On the afternoon of February 19, 1862, Commander Stephen C. Rowan's eight-gunboat flotilla steamed up the Chowan River toward Winton carrying part of the 4th Rhode Island Infantry and the 9th New York Infantry under Col. Rush C. Hawkins when Confederate Lt. Co. William T. Williams, with 400 concealed infantrymen and Capt. J.N. Nichols's four-gun battery on the bluff, opened cannon and musket fire on USS Delaware; the artillery overshot, and the bullet-riddled vessel escaped. That night Winton's townspeople celebrated Williams and his men, and the next morning Williams marched his troops away, followed by the town's residents. Shortly afterward the gunboats returned and bombarded the empty town, and Hawkins, enraged by the ambush, led his men into Winton and set it ablaze with barrels of tar, burning the courthouse and county records. Only the Methodist church and two buildings belonging to Union sympathizers remained standing. Hawkins claimed Confederates had used the buildings "as store-houses and quarters" and boasted that the burning of Winton was "the first instance [in North Carolina] during the war … where fire has accompanied the sword." Winton was rebuilt after the war. In Hertford County, as in other parts of North Carolina, self-liberated enslaved men and free people of color worked their way to Union lines, and more than 80 enlisted in the U.S. Colored troops authorized in 1863 by the Emancipation Proclamation; among them was Martin Van Buren Reynolds, born in 1840, who enlisted in Norfolk, Va., in Co. G, 2nd U.S. Colored Cavalry, on Dec. 25, 1863, fought in Virginia at Suffolk in March 1864, at Drewry's Bluff on May 16, 1864, and at New Market Heights on Sept. 29, 1864, then went with the regiment to Texas after the war, mustered out on Feb. 12, 1866, and died in Hertford Co. in 1906.