Chapter I: Foreword

This unpretentious work is not the product of a literary ambition. Though my story deals with events that will live forever in the records of our country, I have not sought to give it the wings of poetic fancy whereby it may fly into the libraries of the earth.

Within the happy family circle, from which my children are now gone, these oft-recounted recollections became a part of their education. I permitted them to turn the pages of my memory, as the leaves of a book, that they might learn the vanished glory of the old South--the loving loyalty and the sad travail of her people. And I trust that they learned also that our unfortunate Civil War--now, thank God, nearly sixty years behind us--was a clash of honest principles.

That there were wild-eyed agitators and extremists on both sides, and that each had its scalawags and low-flung ruffians, there can be no doubt (and some of these--alas!--still live); but the masses of the soldiers of both armies, who bore the brunt of battle and suffered the privations of those sorrowful years, were patriots; and he who speaks or writes to the contrary is an enemy to our reunited country and an element of weakness and danger in the strength of the nation.

My two beloved daughters have prevailed upon me to record my experiences of four years as a Confederate soldier, in the form of a brief printed memoir; and so, impelled by my regard for their wishes, I enter the work for them and for their descendants, without any thought of placing a literary commodity upon the counters of the country; and yet I must so write that, wherever this volume may chance to fall into the hands of a stranger, he may find in it that one essential to such a story as this is--_Truth_.

THOMAS D. DUNCAN.

DEDICATION

This brief reminiscent story is affectionately dedicated to my two grandsons, Shelby Curlee, Jr., and William Peyton Dobbins, Jr., in the hope that it may help to teach them two great truths--that the old South that was and is no more, and the gray armies that fought for its glory, its principles, and its institutions, are entitled to their devotion and respect forever; and that the nation by that strife once severed, now reunited and in peace, is inseparable and eternal--the guardian of the highest ideals of mankind, the pioneer of liberty and of world democracy.

THOMAS D. DUNCAN.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I The Tocsin of War 9

CHAPTER II Mobilization 21

CHAPTER III Henry and Donelson 24

CHAPTER IV Corinth Again the Center 32

CHAPTER V Strange Outcome of a False Alarm 39

CHAPTER VI Shiloh 45

CHAPTER VII Corinth After Shiloh 67

CHAPTER VIII Battle of Rienzi 79

CHAPTER IX Murfreesboro and Kentucky Campaign 83

CHAPTER X The Battle of Corinth 88

CHAPTER XI West Tennessee 104

CHAPTER XII Middle Tennessee 109

CHAPTER XIII Pursuit of the Streight Raiders 112

CHAPTER XIV Chickamauga 119

CHAPTER XV West Tennessee 121

CHAPTER XVI Gen. “Sooey” Smith 127

CHAPTER XVII Fort Pillow 132

CHAPTER XVIII A Personal Sorrow 136

CHAPTER XIX Battle of Brice’s Cross-Roads 139

CHAPTER XX Harrisburg and Tupelo, Miss. 152

CHAPTER XXI Raid Into Memphis 157

CHAPTER XXII Raid Into North Alabama and Middle Tennessee 162

CHAPTER XXIII Sulphur Trestle, Ala. 167

CHAPTER XXIV Fourth Invasion of West Tennessee 175

CHAPTER XXV The Beginning of Dark Days 179

CHAPTER XXVI The Last Flickering of the Great Flame 186

CHAPTER XXVII Reconstruction 199

CHAPTER XXVIII Americanism Triumphant 207