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Stanly County, NC man last to die for General Lee?

Sgt.Ivy Ritchie buried in Virginia as Union soldier

The last Confederate soldier to die in General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was likely a Stanly County, NC man.

And, today, that Civil War soldier lies in a grave which mistakenly labels him as a Union soldier.

As Stanly County prepares for its 150th anniversary, the story of Sgt. Ivy Ritchie is being retold.

On April 9, 1865, as Lee’s ragtag army made one final effort to break through the encircling army of General Ulysses S. Grant just outside Appomattox, Virginia, a Stanly County unit made its final charge.

In that unit was Ivy Ritchie, who had been with the unit since the war began in 1861.

Ritchie was a member of Company H, 14 Regiment, the first unit organized in Stanly County. He enlisted as a 22-year old private May 5, 1861.

The men in Company H called themselves the Stanly Marksmen.

On the day they marched out of Albemarle, a group of young women standing on the second-floor balcony of a hotel on South Second Street sang the state song, “The Old North State.”

At the end of the war, a mob of residents desperate for food rioted along the South Second Street in the shadow of that same hotel.

During his four years of service, Ritchie took part in some of the most vicious fighting of the war.

He was captured at the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, and was confined as a prisoner at Fort Delaware until November of that year when he was part of a prisoner exchange.

He returned to Stanly County, NC following his release and married Clara S.C. Ridenhour, also of Stanly County, on December 14, 1862.

After returning to service, Ritchie was wounded at the Battle of Chancelorsville in Virginia on May 10, 1863. Two days later he was promoted to corporal.

In July, 1864, Ritchie attained the rank of sergeant. But it was during the last day of fighting in April 9, Ritchie and other Stanly County men in Company H advanced across an open field toward Union cannon positions near the Lynchburg Stage Road. Though no one knew it at the time, the charge would be the last advance by any unit in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

A soldier in that charge remembered that “the enemy from our left opened a battery of artillery upon us, firing right up to our line as we went across the open field…and marched up to a fence on the top of a hill (and) halted.” It was then that the gun as the shells burst about 12 or 15 feet to my left, killing Sergeant Ivy Ritchie and wounding five others…”

The Confederate attack briefly cleared the Lynchburg Stage Road so that Lee’s army could escape – but Lee had already decided to surrender.

Ritchie’s younger brother, Marvel, a member of the 28th Regiment, was elsewhere and didn’t see Ivy fall.

Later, after Lee’s surrender two soldiers from Ivy’s campany and the 14th Regiment’s chaplin came to Marvel and told him that Ivy had been killed.

Marvel followed the men to Ivy’s freshly dug grave.

“We opened the grave and found it was him, Ivy Ritchie,” Marvel wrote in a letter in 1923.

No one ever disputed the claim that Ivy was the last soldier to die in Lee’s army, Marvel wrote.

Ivy’s body was exhumed and reinterred in Poplar Grove National Cemetery near Petersburg, Virginia.

Because of the confusion of those days, Ivy’s identity was bungled. His tombstone today reads: “J. Ritchie, Sgt., Co H. 14th N.Y. Inf., Died April 9, 1865.”

There was no such unit from New York in 1865.

Historians believe the grave is actually the final resting place of Ivy Ritchie of Stanly County, NC – the last Confederate to die in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

Published in the Stanly News and Press
Written by SNAP Staff Writer David Deese
237 West North Street
P.O. Box 488
Albemarle, NC 28002
Phone: (704) 982-2121
Fax: (704) 983-7999

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