The Lowry Band of North Carolina

William Loren Katz

People of African and Native American descent have played a prominent part in North Carolina history since survivors of the Lost Colony of Roanoke in 1585 found a home among nearby Lumbee Indians and took in runaway slaves from the British colonies.

One band of these well-armed mixed bloods lived in Robeson County, North Carolina, next to South Carolina, under the name of the Lowry Band and commanded by Henry Berry Lowry, a mixture of the three races. The Lowry Band also lived under the noses of angry slaveholders.

During the Civil War the Lowry Band often had to fight off attacks by North Carolina’s Confederate Home Guards. The Guards acted as police unit that seized and forced Lowry’s men to build Confederate fortifications. The Lowry Band had no use for the Confederacy, forced labor and -- some of their kinfolk were still enslaved by Confederates. Lowrey’s men welcomed, recruited and armed fleeing Union prisoners, African American runaways and Confederate deserters.

During the Civil War the Lowry Band and the Home Guards fought their own civil war.

Then the Union Army reached North Carolina! In late 1864 US General William T. Sherman decided he could end the war if he sliced the Confederacy in half cutting through Georgia to its capitol at Atlanta, and then on to Savannah on the Atlantic. 

With 60,000 men, lacking contact with supply lines -- but aided by slave runaways – Sherman’s soldiers lived off the land. From Savannah, they spun around and marched northward into South Carolina seeking to crush this fountainhead of the secession movement.

Then Sherman’s army headed toward North Carolina to cut another devastating swathe through the Confederacy. His army reached Robeson County, on March 9th only to be stopped by a torrential rain, muddy roads and swollen creeks. They could not move, or even knew where to move.

Suddenly out of the downpour appeared a dark, grizzled guerilla force offering to help. Sherman called his saviors “Lumbees” because he heard were descended from Jamestown’s first English colonists mixed with slave runways and Lumbee Indians.

His rescuers were “The Lowry Band” now also mortal enemies of the Confederacy and slavery. They led Sherman’s army through the torrential rain and treacherous swamps. Sherman thanked the Band for “the damndest marching I ever saw.”

On February 22nd Union troops including African Americans liberated Wilmington. On April 9th Lee surrendered to Grant, and two weeks later on April 26 Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrendered to Sherman in North Carolina.

Whether you call them Lumbees, the Lowry Band or Black Indians, these fighters had done their part to end the war, defeat the Confederacy and abolish slavery in the United States.

This essay is adapted from the new, expanded [2012] edition of Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage by its author, William Loren Katz. His Black Indian website --  williamlkatz.com – has other articles on the subject and his forty other books.