Brigadier General Edward E. Potter had landed at Georgetown with 2,700 men and orders to wreck the South Carolina railroads. His Second Brigade was commanded by Colonel Edward N. Hallowell, who had himself been wounded at Fort Wagner in 1863 and now led his old regiment - the 54th Massachusetts, more than 700 strong by April 1865. From April 9 at Dingle's Mill through April 18, Potter's column had been skirmishing with Kentucky's 'Orphan Brigade' of mounted infantry. The Orphan Brigade had earned its nickname because most of its men could not return home - Kentucky had stayed in the Union. On April 18, in the quiet town of Boykin, the Confederates took up a strong defensive position in an abandoned fort overlooking a millpond.

Sergeant Major Joseph Thomas Wilson, who would later write 'The Black Phalanx,' a pioneering history of African American military service, was there. He recorded the terrain plainly: 'No better position could be found for a defense, as the only approach to it, was by a narrow embankment about 200 yards long, where only one could walk at a time.' The 54th drew the assignment. They went up that embankment one at a time, into prepared fire. They lost two killed and thirteen wounded - the bloodiest engagement of the entire raid for the 54th, which had the highest casualty rate of any unit in Potter's operation. The two men killed were Private James P. Johnson of Company F, a twenty-one-year-old barber from Owego, New York, and Lieutenant E. L. Stevens. Stevens was hit by fire from young Burrell Boykin of the Confederate Home Guard, defending land his family owned.

The Confederate defenders were heavily outnumbered. Once the 54th made the embankment and the rest of the brigade closed up, the Southerners ran. Union troops pursued the fleeing column without success. The mill itself was burned to the ground in accordance with Sherman's scorched-earth policy. The two opposing units kept skirmishing through April 19 at Dinkin's Mill - the last major conflict of the Eastern Theater. The preliminary cessation of hostilities was announced to both sides two days after that. Confederate General Johnston did not officially surrender until April 26. By any honest measure, the killing at Boykin's Mill was extra. Lee had already surrendered. The Confederacy was finished. Two men died anyway: Stevens, the New York officer; Johnson, the barber from Owego who had enlisted in a Black regiment to fight for his country's promise; and on the other side, a few men whose names history did not preserve, killed defending a position they had no real reason to hold.

It is the detail of Burrell Boykin's age that has fixed Boykin's Mill in memory. A fourteen-year-old child took the shot that killed the last Union officer of the war. He was a member of the Confederate Home Guard - the local militia of old men and boys mobilized when the regular forces were elsewhere. He was defending property, not abstractions. The land was his family's. The mill was his neighbor's. He survived the war. Stevens did not. James P. Johnson did not. The bloodletting at Boykin's Mill is small in numbers - just two killed on one side - but it stands as the last sharp note of a war that produced over 600,000 American dead. Today the site is marked, the mill long gone, the pond still water. It is hard to walk it without thinking of how often, in human conflict, the killing keeps going past the moment when anyone needs it to.