Confederate Veteran

You can find articles about local Confederate veterans’ organizations, biographical sketches, anecdotes, personal histories, literary works, obituaries and photographs. You also can find lists of subscribers for Confederate memorials that can help you locate an ancestor in a certain time and place.

Fortunately, there is an online index that can help you find what you are looking for.

Library of Virginia: This is a fully searchable index to the personal names of Confederate soldiers as they appear in the magazine. Each of the more than 11,000 entries contains the volume and the page number where the article can be found. Depending on the type of article, the index may include:

• Birth date
• Death date
• Place of death
• Rank and military unit
• Other info

Take the index info you find and go to the University of Pennsylvania Online Books Page. Here you will find links to digitized volumes of most issues of Confederate Veteran at Duke University Libraries. You can view the volumes online or download them in various forms. The volumes are for 1892-1923 and 1932. Volumes 1924-1931 are missing.

You may be able to obtain microfilm of the missing volumes from Family Search. The website can tell you how to access the information from the original magazine by going to the Family History Library Catalog or contacting other libraries that have the collection of volumes.

As with all sources, double-check any facts you find in the magazine. For example, I found an obituary for Francis M. Poore that lists his birth place as Virginia. In fact, he was born in Mississippi.

Give the Confederate Veteran a try and see what you come up with.

The Bloody Angle as it looks today. The Confederate earthworks in the shadows in the foreground have heavily eroded in the 149 years since the battle.

Around 4:30 a.m. on a still dark May 12, 1864, 20,000 federal infantrymen under U.S. Major General Winfield Scott Hancock surged across this rolling ground toward the location of the camera. This is the Mule Shoe or Bloody Angle. Another 40,000 bluecoats attacked on two sides of the Angle.

For about 20 hours, William B. Poore and his fellow Confederates fought ankle deep in blood and human gore. William and his fellow rebels often had to step on the dead and wounded during the hours of desperate fighting. One soldier called it “a scene indescribable in its terrible horror.”

By the early morning hours of May 13, William and his comrades had bought the time C.S. General Robert E. Lee needed to build a new defense line. The Bloody Angle’s defenders peeled off one unit at a time taking care not to make any noise that would alert their enemy that they were leaving.

The Bloody Angle in May 1864.

Photo owned by Melvin Tingle of Newton County, Mississippi.

Sometimes photos or other artifacts from after the Civil War can give you clues about your Civil War ancestor’s military service.

Take, for example, the above photo of three Confederate veterans. On the right is Francis M. Poore. The other two men, from the left, are Thomas Scanlan and Thomas Shockley, Francis’ comrades in the 13th Mississippi Infantry.

Although taken maybe 50 years after the Civil War, it tells us something about the men during the war. For one thing, the men developed such a bond during the war that many years later they thought it important to have their picture taken together.

Such a photo might be dismissed as just three old war comrades gathering by chance for a photo at a veterans’ reunion, except that there is other post-war evidence that the three men became close during the war. Scanlan and Shockley were listed as witnesses on Francis’ application for a state pension for his Confederate service.

With these facts in hand, we can start asking other research questions such as:

• Did Scanlan or Shockley leave a diary, memoir or other written record of their service that might tell something about Francis?
• Did Scanlan or Schockley become prisoners of war with Francis?
• Did the three men know each other before the war started and perhaps serve in a militia unit together?
• Do the three men have any family members in common?

This is similar to researching related family lines to find more information about your own. Depending on your interest in your Civil War ancestor’s service, you could expand your research until you eventually encompassed every member of his military company.

Have you had any success in expanding your research in this way?

In my previous post I wrote about John Ford’s Horse Soldiers (1959), starring John Wayne, that depicts events that occurred in my Poore family’s homeland during the Civil War.

Interestingly enough, Horse Soldiers wasn’t the only movie, or even the first, made about Piney Woods Mississippi during the Civil War and that also prompted research into my Civil War ancestors.

Tap Roots (1948) stars Van Heflin and Susan Hayward with Boris Karloff, Julie London, Whitfield Connor, Ward Bond and Richard Long.

The film, adapted from the 1942 novel Tap Roots by James H. Street, is very loosely based on the true-life story of Newton Knight.

Before the war, Knight lived in the southwest corner of Jasper County, near the Jones County line. Though Knight is closely linked with events in Jones County, he lived in Jasper County.

A legend arose that, under Knight, Jones County had seceded from the Confederacy to form the Free State of Jones “complete with President, Vice-President, Cabinet and an army of several hundred men.” No such thing ever occurred.

Knight had no interest in the Confederate cause, but he had been drafted and served as a hospital orderly with the 7^th Mississippi. Knight deserted after Confederate officials took his mother’s horse. Soon afterward another deserter, Jaspar Collins, joined Knight. Collins left the rebels because he resented the law that kept planters who owned 20 or more slaves out of military service.

Knight and Collins recruited others and estimates of the number in their band range from about 125 to nearly 300. Regardless of their number, the guerrillas vowed “to form a home defense band for resistance to oppression, by assassination, raiding, destruction, and other means to aid the Union, and at the same time to save our families from famine.”

From the Devil’s Den Knight and his men fanned out through Jones and surrounding counties to sink ferryboats, burn bridges and bushwhack Confederates.

In an effort to wipe out the Knight Company, C.S. Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk sent Colonel Henry Maury to Jones County with a sharpshooter battalion, a unit of horse artillery and 200 cavalrymen. But they never captured Newt Knight, who survived the war and lived into the 1920s.

Historian Victoria Bynum has written extensively about Newt Knight in her book The Free State of Jones and her blog Renegade South.

Are there any movies that inspired you to do more research into your Civil War ancestors’ lives?

John Ford’s Horse Soldiers (1959), starring John Wayne, depicts events that occurred in my ancestors’ homeland in this month 150 years ago. The movie, although heavily fictionalized, got me to look more closely at the real events.

Grierson

Here are the facts. On the spring morning of April 17, 1863, Union horse soldiers set out on a daring raid down the length of Mississippi toward Newton County, where my Poore family ancestors lived. Union Colonel Benjamin Grierson, a music teacher turned soldier, led the long, mounted column of 1,700 officers and men southward out of La Grange, Tennessee.

The primary objective this stirring raid was to rip up the tracks of the Southern Railroad in and around Newton Station, about 7 miles northwest from the Poore farm.

Grierson’s main column reached Newton County on April 23. At about 6 a.m. the next day, the federals rode into Newton Station. The movie depicted Newton as quite a settled little town. In fact, it consisted of only a handful of structures newly built to take advantage of the railroad opened across Newton County in late 1860.

A railroad station in Mississippi is destroyed by Grierson’s raiders. (Frank and Marie Wood print collection), National Park Service.

The bluecoats burned two trains of freight cars loaded with food stores and ammunition, including artillery shells bound for Vicksburg. The federals touched off explosives to destroy the locomotives. The soldiers then burned the depot and a building in the town containing 500 muskets.

Grierson sent two detachments east and west along the railroad to destroy bridges, trestles and telegraph wires, cutting off contact with Vicksburg. The Yankees ripped up several miles of track, heated them over burning ties and twisted them around trees. The explosions and smoke from these destructive efforts no doubt could be heard and seen from the Poore farm.

Grierson spread word among the townspeople that he intended to head east toward the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. Instead, he set out southeast for Garlandsville, taking his column nearer to the Poore farm.

As the cavalry column moved, foraging parties visited local farms and seized food, fresh horses and other supplies.

“They took the farmers of the county greatly by surprise, and whatever property was exposed, they appropriated as far as they needed it,” wrote Newton County historian A. J. Brown. “They mostly took horses and mules and whatever they needed as supplies, feeding themselves and their horses very bountifully. They would take the best horses on a plantation and usually leave nearly as many as they took off, of stock that was completely broken down and unfit for their use.”

At Garlandsville, a few Mississippians, perhaps including Francis T. Poore or his son John, put up a short fight against the Union soldiers. Grierson had them rounded up, disarmed and gave them a stern lecture before ordering their release. The federal column then turned sharply westward eventually moving on to Union-held Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Writing later, Grierson recalled differently than historian Brown his army’s ability to live off the land. “Much of the country through which we passed was almost entirely destitute of forage and provisions,” he wrote. “It was but seldom that we obtained over one meal per day. Many of the inhabitants must undoubtedly suffer for want of the necessities of life, which have reached most fabulous prices.”

If we accept Grierson’s view as the correct one, then his raid through Newton County added to the misery of the Poore family and their neighbors by taking off their farm products and destroying an important rail link.

Interestingly enough, Horse Soldiers was not the only Hollywood movie about my Civil War ancestors’ rural Mississippi homeland. I’ll write about the other quite different movie in my next post.

Are there any movies that inspired you to do more research into your Civil War ancestors’ lives?

Grierson’s cavalrymen near the end of their 600-mile raid behind the Confederate lines. This photo was taken by a Confederate spy.

Reblogged from Mississippians in the Confederate Army:

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Having begun my career as an historian in the pre-internet era, it never ceases to amaze me how much information is now available through my trusty lap top computer. As more and more collections are put online, material that I might never have found is readily available - it truly is an amazing time we live in.

A good case in point are some photographs taken in Mississippi in 1865 that I found posted on the flickr account of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.

Read more… 781 more words

Confederate fortifications at Yorktown reinforced with bales of cotton. Library of Congress photo. LC-DIG-cwpb-01599 DLC.

The first Europeans began settling Virginia more than 250 years before the Civil War. It is not surprising then that both Confederate and Union troops camped, marched and fought over the same grounds where many of their ancestors had lived, fought their own battles and died.

In the early hours of April 9, 1862, Francis and his comrades in the 13th Mississippi Infantry Regiment headed toward one of the most famous battlefields in America. They marched down to a James River landing in Richmond and boarded the steamboat Curtis Peck. Under a drenching rain, the boat steamed down the Peninsula, landing around 4 p.m. at Kings Hill wharf. From here the rebels marched about 10 miles through mud in “some places half boot leg deep.”

Around 10 p.m. that night, “cold, wet and hungry” they reached the Confederate defenses near the old Revolutionary War battlefield at Yorktown. Francis was among the fewer than 13,000 Confederates who dug in along the bank of the Warwick River. The graycoats and butternuts were there to block Major General George B. McClellan’s 55,000 troops from getting any closer to Richmond.

Francis probably didn’t know it, but his great grandfather William Hearne fought on this same ground.

Hearne served as a soldier of the Revolutionary War. Born in 1746 in Somerset

Grand French Battery, Revolutionary War Yorktown. National Park Service photo.

County, Maryland, he died in Lowndes County, Alabama, on Sept. 21, 1832, six years before Francis was born.

During the Revolution, Hearne served in Gen. Kazimierz Pułaski’s legion, later absorbed into the legion of Gen. Charles Armand Tuffin, marquis de la Rouërie. The legion, also called the 1st Partisan Corps, took part in the assault on Redoubt 10 at Yorktown that led to the surrender of Lord Cornwallis.

Francis and his comrades were now trying to dissolve the very Union that their ancestors had fought so hard and sacrificed so much to create.

But Francis and his brothers and rebel comrades no doubt believed they were defending the constitutional principles they believed in and the legacy of the American Revolution.

Did your Civil War ancestors have Revolutionary War ancestors? What meaning can you draw from those links? Or did your Civil War ancestor family line arrive in the country after the Revolution? Did they see a different meaning in the fighting in the Civil War?

So how do you know if your ancestor was held as a prisoner?

Start with the soldier’s Compiled Service Record, which you can obtain from the National Archives or the archives in the state of the unit where he served.

Look at the example of Francis M. Poore’s service record. In it is a summary of engagements that shows he was captured at the Battle of Berryville, Va., on Sept. 3, 1864. Another sheet in the record shows that he was moved to Harper’s Ferry, W.V., and from there shipped to Camp Chase, Ohio. He arrived at Camp Chase on Sept. 11.

Records about Confederate prisoners of war are available on microfilm as National Archives Publication M598, Selected Records of the War Department Relating to Confederate Prisoners of War, 1861-1865. There are a few other prisoner records as well.

So what is in the records? You can find information arranged by prison on:

• Arrivals, transfers, exchanges.
• Prisoners who took the oath of allegiance to the United States or enlisted in the Union Army.
• Deaths.

The registers of prisoners include an alphabetical listing of POWs by name, rank, regiment, county or state, company, date and place of capture, whether sent for exchange and other remarks.

Take a look at Francis’ record from Camp Chase (at the bottom of this post) for an example of the information that can be found. In the fifth line from the bottom on the right-hand page, he is listed as prisoner number 570.

In the National Archives you can find the records of all of the prisons located in the North during the war, as well as many lesser-known POW camps set up in the South as the Union took control.

You can find a fuller discussion of these records on the National Archives blog.

There is no index to prisoner of war records. That tends to make searching them time consuming and tedious, but it can be very rewarding.

Do you have any success stories you can share from researching POW records? Any tips?

The above image is a photocopy John F. Poore’s pay voucher in 1864. Although the voucher is hard to read, it shows that the Confederate army paid John at rate of $11 a month. For a little over two months of service he collected $27.13.

Even two months back pay didn’t go very far for soldiers. Confederate inflation had pushed prices to very high levels.

In nearby Richmond John and his comrades would have had to pay $45 for a pound of coffee, $25 for a pound of butter and $1,250 for a barrel of flour. Soldiers might pool their funds and buy a few goods, but their money was quickly spent.

“Destruction of rebel property at Jackson, Mississippi, May 15″ from Harper’s Weekly, June 20, 1863. Image from the Civil War website.

Tracing your Confederate ancestor can be very frustrating at times. At least when I tried to trace the service of my great grandfather William B. Poore I got frustrated a number of times.

The official records are blank regarding William’s part in the war. No compiled service record exists for him.

This lack of records is not unusual. One reason is that the South ran short of paper on which to keep records. Also, near the end of the war, fires destroyed many Confederate records in Richmond, Virginia, and Jackson, Mississippi.

When you run into such a documentary void it sometimes pays to check resources that you had previously ruled out.

One such unlikely source for Confederate research, for example, is the 1890 special census of Union Army veterans and widows. As the name would suggest, this census was for Union men and not Confederates. Nevertheless, some census takers listed Confederates as well.

Nearly all of the schedules for the states of Alabama through Kansas and about half of those for Kentucky were destroyed. So what is left is Louisiana through Wyoming, Oklahoma and Indian Territory.

Information recorded includes name, rank, company, regiment or vessel, date of enlistment, date of discharge, and length of service. The form also contains the post office address, any disability incurred in the service and remarks.

Fortunately, there was an index for Mississippi where my great grandfather lived: 1890 Mississippi Census Index of Civil War Veterans or Their Widows, compiled by Bryan Lee Dilts and published in 1996 by the American Genealogical Lending Library. Unfortunately, my great grandfather was not listed.

Works Progress Administration materials from the Great Depression were another unlikely source. They were unlikely for my William B. Poore because he had been dead for 20 years by the time of the Great Depression.

In Source Material for Mississippi History, Preliminary Manuscript, Jasper County, I found a “List of Confederate Veterans of Jasper County.” This time, I not only found William but also his brother John. This source helped confirm their Confederate service and put me on track to find additional resources.

Do you have some examples of sources that you at first passed by and later found useful in your research?