<< Back

8/14/02

A Confederate soldier’s perservering spirit yields a good read

By Jeff Minick
Co. Aytch, A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War, by Sam Watkins. Touchstone Books, 1997. $8 — 240 pp.

In May 1861, Sam Watkins enlisted as a private in Company H, First Tennessee Regiment, to fight for the Confederacy. For the next four years, fight is exactly what Watkins did, battling Union forces from Shiloh to Nashville. Twenty years after he and a handful of surviving comrades surrendered to his Yankee enemies, Watkins wrote out his remarkable story, first as a newspaper serial and later in book form.

Co. Aytch, subtitled “A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War” by the present-day publishers but called “A Side Show Of The Big Show” by Watkins, is that book. Although it has been in circulation for many years — Margaret Mitchell long ago said of it “a better book there never was” — Co. Aytch is the sort of book that deserves readers from every new generation. It is a young person’s book, written by a man who has not forgotten what it was to be young, the story of a young soldier who never loses his sense of humor, descriptive talents, or powerful memory despite the horrors of battle.

Throughout his narrative, Sam Watkins tells the reader repeatedly that he is not writing to recount dates and maneuvers, that the reader may turn to a history book for such data, that what he wishes to record is what he knew —the life and trials of the common soldier. Although Watkins may have clarified certain points in his story by adding dates and place-names, certainly there can be few personal accounts of the Civil War that so vividly recreate the life of an infantryman at that time.

Let’s listen as Watkins describes heavy fighting around Marietta during the Atlanta campaign, when officers of his regiment


...threw rocks and beat them (the Yankees) in their faces with stick. The Yankees did the same. The rocks came in upon us like a perfect hail storm, and the Yankees seemed very obstinate, and in no hurry to get away from our front, and we had to keep up the firing and shooting them down in self-defense. When the Yankees fell back, and the firing ceased, I never saw so many broken down and exhausted men in my life. I was as sick as a horse, and as wet with blood and sweat as I could be, and many of our men were vomiting with excessive fatigue, over-exhaustion, and sunstroke; our tongues were parched and cracked for water, and our faces blackened with powder and smoke, and our dead and wounded were piled indiscriminately in the trenches. There was not a single man in the company who was not wounded, or had holes shot through his hat and clothing.


Watkins also shows us aspects of the war that don’t always make the high school history texts. He records the kindnesses shown to one another by Confederates and Yankees. He gives us the confusion of battle — at Missionary Ridge, for example, Watkins’s regiment was drawing rations and cooking food when the charging Yankees were less than a hundred yards away — and the many mistakes made by both private soldiers and by generals. He tells us of the everyday life of the soldiers, the hundreds of times they read the letters received in the field, their rough diet, the exhausting attacks and retreats. He tells us of the deaths of soldiers who for sport tried to catch the nearly spent cannon balls that rolled across the field, with the soldiers, some of whom lost limbs or died in this pursuit, failing to realize that the great weight and velocity of the balls still made them lethal weapons.

Watkins’ observational powers and eccentric writing style in Co. Aytch often add a biting humor to his account. Sometimes this humor seems unintentional. My favorite example of such zestful observations occurs whenever Watkins and his friends see a pretty girl; Watkins inevitably sizes her up as the “prettiest young girl” he had ever laid eyes on. Given that Watkins delayed his marriage for four years because of the war, perhaps such declarations in a love-starved soldier are less extraordinary than they might appear.

Nearly all of Watkins’ story is set in the western theater of the war, that half of the Confederacy where the soldiers were for the most part so ineptly led by their commanders. Watkins, who usually finds it difficult to demonize any individual, nonetheless does offer clear-eyed criticism when it is deserved. He says of Gen. Hood, for example, after describing his failures at Atlanta and then in Tennessee:


As a soldier he was brave, good, noble, and gallant, and fought with the ferociousness of the wounded tiger, and with the everlasting grit of the bulldog; but as a general he was a failure in ever particular.


Co. Aytch is most recently published by Touchstone Books. It is a book that is known to Civil War buffs, but which should be shared with the young and with all those who enjoy a good story.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville and can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)