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The Divergent Lives of Siblings Dwight and Sophia Stone in the American Civil War
Do their different actions indicate similar politics?
This story was originally published in GenTales on Substack. You can read it there instead.
The American Civil War is often given as an example of how political alignment can divide blood lines. You’ve probably heard of the “brother vs. brother” aspect of the fighting in the border states — one brother joined the Union, the other the Confederacy, and they met on the battlefield. As my paternal line comes from Kentucky, we have a few of those stories already. What I wasn’t expecting was to find a different take on this among my maternal cousins from Massachusetts.
The Stone family (one of them in the lineage — it’s a common enough surname in post-Colonial New England) is a two-generation step from my Lincoln line: from Hannah Lincoln and Cyprian Parish through their daughter Lora (Parish) Stone. Lora’s children are who I am talking about today.
Of Lora’s 8 known children so far, her fifth-born, a son named Dwight Stone (1817–1901), ended up moving to Louisiana and running a plantation after the Civil War — he is said to have purchased Pecano Plantation (tied to the Shields family) in 1867.
