My Top Ten Favorite Civil War Bios of Common Soldiers

By C. Michael Harrington · Originally published November 2021 · pp. 15–17

In no particular order, here’s my ten favorite bios or autobiographies of common soldiers of the Civil War: 1. Rebel Private Front and Rear. By William Andrew Fletcher. Press of the Greer Print, Beaumont, 1908. This slender book is a refreshingly honest account of the Civil War service of a carpenter from Beaumont, Texas, Pvt. William Fletcher. Fletcher served first an infantryman in Hood’s Texas Brigade, and later, after suffering a leg wound at Chickamauga, he rode with Terry’s Texas Rangers, making him the only Texan to have served in these two celebrated Confederate commands. Fletcher ended the war in North Carolina where he fought at Bentonville in the last charge of the Rangers. Fletcher accepted defeat without remorse, taking the advice of a Tar Heel to “grease and slide back into the Union.” What makes Fletcher’s memoir especially attractive to me is his abstention from puffery and brag. For example, Fletcher describes how on the evening of the second day at Gettysburg he was overcome by a “bad case of cowardly horror” when confronted with the prospect of participating in a frontal assault on Union lines. He confesses: “I tried to force manhood to the front, but fright would drive it back with a shudder.” Original editions of Fletcher’s book are rare and costly, most of the small 1908 first edition having been destroyed in a warehouse fire. Fortunately, relatively inexpensive reprints are available. 2. Fourteen Hundred and 91 Days in the Confederate Army: A Journal Kept by W. W. Heartsill … of the W. P. Lane Rangers. By W. W. Heartsill. Hand printed by the author, 1876. I would die for a first edition of this book, by far the rarest of all Civil War books. Fortunately, it’s been reprinted several times. More than its rarity makes this book valuable. Heartsill’s journal is well written, perceptive, modest, and often humorous. Heartsill printed his journal from a day-by-day record he kept during his service, lending considerable accuracy to his account. An 1859 immigrant to Texas from Tennessee, Heartsill enlisted as a private in April 1861 in the W. P. Lane Rangers, an independent Texas cavalry company. Initially, the Lane Rangers guarded the Texas frontier. The few Indians they saw eluded the Rangers, but Heartsill’s entertaining record of frontier service is a highlight of his book. Taken prisoner at Arkansas Post, Heartsill served time in a Chicago POW camp. Late in the war he did guard duty at a Confederate POW camp in Texas, giving Heartsill the rare experience of serving on both sides of prison walls. In between, Heartsill participated in his only significant battle, Chickamauga, and afterwards took French leave from Bragg’s army to return to his company in Texas.

Heartsill’s journal ends with the disbandment of his unit in May 1865, after 1,491 days of service. 3. Carrying the Flag: The Story of Private Charles Whilden, the Confederacy’s Most Unlikely Hero. By Gordon C. Rhea. Basic Books, 2004. Spoiler alert: I put Gordon Rhea, an authority on the Overland Campaign, onto the story of Charles Whilden. What Rhea did with the story is strictly to his credit, however. A native of Charleston, Charles Whilden was working as a civilian clerk at a New Mexico army outpost when war erupted. Whilden could have sat out the war in the Southwest, but being an ardent southern patriot, he risked life and limb to get home to Charleston and enlist. Passed over for service several times due to his epilepsy, in the spring of 1864 Whilden was finally allowed to enlist as a private in the Second South Carolina Infantry, a regiment serving in Virginia. In short order, this aging epileptic found himself plunged into bloody combat. In an astonishing act of courage, Whilden wrapped the Rebel flag around his body and led a charge at Spotsylvania that won back crucial ground for the Confederates, changing the course of one of the war’s most significant battles and arguably extending the war for nearly a year. Shortly after the war, when back home in Charleston, this most unlikely hero drowned in a shallow puddle of water following an epileptic seizure. 4. Berry Benson’s Civil War Book: Memoirs of a Confederate Scout and Sharpshooter. Edited by Susan Williams Benson. University of Georgia Press, 1962. Teenager Berry Benson could not wait for his native Georgia to secede, so in early Jan. 1861 he crossed into South Carolina and enlisted as a private in a Palmetto State regiment. Benson was singled out early on for his scouting abilities. His reconnaissance exploits make up one of the main stories in Benson’s memoir. Benson’s battlefield experiences are prominent in his memoir. A crack shot turned sharpshooter, Benson participated in the major battles in the East, from First Manassas to Petersburg. At Appomattox, Benson, ever the diehard Rebel, slipped away, refusing to surrender. For me, Benson’s account of his two escapes from prison is the most engaging part of his memoir. Benson swam out of the POW camp at Point Lookout, narrowly evading sharks. Recaptured, he was sent to Elmira Prison in New York. There he was part of the only successful tunnel escape in Elmira’s history. Remarkably, he made it back to his command in Virginia. Benson wrote his memoirs thirteen years after the war, consulting his wartime diary. Critics have questioned the authenticity of some of Benson’s derring-do, but if only half of it is accurate, Benson still ranks as a remarkable private soldier. 5. Chapters from the Unwritten History of the War Between the States…. By R. M. Collins. Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1893 (reprinted by Morningside, 1988). When war erupted, Bob Collins was 23 and a shop clerk in a small Texas frontier town. Evidently a lukewarm Rebel, Collins delayed Confederate service until joining the 15 Tex. Cav. as a private in March 1862. Posted first to Arkansas, Collins’ regiment was converted to infantry a few months before Collins was taken prisoner at Arkansas Post in Jan. 1863 and shipped off to a POW camp in Ohio. When exchanged, Collins soon found himself serving in what became Granbury’s Texas Brigade, one of the premier fighting units in the Confederacy’s main western army. Promoted to lieutenant, Collins saw hard service in the West, fighting at Chickamauga and

Missionary Ridge as well as in the Atlanta Campaign and Hood’s disastrous Tennessee Campaign. Collins surrendered with Joe Johnston’s army in April 1865, walked home to Texas, and eventually became a newspaperman. Despite scanty formal education, Collins was decidedly literate. His account of Confederate service is lively and crisp, devoid of the heavy prose of the Victorian era. Besides being easy to read, Collins’ book is factual to a fault, often humorous and without partisan rancor. 6. A Texan in Search of a Fight, Being the Diary and Letters of a Private Soldier in Hood’s Texas Brigade. By John C. West. Press of J. S. Hill & Co., 1901 (reprinted by Texian Press, 1969). If John West was, as he maintained, a “Texan in search of a fight,” when he enlisted in the 4 Tex. Inf. in April 1863, he found it soon enough. Before his discharge in Feb. 1864, Pvt. West was wounded at both Gettysburg and Chickamauga. He also endured Longstreet’s grueling East Tennessee campaign. This slender book consists mostly of the diary West kept and the letters he wrote home during his short but eventful tenure in Hood’s Texas Brigade. West was hardly the typical Confederate volunteer. Exempted from the draft by his employment, West was also college educated, nearly 30, and married at enlistment. West wrote well and, for the most part, honestly, especially when chronicling the hardships his brigade endured. He also showed frequent humor in his writings, as this remark after Gettysburg attests: “I am having my only underwear washed today, and owing to a large rent in my pants, would be subject to arrest in any well managed city for improper exposure of my person in a public place.” West compiled his memoir long after Appomattox. West’s attribution of his enlistment to his “being more determined than ever to see a fight” looks like classic Old Soldierism. 7. The Ragged Rebel: A Common Soldier in W. H. Parsons’ Texas Cavalry, 1861-1865. By B. P. Gallaway. University of Texas Press, 1988. This modern biography of David Nance makes my list for several reasons. First, Nance defies stereotypes of most Confederate volunteers. Born in Illinois and reared in an antislavery family in a Texas area with strong Union attachments, the teenaged Nance nonetheless volunteered for Confederate service early in the war, chiefly seeking a chance for adventure. Second, Nance’s story takes place in the Trans-Mississippi Theater, a relatively unappreciated area of the war. The principal reason I like this biography, however, is the author’s skillful development of the impact that war had on Nance’s youthful romanticism. Together with many 1861 volunteers, Nance’s concepts of the honor and glory of war soon gave way to the realities of hardship and disease. Those realities included several battle wounds that Nance suffered and the excesses of enemy occupation he witnessed. What emerges from Nance’s story is a young man who, when confronted by unanticipated experiences, becomes vehemently antiwar, despite his being a good soldier who eventually attains the rank of sergeant. Late in life, Nance expressed regret about entering the army, both because he assisted in protecting the evil of slavery and “because war is murder, and murder has no mercy in it.” 8. Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade. By John O. Casler. State Capital Printing Co., 1893. Private John Casler spent barely two years on active duty in Virginia’s heralded Stonewall Brigade. Short as his service was, Casler still managed to participate in several major battles, including First Manassas. Casler was long in the tooth when his war memoir was first published. Not surprisingly for a book written decades after the war by an illeducated man, Casler confuses some facts and consistently misspells some proper names. Warts and all, however, the memoir reads well and is a fairly accurate and comprehensive account of Casler’s wartime experiences. Mostly, it’s the realism of Casler’s account that endears it to me. Casler’s service record is pockmarked by persistent straggling, multiple unauthorized leaves and arrests, theft of hooch in camp and grub on the march, fistfights with comrades, and a general unwillingness to bend to military discipline. Instead of papering over his transgressions, Casler fesses up to them. As an example of his candor and his lack of Victorian romantism about war, Casler confides in the final paragraph of his book: “No man dreaded going into battle more than I did or was more anxious for one to be over.”

9-10. The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy and The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union. By Bell Irvin Wiley. Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1943 and 1952, respectively. The late Bell Wiley’s twovolume study of the common soldier of the Civil War broke new ground when published. Admittedly somewhat dated now, Wiley’s twin books remain generally reliable guides to the army life of everyday Confederate and Federal soldiers. Each book covers multiple facets of the soldiers’ lives, from their backgrounds and education, to their clothes, the food they ate, the crude shelters they built, their training and drill, their attitudes to officers and one another, their heroism and cowardice, and their reaction to battle. Near the end of The Life of Billy Yank, Wiley concludes that the “similarities of Billy Yank and Johnny Reb far outweighed their differences.” Wiley relied heavily on soldiers’ letters, diaries, and recollections in detailing the experiences of the grunts who too often elude the attention of historians. Wiley’s emphasis upon soldiers’ letters has both plusses and minuses for readers today. Deciphering Johnny Reb’s or Billy Yank’s typically unrefined spelling and grammar can be a chore. On the positive side, the Civil War was an era before wartime censorship of soldiers’ letters, so Civil War soldiers’ letters tend to convey their writers’ thoughts and emotions more accurately than, say, letters written by WWII GIs who suspected that their officers might read and censor their missives. The Life of Johnny Reb especially shows its age in places. For instance, there is scarcely a mention of blacks outside references to body servants; and Wiley, with his gentle southern bias, leaves the rectitude of the Confederate cause largely unexamined. C. Michael Harrington is a retired lawyer, resident in Houston and Galveston. He’s authored several published articles on South Carolina soldiers, and he’s lectured to Civil War organizations in Houston on multiple topics, including Yale’s

Confederate alumni and South Carolinians in the war. He’s immediate past president of the Houston CWRT.