Civil War diary tells of soldier's capture at the Battle of New Bern

It was his first real fight, and already he was captured.

Before the battle, typhoid pneumonia had weakened Cpl. Columbus Lafayette Turner, though he hadn't said so. He had been made to stay behind the night before, had slept alone in a tent and had awakened feeling the best he had felt in weeks. He intended to fight in the Battle of New Bern, and so he did.

And now he and 13 others from his company were facing their enemy.

He had just turned 20 the month before, but that day seemed distant as the Confederate soldier stood among those "well nigh surrounded" and awaiting capture. He would soon be shuffled to the Albany, a prison boat anchored on the Neuse.

It wasn't long before he scrounged for scraps of paper to record his thoughts, which were later transcribed into a formal journal. That Civil War diary has survived for more than a century - much of that time in the bottom of a filing cabinet.

Wilfred Turner, formerly a teacher at Craven Community College, ended up with the diary of his grandfather - whom he calls CLT.

Turner's father, Reginald, was the soldier's youngest son. Reginald Turner had the diary for years, along with a sword that his father brought back from the war.

"After our father died, one of my brothers found the diary in a file drawer," Wilfred Turner said. "It had survived moves from Asheboro to Winston-Salem to Kure Beach. That's probably because the files were moved each time completely intact."

Turner and his wife, Elena, spent months deciphering and transcribing the diary and his family took it to the state for review. After months of vetting to determine its authenticity, the diary was recently published by the N.C. Office of Archives and History in "Worthy of Record." The book contains two diaries of Columbus L. Turner: one chronicling his time as a prisoner during the Civil War and the other detailing his experiences as a young representative in the General Assembly in 1874.

The diary begins with an account of Turner's time on the Albany, a prison ship that was anchored on the Neuse River in New Bern for a month.

"All the room on it was well occupied by prisoners," he wrote. "It was a steam transport old, rickety and ungainly in appearance.

"The ... passage was very narrow - the air close and the whole place ... damp and offensive."

It was on the ship that he had his first encounter with a "pestiferous tribe of insects," probably lice, which affected both armies.

"One or two of the advanced scouts had no sooner attacked me, that I was seized with a feeling of loathing and disgust, and very imprudently as it afterwards proved to be-drew off a good shirt, almost an only shirt, and threw it overboard."

Turner wrote that soup on the ship was served in large tureens and the prisoners would crowd around them, scrambling to eat without having enough spoons.

"I can almost imagine myself writing an essay on the aforesaid subject and saying, ‘The spoon, how useful it is - how convenient it is," he wrote. "The fork is, too - but it won't hold liquids or small grains of anything. The spoon will, and any of those things you can carry to your mouth without any trouble."

Turner wrote his recollections of his time on the ship on legislative stationery some years after the war, and they were later edited and published in a Craven County newspaper.

One portion of his diary suggests that his Albany account may have needed to be re-created because "some lady took off with" part of Turner's journal and would not return it.

The war journal also details Turner's time in two federal prisons: Johnson's Island in Ohio and Fort Delaware.

"He had friends who were killed and yet he endured," the soldier's grandson said recently. "After reading it all, I'm very surprised that I even exist.

"I don't know what kept him alive. He was stoic. He saw survival as his duty, and maybe the diary was part of that."