A Guide to the Microfiche Edition of CIVIL WAR UNIT HISTORIES Regimental Histories and Personal Narratives Part 1. The Confederate States of America and Border States A Guide to the Microfiche Edition of CIVIL WAR UNIT HISTORIES Regimental Histories and Personal Narratives Part 1. Confederate States of America and Border States Editor: Robert E. Lester Guide compiled by Blair D. Hydrick Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Civil War unit histories. The Confederate states of America and border states [microform]: regimental histories and personal narratives / project editors, Robert E. Lester, Gary Hoag. microfiches Accompanied by printed guide compiled by Blair D. Hydrick. ISBN 1-55655-216-5 (microfiche) ISBN 1-55655-257-2 (guide) 1. United States--History~Civil War, 1861-1865--Regimental histories. 2. United States-History-Civil War, 1861-1865-- Personal narratives. I. Lester, Robert. II. Hoag, Gary. III. Hydrick, Blair. [E492] 973.7'42-dc20 92-17394 CIP Copyright© 1992 by University Publications of America. All rights reserved. ISBN 1-55655-257-2. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction v Scope and Content Note xiii Arrangement of Material xvii List of Contributing Institutions xix Source Note xxi Editorial Note xxi Fiche Index Confederate States of America Army CSA-1 Navy CSA-9 Alabama AL-15 Arkansas AR-21 Florida FL-23 Georgia GA-25 Kentucky KY-33 Louisiana LA-39 Maryland MD-43 Mississippi MS-49 Missouri MO-55 North Carolina NC-61 South Carolina SC-67 Tennessee TN-75 Texas TX-81 Virginia VA-87 Author Index AI-107 Major Engagements Index ME-113 INTRODUCTION Nothing in the annals of America remotely compares with the Civil War. To historian Allan Nevins, it was "a struggle for the future of humanity." The distin- guished British analyst D.W. Brogan termed the conflict "the most moving, inter- esting, dignified thing that ever occurred in America." Without question, the Civil War was the turning point on the country's history. On its outcome hinged the perpetuation of the nation, slavery versus freedom, and the maintenance of majority rule in American democracy. It was a "strange sad war" to poet-nurse Walt Whitman, but the majority of eyewitnesses saw the North-South conflict as the most exciting and memorable event in their lives.The very nature of the Civil War lends itself to perpetual fascination. As historian Richard B. Harwell stated: It is a convenient war. It has a beginning and an end. Its causes stretch back to the beginning of our national life and its influences are still with us, but 1861- 1865 is a tangible period. It was a war in which the same language was spoken on both sides and which, therefore, can be studied by one not trained in languages. It was a war in which the participants understood the ideology of one another (perhaps better than it has been understood since). T. Harry Williams, one of the foremost authorities on the conflict of the 1860s, added: A real good hearty war like that dies hard. No country likes to part with a good earnest war. It likes to talk about the war, write its history, fight its battles over and over again, and build monument after monument to commemorate its glories. Mid-nineteenth century America was a lusty, growing nation that created both the war and the armies that fought it. For the three million volunteer soldiers involved, the Civil War exceeded their wildest expectations about life. A majority of those men were farmers who had literally never been out of sight of their homes prior to the 1861 bombardment of Fort Sumter. An even larger number left for war fully convinced that the contest between the North and South would be brief and comparatively bloodless. No one at the beginning had the faintest thought that the Civil War would last four wrenching years, or that the seven hundred thousand fatalities it produced would make it the most traumatic event in the nation's history. Indeed, more Americans perished in the Civil War than in all of our other wars combined. These deaths were not in vain. The Civil War's impact on American life is all but incalculable. One can argue easily that everything from the debates of the Founding Fathers to the events of today have a strong and direct relationship with the struggle of the 1860s. Introduction Enchantment with the war has not ceased; if anything, it has grown with each passing decade. Continued interest has sparked continued examination, which in turn has uncovered more facts and insights. The result has been to make the four-year conflagration between Union and Confederacy the most documented of all of America's wars. Military historians are inclined to preach how the good general inspires his troops. In the Civil War, the reverse was often true; a general was only as good as the men he led. While Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs left a good deal to be desired as disciplined soldiers, they proved beyond doubt and for all time their prowess as determined fighters. Much of the mass of information about that war fortunately comes from those men in the ranks. Like soldiers in any war, they existed in all their unsophisticated variety, and if their voices at times sound confusing, it is principally because they spoke with many voices. Some were writing letters and keeping diaries from the date of their enlistments. Even before the bloody conflict came to an end, others were penning memoirs and compiling regimental histories. As veterans aged in the tranquility of postwar years, hundreds of them devoted indeterminable hours to reminiscences and unit studies. The nation-building war had been so sweeping, so awesome, that men and events had to be preserved in print. What eventually appeared were more firsthand accounts of men in battle than exist for any other war ever fought. This unprecedented collection of material by the Civil War's common soldiers is a wondrous testimonial not only to the gallantry of those soldiers but equally so to their sense of history. The existence of so much writing might well be called providential in that American soldiers of the 1860s were more educated than their counterparts in Europe; larger numbers returned home and were able to relate their stories; the majority of them experienced much to tell. Ink and paper survive with a peculiar freshness. The words of Civil War soldiers re-create their era with an immediacy and revelation that, six score and ten years later, bring a new understanding of the indivisible nation and the war that made it so. Historical Perspectives Several attributes should be understood as an introduction to this splendid collection. What will be readily apparent in the writings of the Civil War soldiers is the imbalance in quantity between northern and southern works. This is natural, considering the relative numbers involved, the higher percentage of Federal survivors, the northern superiority in finances and facilities, and the postwar subjugation of southern states horribly ravaged by battle and want. This wide gap in published studies is most evident in unit histories. New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania have book-length works for practically every one of their Civil War regiments. Before 1920, in contrast, Mississippi could not boast of any unit history, Arkansas had one, Georgia only two. Virginia and North Carolina alone among the former Confederate states kept reasonable pace with the states to the north. Today that disparity in publications is steadily becoming less, but the catch-up process will still require many years to achieve any degree of parity. Another element in Civil War narratives is sectional prejudice. The bitterness left by the war was slow to die. Well into this century, some potentially good accounts suffered fatally from regional biases and personal resentments. Northern writers often exhibited the complex of a conqueror; the result was compilations that belittled or defamed the land of their opponents and everything in it. Billy Yanks began penning reminiscences during the war. By the end of the century, they had lost momentum and interest. Time often did not have a chance to exercise its mellowing effects on their judgments. In contrast, fewer than half a dozen memoirs by Johnny Rebs appeared in the war years. The bulk of Confed- erate memoirs emerged a quarter-century later and benefited from calmer thinking. Writings by the men of blue and grey cannot be lumped into one general category. Each title must be classified by time and by content. Historians know that the trustworthiness of a memoir is directly related to when it appeared. The more elapsed time there is between the events and the recording of them, the less dependable the narrative tends to be. Professional researchers traditionally put all Civil War eyewitness accounts into one of three types: (1) the immediate witness, who wrote soon after the events; (2) the secondary witness who, motivated by what he or she considered necessary, desirable, or profitable, penned an account twenty years or so later; and (3) the subsequent witness, a goodly number of whom had interest sparked and memory refreshed by the publication in 1880-1901 of the War Department's massive Official Records. Any student of Civil War history must treat the above classifica- tions differently. One cannot give the same measure of acceptance to the second two that is attached naturally to the first. "Time is of the very essence of reliability in reminiscences," bibliographer E. Merton Coulter once stated, "but as few people feel in the reminiscent mood until many years have elapsed since the event, there is constant danger that a treacherous memory will produce distortion of past events." Douglas Southall Freeman was always suspicious of Civil War reminiscences penned many years after the conflict, for the veteran always "adorns his story with every telling, until it becomes exceedingly difficult to ascertain the fabric of fact that underlies the embroidery of fancy." Fellow historian C.