In Good Company

One score and four years ago, I was in the tenth grade, and our history teacher, a Mr. Hawkins ("I'm the HAWK -- no one cheats in my class"), suggested that as part of a study project on the U.S. Civil War (aka the War Between the States, the War of Northern Aggression, the War to Preserve the Union, the War of the Rebellion, the Late Unpleasantness), we should find a "civil war diary" in the library -- a diary of a solider who fought in the war. I was intrigued by the notion just enough to put forth the effort to search for such a thing in our school library and the public library, but without result. Such an original source just didn't make the cut with our local government, whether it be for their high school's library or for their library featuring titles selected for the general reading public. Or maybe I just never really figured out that whole Dewey decimal system thing . . . .

Anyway, a generation later, I'm finally reading that civil war diary that Mr. Hawkins wanted me to read. And it's not half bad. So far, at least. I gather from the introduction that this is one of the classics -- not exactly accomplished literature, but lively, entertaining and mythic in its aspirations. Sam Watkins was born and lived his life in Columbia, Tennessee (also home to one James K. Polk!), a small town in a part of Tennessee with which I happen to be very familiar. But from 1861 to 1865, he traveled all over the South, mostly on foot I gather, fighting the Yankees as part of Company H, or the Maury Grays, part of the First Tennessee Infantry Regiment, Confederate States of America.

Watkins' entertaining style is in direct contrast to the horrors he witnessed; horrors he includes with real directness, as will be seen in my later posts. The odds against his being able to write about them were high, as noted in the Introduction:

Watkins would fight through some of the most difficult battles of the Civil War. Service at Shiloh was followed by Corinth, Perryville, Murfreesboro, Shelbyville, Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, the Hundred Days' Battles, and the Atlanta, Jonesboro, Franklin and Nashville campaigns. He was wounded three times -- at Murfreesboro, Atlanta, and Nashville -- but always recovered to reenter the fray. Out of the original 3,150 men who formed the Army of Tennessee, and the 1,950 recruits and conscripts who joined them, only 125 officers and men remained when the war was concluded in 1865. Out of the 120 men who enlisted with Watkins in Company H in 1861, he was one of only seven survivors.

Up next: the story of the man who drank water from his own grave.