Western North Carolina citizens who had guided them to safety in East Tennessee, which was Union-held territory.  

They’re all adults, except for one who was a 14 year-old-boy from Cashiers named Thompson Roberts Zachary, also called Tom or Tommy or T.R. He was the son of Alexander “Andy” Zachary, a Union sympathizer who often gave aid to escaped Union soldiers. When that boy grew up, he became one of my great-grandfathers.

When the group of nine Union officers showed up at Alexander Zachary’s Cashiers home in late December, 1864, there was deep snow and freezing temperatures outside. It was a brutal winter. They were fed and got some much needed rest in the warm house and made a plan to continue their journey to safety in Tennessee.  

Union officer M. M. Bassett of Illinois promised Alexander that if Tommy was allowed to be one of the guides, he (Bassett) would, after the war was over, pay Tommy’s way through college. 

The group walked west until they reached Union-held territory in Tennessee, boarded a train there and got off in Knoxville, where a photographer lined them up and took their picture. Tommy is on the top row, last one on the right.

Years later, around 1895, M. M. Bassett, who had subsequently become an Illinois state senator and a judge, got in touch with T.R. Zachary in Cashiers, then returned to Cashiers where the two men retraced their long ago trek from Cashiers to Knoxville. Bassett also mailed Zachary a copy of the photo taken on January 1, 1865, listing the names of each person in the picture.

Flash forward to the year 2021, when I got a phone call from Steve Procko, a Civil War buff, who has a home in North Georgia. His neighbor, a descendant of one of the adult guides on the Cashiers to Knoxville escape, showed Steve the January 1, 1865 picture, complete with the names of Union officers and their guides. Intrigued, Steve began doing email research on the people in the picture and quickly ran across a copy of the picture on the cover of a book titled To Die in Chicago, Confederate Prisoners at Camp Douglas, 1862-65 by George Levy. The picture was misidentified as “Morgan’s Raiders,” Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas. The photo was noted to reside in the Chicago Historical Society, which is presently closed due to Covid-19, but Steve is working on proof that the picture needs to be re-identified.

Stay tuned – I’ll have an update for you in a few months.