Newt never talked about his Confederate military duty or his role in the war in the Confederate Army, but he sure had a lot to say about his "Union" role. I believe the bias towards one side or the other after the war had more to do with his half dozen attempts to collect a Union pension, at a time when there were no Confederate pensions available to him. The pension boards didn't by his story but years later a dime novel newspaperman decided to listen to him and made him out to be a western type gunfighter- although his weapon of choice seems to be the dark of night, a couple of bushes and a shotgun. I can't believe that if Newt did the things half the things he claimed to have done he could not have been able to live in peace all those years. All the men I have researched that actually did "galvanize" with the Union forces in this theater of the war moved west within the last year of the war. How did Newt escape justice his peers? It doesn't make sense.

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David Upton