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Gen'l Robert C. Newton Camp #197

Colonel Robert C. Newton

C.S.A.


Captain R.C. Newton, Summer, 1861


General Newton as State Treasurer

Robert Crittenden NEWTON was born in Little Rock, Arkansas on June 2, 1840; the oldest son of U.S. Representative Thomas W. Newton and the former Mary K. Allen of Shelbyville, Kentucky. At the age of thirteen he entered the Western Military Institute of Tennessee. After remaining there a year, he returned home to Little Rock and was placed under private tutors. He became Deputy Clerk of the Circuit Court, and at the same time, studied law. In 1860, he was admitted to the State bar by Chief Justice E.H. English, and began to practice law as a member of the firm Pope & Newton.

When the War began in the spring of 1861 and Arkansas seceded from the Union, Newton entered the Confederate Army as a captain and in May, 1862 was appointed as a major, serving as the Adjutant General on the staff of Major General Thomas C. Hindman, commanding the Department of the Trans-Mississippi and the District of Arkansas. In this post he assisted Hindman in the raising and training of troops for defending the state, as the departure of General Earl Van Dorn and his Army of the West had completely emptied Arkansas of troops and military supplies.

In June, 1862, with Union General Samuel Curtis' Army of the Southwest bearing down on Little Rock and less than 400 unarmed Confederate soldiers to defend the state, Newton concocted a plan to confuse and deter the Yankees' advance. Bill O'Donnell of the Civil War RoundTable of Arkansas tells this story in The Civil War Quadrennium:

: "...a mail was fixed up ostensibly to cross the Mississippi river with letters to the Arkansas soldiers beyond, and dispatches for the Richmond authorities. Newton went to a hundred or more ladies and gentlemen whom he knew well, and who had fathers, husbands, lovers, children and brothers over there under Lee and Beauregard, and unfolded to them privately Hindman's wishes and plans. The old patriarchs wrote to their sons and bade them be of good cheer, for five thousand splendidly armed Texans had just arrived, and Little Rock was safe. Brothers wrote to brothers describing some imaginary brigade to which they were attached, and went into ecstasies over the elegant new Enfields arriving from Mexico. The young girls, true to the witchery and coquetry of their sex, informed their lovers under Cleburne and Gates, in delicate epistles, of the great balls given to the Louisianians, and how Mary Jane lost her heart here, Annabel Lee there, and Minnie Myrtle somewhere else, importuning the absent ones to make haste speedily with the war and come home, for the Louisiana and Texas gallants would take no denial and were so nice and fascinating.

"Everybody wrote that could write, and under the sense of great peril, wrote naturally and well. Every letter was submitted to the ordeal of Hindman's acute diplomacy and Newton's legal acumen. Then Hindman wrote concisely and plainly that his efforts for the defense of the department were bearing healthy fruit. The people, alive to their danger, were volunteering by thousands. The scarcity of arms, looked upon as being an almost insur-mountable obstacle, had been in a measure overcome, so that with a large number just arriving, and with several thousand more a Mexican firm at Matamoras was willing to exchange for cotton, he had great hopes of soon attacking Curtis. Then followed a list of his new organizations and the names of many officers appointed by himself for whom he asked commissions.

"To get this mail now into Curtis' hands with all its heterogeneous contents its paternal lectures, its school-boy scrawls, its labored love-letters, its impassioned poetry, its calm, succinct statements of military facts, was the uppermost question in Hindman's mind. Fate, which always favors the brave and beautiful, favored Hindman. A young Missourian - a daring, handsome, intelligent athletic soldier from St. Joseph - Lieutenant Colonel Walter Scott, volunteered for the perilous mission, asking only a swift, strong horse and greenbacks enough for the journey. He had himself the rest - the nerve, the arms, the knightly valor.

"Toiling through swamps, swimming bayous, keeping lonely vigils about lonesome, guarded roads, he reached at last the vicinity of Curtis' army. Up to this point his beautiful sorrel mare - his petted 'Princess' - had been led tenderly along, watched and nursed as a man waits upon a fickle beauty. Upon her fleet limbs depended the fate of a state - upon her strong sinews the life of a rider. Bold and determined, and resolved to win all or lose all, Scott rode calmly up to the nearest pickets, and, alone as he was, and ig-norant of the country as he was, fired upon them. It was returned without damage, and he retreated back a little to bivouac hungry in a swamp by the road side.

"The next morning, with the dew on the grass and the song of 'half-awakened birds,' thrilling on the air, he rode out broad and good into the pathway, and fired closely upon the head of thirty Federal Illinois cavalry coming out to pillage and to burn. They dashed after him fiercely. Princess, quivering with suppressed speed, pulled hard upon the bit and flecked her spotless coat with great foam splashes. Round and round wheeled Scott, firing now at the enemy almost upon him, and then dashing off followed by a handful of bullets. The saddlebags were safe yet, and he must win. At last, feigning great exhaustion for his mare, he held her in with an iron hand, though using his spurs mercilessly, every stroke going into his own flesh. First his overcoat went, then one pistol, then another - he had two left yet, though, - then his heavy leggings, then the large cavalry roll, then as a last resort the precious mail went down in the road before the rushing Federals. Potent as the golden apples of Atlanta, the Illinois men stooped to gather it up and were distanced. Scott, after turning a bend in the road, caressed his poor, tried beauty and gave her the reins with a soft, sweet word. The sensitive creature dashed away superbly, and carried her rider far beyond all danger, and Scott soon returned to Little Rock to receive thanks for services well and faithfully done.

"This ruse had the desired effect upon Curtis, and he halted and wavered. His own dispatches captured afterward revealed the fact, for in them were pleading supplications for reinforcements. Hindman only wanted time, and the time he gained enabled him to save the department and drive back Blunt and Curtis."

Hindman was able to raise and train an army nearly from scratch, creating the 1st Corps of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, and with Major Newton as his chief of staff, marched to northwest Arkansas to confront the Federals there. However, the enmity that Hindman had created by his enforcement of martial law in the state led to his being superseded in command of the Department by Major General Theophilus Holmes, an elderly officer whom Robert E. Lee had recently discarded from the Army of Northern Virginia. Hindman was reduced to simply commanding the 1st Corps in the field, with Newton as his AG. Hindman attempted to attack the Federal army while it was divided, resulting in the bloody battle of Prairie Grove on December 7-8, 1862. Hindman and Newton were able to hold their own on the battlefield, but a lack of supplies and ammunition and no possible reinforcements forced them to retreat south to Van Buren, and on back to Little Rock. With the reassignment of Hindman to staff duty in Louisiana and Mississippi in March, 1863, Newton left the Department staff and set about to raise a regiment of Arkansas cavalry.

In early 1863, General Hindman had accused Elisha Baxter, a prominent Whig and former State representative and prosecuting attorney for Independence County, of treason for allegedly violated the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy required of all officeholders. Baxter was arrested, and Newton was detailed to escort Baxter to Little Rock for trial. Newton and Baxter became close friends, and Newton, whose family had also been Whigs, paroled Baxter on his promise to go to Little Rock and report to General Holmes. Newton never expected his friend to fullfill that promise, but Baxter faithfully reported to Little Rock, where he was imprisoned for five months awaiting a trial that was never held.

In April 1863, Newton raised and was appointed as a colonel to command the 5th Arkansas Cavalry Regiment, which he led as part of General Walker's Arkansas Cavalry Division during the battle of Helena and in the Little Rock Campaign in the summer of 1863. In August, 1863, Newton's regiment conducted screening operations in front of the Confederate defenses along Bayou Meto, and guarded Shallow (or Shoal) Ford on that bayou. Pushed away from Bayou Meto by the federal cavalry after the Union repluse at Reed's Bridge, Newton continued to harass the federals as they searched for an alternate approach to Little Rock. On September 10 and 11, Newton's regiment (also known as the 8th Arkansas Cavalry) skirmished with Federal troops near Ashley's Mills and at Terry's Ferry near present-day Scott, and fought under Dobbins' command at Fourche Bayou on the outskirts of Little Rock. Newton retreated to Benton with the rest of Dobbin's division, and the next month participated under the command of General Marmaduke in an attack on the Federal garrison at Pine Bluff on October 25.

Newton turned command of the 5th Cavalry over to Colonel Thomas Morgan on December 24, 1863 (whereupon the regiment was renamed as Morgan's 2nd Arkansas Cavalry), and assumed command of a small cavalry brigade which he led for the remainder of the war. On January 14, 1865, Newton's brigade in company with the brigades of Colonels William H. Brooks and Ras Stirman conducted an attack on Union forces on the Arkansas River near Dardanelle, which was repulsed. They next chased a fleet of steamboats down the Arkansas River, ambushing and sinking several of them near Ivey's Ford. Following this campaign, the Confederate force returned to the stronghold of southwestern Arkansas where they stood mostly in defense or garrison duty until the surrender of the Confederate forces in the Trans-Mississippi on May 26, 1865.

After the war, Colonel Newton returned to Little Rock and reopened his law practice, forming a partnership with former Major George A. Gallagher with his offices at 118 West Markham Street. This partnership continued until the death of Major Gallagher in 1878. He courted and married Miss Cassandra Reiter, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Reiter of Little Rock; made his home at 7 Louisiana Street in Little Rock, and the couple had two children - a daughter, Mrs. Frank Gibb, and a son, Robert C. Newton, Jr.

In 1874, Elisha Baxter, now a Republican, was elected governor in a hotly contested election. Baxter then appointed R.C. Newton as a major general in the Arkansas State Militia. Baxter proved a disappointment to the Radical Republicans and carpetbaggers who had helped him get elected, as he soon displayed that he was no man's puppet and attempted to serve the needs of the common people. Joseph Brooks, an opponent of Baxter in the general election, seized the State Capitol and ousted Baxter from office by force of arms. Baxter still held many of the reins of state government, and began to rally his supporters to suppress the attempted coup. General Newton became commander of the militia troops supporting Baxter in what became known as the "Brooks-Baxter War", and led them in a number of skirmishes and battles in which nearly 100 militiamen on both sides were killed. Governor Baxter was able to regain the Capitol and the Governor's Office after several weeks, and in gratitude for his service, appointed General Newton as the State Treasurer following the overthrow of the carpetbag government in Arkansas.

Robert Newton proved to be a far better soldier than he was a bookkeeper. When he left office in 1876, an audit showed a nearly $500,000 discrepancy in his accounts. It must be said in his defense, however that the carpetbag legislature had bankrupted the state, and things were in a sorry state of affairs when Newton took office late in 1874. The two succeeding Treasurers, former General Tom Churchill and Major William Woodruff, Jr., also suffered from large discrepancies in their accounts as well.

Upon leaving public office under the cloud of the bookkeeping scandal, Newton returned to his law practice. General Newton died at Little Rock on June 5, 1887 at the age of 48. He is buried at Calvary Cemetery in Little Rock.

Photographs and biographical information are courtesy of General Newton's great-niece,
Peg Newton (Mrs. George Rose) Smith, of Little Rock.

 

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Background music "I'm A Good Ol' Rebel" courtesy of Compatriot Dean Fowler and ReWEP Associates