Look at the cover of this paperback (price 95 cents!) and you’ll know just how long I’ve been reading Sam Watkins’ famous memoir, “Co. Aytch.”
Almost half a century ago, I would take my high school American history students on a Saturday morning trip to Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. The film that the Visitor Center showed back then featured a narrator quoting Watkins: “a solid line of blazing fire right from the muzzles of the Yankee guns being poured right into our very faces.”
Yup—I’ve been reading Watkins’ words that long.
Samuel Rush Watkins was born on June 26, 1839 near Columbia, Tenn. He attended college there and was twenty-one when the war broke out. Just weeks after Sumter he volunteered to join a local company, the Maury Grays, that became Company H of the 1st Tennessee.
Private Watkins saw the elephant at Shiloh, followed Bragg to Perryville, and was slightly wounded at Murfreesboro. He suffered through the rout at Missionary Ridge. He was wounded at Atlanta, and in Hood’s tragic raid into Tennessee again at Nashville. True to the colors, he surrendered with Joe Johnston in North Carolina.
Watkins’ memoir, Co. “Aytch,” Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment, or, a Side Show of the Big Show, was published by a Nashville house in 1882, two decades before the veteran’s death. By my count it has been reprinted seven times: in 1900; in 1952 by McCowat-Mercer (edited by Bell Wiley); in 1962 (my paperback edition); in 1982 by Bob Younger’s Morningside; in 1987 and 1990 by Tom Broadfoot; and again in 2007.
I like very much Dr. Wiley’s introduction (1952) to the memoir, in which he likens “Co. Aytch” to other memorable memoirs, Carlton McCarthy’s Detailed Minutiae (1882) and Josh Billings’ Hard Tack and Coffee (1887): “No memoir by a Rebel participant is richer in intimate detail of common soldier life than this engaging story told by Private Sam R. Watkins of the First Tennessee.”
I’ll offer only a few handfuls of “intimate detail” from Watkins’ work, as subtitled by the author himself.
At this place was held the grand court-martial. Almost every day we would hear a discharge of musketry, and knew that some poor, trembling wretch had bid farewell to mortal things here below. It seemed to be but a question of time with all of us as to when we too would be shot. We were afraid to chirp. So far now as patriotism was concerned, we had forgotten all about that, and did not now so much love our country as we feared Bragg.
After the fighting was over, where, O where, was all the fine rigging heretofore on our officers? They could not be seen. Corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, all had torn all the fine lace off their clothing. I asked several of them why they had torn off the insignia of their rank, and they always answered, “Humph, you think that I was going to be a target for the Yankees to shoot at?” You see, this was our first battle, and the officers had not found out that minnies as well as cannonballs were blind; that they had no eyes and could not see. They thought that the balls would hunt for them and not hurt the privates. I always shot at privates. It was they that did the shooting and killing, and if I could kill or wound a private, why, my chances were so much the better.
I do not pretend to tell of what command distinguished itself; of heroes; of blood and wounds; of shrieks and groans; of brilliant charges; of cannon captured, etc. I was but a private soldier, and if I happened to look to see if I could find out anything, “Eyes right, guide center,” was the order. “Close up, guide right, halt, forward, right oblique, left oblique, halt, forward, guide center, eyes right, dress up promptly in the rear, steady, double quick, charge bayonets, fire at will,” is about all that a private soldier ever knows of a battle.
Watkins’ pluck and wit are evident in this passage:
The histories of the Lost Cause are all written out by “big bugs,” generals and renowned historians, and like the fellow who called a turtle a “cooter,” being told that no such word as cooter was in Webster’s dictionary, remarked that he had as much right to make a dictionary as Mr. Webster or any other man; so have I to write a history.
Reviewed by Salvatore Cilella
“These forms, crushed and torn out of all human semblance, are our brothers…the scars we carve and with steel or burn with powder across shuddering land, are scars on the dear face of the Motherland we love.” (Anon.)
Alexander Gardner may have introduced war’s ugly but truthful record of untold carnage never before seen by the public, but as Allison Johnson argues, the American print culture kept it front and center. Johnson takes on what she calls “the canonical” writers and histories of the war, insisting that the periodicals and print matter of mid-19th century America tell a more complete story—in Walt Whitman’s words, the parts of the war that he thought would never get “into the books.”
We rarely think of periodicals such as Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News, Southern Punch, and The Southern Literary Messenger as purveyors of the physical aspects of the war. But Johnson has mined the weeklies and smaller local papers for evidence that wounds suffered on the field were almost as injurious as the reporting and the recording of those wounds. She cites several documented cases, where family members, reading the casualty lists in the local paper, experienced actual physical distress. Perusing wartime newspapers became a regular ritual. Absence of one’s name on the list meant another week or month of worry from “not knowing.” It was no better, of course, when the list included a loved one. New technology, the telegraph, heightened the emotionally disturbing news rushed to families back home awaiting word of loved ones on the battlefield. The misinformation listing a fallen family member with the same name or, worse yet, reported dead and later showing up very much alive, was emotionally devastating.
Johnson’s slim volume is only four chapters long. In the first, and longest chapter, she writes convincingly of the feminine/ maternal symbolism of the icon Columbia or Lady Liberty. The author argues that the media raised the image of Columbia, interjecting the “maternal feminine” for both sides of the struggle. Similarly, in the second chapter, she argues that the media were responsible for the elevation of the slave and freedman from victim to full manhood and citizenship. Their bodily wounds and deaths were markers to a higher social standing.
In chapter three, Johnson highlights William Oland Bourne, news editor, philanthropist, and hospital volunteer. In 1865 and 1866, Bourne sponsored a contest called the “Left Arm Corps.” He challenged all maimed Union veterans who lost their right arms in battle to enroll in a penmanship contest using their left arm. The contest aimed to not only instill a renewed sense of usefulness to the maimed soldier, but pride in their badge of honor (their lost limb) which helped save the Union. Their work produced prodigious amounts of poetry and some decent prose. As author Johnson states, Bourne’s contests “testify to survival and loss, successful adaptation and painful readjustment.”
Her last chapter deals with the carriers of news—newspapers, periodicals and the telegraph— and her title says it all: “Spirit Wounds and Invisible Bullets.” Johnson argues that much of “Civil War literature is female” and that news accounts were primarily consumed by women, there-by making them the recipients of “invisible bullets” and “spirit wounds.” Johnson does not mention that not every man, North or South, fought during the war; more so in the North than in the Confederacy. Therefore, some men remained home and grief was not the sole province of women. The author contends that the “wounded” women were counterpoints to Columbia and Lady Liberty and that purveyors of news from the front blurred the “line between public and private.” She argues that the analogy comes around, full circle. It’s a tidy summation but one that remains elusive.
The book is an important addition to our understanding of how human beings suffered at the hands of other human beings and the long-lasting effects of battle wounds on those who are both directly and indirectly involved. The author has done a masterful job in assiduously mining the myriad resources. She has balanced the evidence of the written word, particularly poetry, with periodicals’ illustrations. I wish that her editor had taken a firmer hand in translating the material from a Ph.D. dissertation into a more accessible read. Occasional lapses into “extreme academese” detract from the otherwise cogent narrative.
Other than these academic lapses, this book offers a creative insight into a relatively obscure subject.
For further reading see Aaron The Calculus Sheehan-Dean, of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 2018) and Stephanie McCurry, Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War (Belknap Press, 2019).
Salvatore Cilella is the retired CEO of the Atlanta History Center. He is the author of Upton’s Regulars (University of Kansas Press, 2009) and editor of The Selected Correspondence of General Emory Upton, 2 volumes (University of Tennessee Press, 2017). The latter is the recipient of the 2019 Founder’s Award, American Civil War Museum. He is currently editing the love letters of Emory and Emily Upton, documenting their brief and tragic two-year marriage (University of Oklahoma Press), due out next spring.
Want To Advertise In
Mounted with its rider Horse 1. King Philip 2. Duke 3. Little Sorrel 4. Jeff Davis 5. Jerry 6. Skylark 7. Traveler 8. Rienzi 9. Black Bess 10. Cincinnati Rider a. James E.B. Stuart. b. Ulysses S. Grant. c. Nathan B. Forrest.
Send your book(s) for review to: CWN Book Review Editor Stephen Davis 3670 Falling Leaf Lane, Cumming, GA 30041-2087
For speaking engagements email:
d. Robert E. Lee. e. William T. Sherman. f. Philip H. Sheridan. g. Thomas J. Jackson. h. John B. Hood. i. John H. Morgan. j. Leonidas Polk.
Answers found on page 46.
• Lecturer • Author • Course Instructor
Purveyor of Original Artillery Items
Let me help connect you with a buyer or seller. I specialize in cannon, projectiles, fuses and wrenches, implements, sights, gunner’s equipment, tools, and other artillery related equipment.
From single items to collections.