Co. Aytch, or a Side Show of the Big Show Read online

  CO. AYTCH, OR A SIDE SHOW OF THE BIG SHOW

  A NEW EDITION INTRODUCED AND ANNOTATED BY

  PHILIP LEIGH

  SAM WATKINS

  WESTHOLME

  Yardley

  This edition © 2013 Westholme Publishing

  Introduction and annotations © 2013 Philip Leigh

  Maps © Hal Jespersen, www.cwmaps.com

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Westholme Publishing, LLC

  904 Edgewood Road

  Yardley, Pennsylvania 19067

  Visit our Web site at www.westholmepublishing.com

  ISBN: 978-1-59416-559-7

  Also available in paperback.

  Produced in the United States of America.

  TO THE MEMORY OF MY DEAD COMRADES OF THE MAURY GRAYS AND THE FIRST TENNESSEE REGIMENT, WHO DIED IN DEFENSE OF SOUTHERN HOMES AND LIBERTIES: ALSO TO MY LIVING COMRADES, NEARLY ALL OF WHOM SHED THEIR BLOOD IN DEFENSE OF THE SAME CAUSE, THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR

  CONTENTS

  List of Maps

  Introduction

  Original Publisher's Notice

  Original Preface

  1. RETROSPECTIVE

  “We Are One and Undivided” • The Bloody Chasm • Eighteen Hundred and Sixty One • Camp Cheatham • On the Road • Staunton • Warm Springs • Cheat Mountain • Sewell Mountain • Romney • Standing Picket on the Potomac • Schwartz and Pfifer • The Court-Martial • “The Death Watch” • Virginia, Farewell

  2. SHILOH

  3. CORINTH

  Rowland Shot to Death • Killing a Yankee Sharpshooter • Colonel Feild • Captain Joe P. Lee • Corinth Forsaken

  4. TUPELO

  The Court-Martial at Tupelo • Raiding on Roastingears

  5. KENTUCKY

  We Go into Kentucky • The Battle of Perryville • The Retreat out of Kentucky • Knoxville • Ah, “Sneak” • I Jine the Cavalry

  6. MURFREESBORO

  Battle of Murfreesboro • Robbing a Dead Yankee

  7. SHELBYVILLE

  A Foot Race • Eating Mussels • “Poor” Berry Morgan • Wright Shot to Death with Musketry • Dave Sublett Promoted • Down Duck River in a Canoe • “Sheneral Owleydousky”

  8. CHATTANOOGA

  Back to Chattanooga • Am Visited by My Father • “Out a Larking” • Hanging Two Spies • Eating Rats • Swimming the Tennessee with Roastingears • Am Detailed to Go Foraging • Please Pass the Butter • We Evacuate Chattanooga • The Bull of the Woods • The Wing of the Angel of Death

  9. CHICKAMAUGA

  Battle of Chickamauga • After the Battle • A Night among the Dead

  10. MISSIONARY RIDGE

  Sergeant Tucker and General Wilder • Moccasin Point • Battle of Missionary Ridge • Good-Bye, Tom Webb • The Rear Guard • Chickamauga Station • The Battle of Cat Creek • Ringgold Gap

  11. DALTON

  General Joe Johnston • Commissaries • Dalton • Shooting a Deserter • Ten Men Killed at the Mourners' Bench • Dr. C. T. Quintard • Y's You Got My Hog? • Target Shooting • Uncle Zack and Aunt Daphne • Red Tape • I Get a Furlough

  12. HUNDRED DAYS BATTLE

  Rocky Face Ridge • “Falling Back” • Battle of Resacca • Adairsville—Octagon House • Kennesaw Line • Detailed to Go into Enemy's Lines • Death of General Leonidas Polk • General Lucius E. Polk Wounded • “Dead Angle” • Battle of New Hope Church • Battle of Dallas • Battle of Zion Church • Kingston • Cassville • On the Banks of the Chattahoochee • Removal of General Joe E. Johnston • General Hood Takes Command

  13. ATLANTA

  Hood Strikes • Killing a Yankee Scout • An Old Citizen • My Friends • An Army Without Cavalry • Battle of July 22nd, 1864 • The Attack • Am Promoted • 28th of July at Atlanta • I Visit Montgomery • The Hospital • The Capitol • Am Arrested • Those Girls • The Talisman • The Brave Captain • How I Get Back to Atlanta • Death of Tom Tuck's Rooster • Old Joe Brown's Pets • We Go After Stoneman • “Bellum Lethale” • Death of a Yankee Lieutenant • Atlanta Forsaken

  14. JONESBORO

  Battle of Jonesboro • The Death of Lieutenant John Whittaker • Then Comes the Farce • Palmetto • Jeff Davis Makes a Speech • Armistice in Name Only • A Scout • “What Is This Rebel Doing Here?” • “Look Out, Boys” • Am Captured

  15. ADVANCE INTO TENNESSEE

  General Hood Makes a Flank Movement • We Capture Dalton • A Man in the Well • Tuscumbia • En Route for Columbia

  16. BATTLES IN TENNESSEE

  Columbia • A Fiasco • Franklin • Nashville

  17. THE SURRENDER

  The Last Act of the Drama • Adieu

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  List of Maps

  1. Western Theater of Civil War: September 1861–April 1862

  2. Battle of Shiloh: Morning of First Day

  3. Battle of Shiloh: Afternoon of the First Day

  4. Battle of Shiloh: Second Day

  5. Bragg's Kentucky Invasion

  6. Battle of Perryville: 3:00 p.m.

  7. Battle of Perryville: 3:45 p.m.

  8. Battle of Stones River: 8:00 a.m.

  9. Battle of Stones River: 9:45 a.m.

  10. Battle of Stones River: End of Battle

  11. Chickamauga Campaign

  12. Chickamauga: Saturday Morning

  13. Chickamauga: Sunday Afternoon to Dusk

  14. Battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge

  15. Union Attack on Missionary Ridge

  16. The Atlanta Campaign

  17. Union Attack on Kennesaw Mountain

  18. Spring Hill Affair: Afternoon

  19. Spring Hill Affair: Evening

  20. Battle of Franklin: Approach

  21. Attack at Franklin

  22. Battle of Nashville

  23. Final Movements of Western Armies

  INTRODUCTION

  “Perhaps Mr. Watkins did not contribute enormously to our store of information about military strategy and campaigns, but he certainly left a record to show what the dryly humorous foot soldier thought about it all…. A better book there never was.”—Margaret Mitchell

  The chief aim of this edition of Co. Aytch is to add the context that Margaret Mitchell felt was missing from Sam Watkins's memoir. Specifically, the annotations, maps, and illustrations are intended to help readers visualize the events, people, and places Sam experienced in his four years as an ordinary Confederate soldier mostly in the western theater.

  In contrast, there is little to be added to the humor and pathos of Sam's writing, which at times rises to a standard resembling Mark Twain. Partly that's because Sam is telling a true story, and genuine adventures are often more compelling than fictional ones. As someone once cleverly put it, “It's not an adventure until something goes wrong.” If nothing else, Sam's memoir is a thorough documentation of how routinely war planning “goes wrong.” Presumably, as his dedication indicates, Co. Aytch also reflects Sam's determination to honor his comrades by helping posterity appreciate their experiences.

  Mark Twain first achieved fame seven months after Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” a story about a shrewd frontier gambler who tricks a California prospector. The miner owns a pet fro
g that has outjumped any frog in the county. While the miner is occupied catching a new frog for the gambler to wager against his champion, the gambler feeds the prospector's frog buckshot. When the miner returns, the speculator declares the freshly caught frog a suitable contender and places his wager. To the dismay of all—save one—the champion frog won't budge, and the cheater wins.

  Watkins tells of a similar, but true, incident several years earlier when his Confederate army was idled for seven weeks in Tupelo, Mississippi. To overcome boredom the soldiers would wager on most anything, including how fast lice would run off of a tin plate. One soldier was constantly winning until the others figured out he always heated his plate before a race.

  Yet Sam could also tell the poignant side of soldier life. On the evening after the battle of Chickamauga in northern Georgia, he experienced a heartrending sight. He was with a detail of soldiers looking for wounded when they were approached by a group of women with lanterns also searching for survivors:

  “[C]oming to a pile of our slain, we had turned over several…when one of the ladies screamed…ran to the pile…and raised [a] man's head, placed it in her lap and began kissing him…saying ‘Oh, they have killed my darling, darling, darling! Oh, mother, mother, what must I do?…My darling! Oh, they have killed him, they have killed him!’ I could witness the scene no longer. I turned and walked away.”

  Shakespeare writes of combat transforming soldiers into a “band of brothers” who become more motivated to fight for one another than any political cause. Similarly, during the hasty retreat from Missionary Ridge at the battle of Chattanooga in November 1863, Sam describes how four Rebels demonstrated brotherly affection for a comrade in a manner that would have been unthinkable under almost any other circumstances:

  [W]e saw poor Tom Webb lying…shot through the head, his blood and brains smearing his face and clothes, and he still alive…. We did not wish to leave the poor fellow in that condition and [four of us] got a litter and carried him…to Chickamauga Station…. The next morning Dr. J. E. Dixon…told us that it would be useless for us to carry him any further [because] it was utterly impossible for him ever to recover…. To leave him where he was we thought best. We…bent over him and pressed our lips to his—all four of us. We kissed him goodbye.

  Unlike Twain's, Watkins's literature would go almost unnoticed for over a century. After his memoir was serialized in the Columbia (TN) Herald in 1881–82, fifteen hundred copies were printed as books. Hardcover versions sold for $1.25 and paperbacks for $0.75.

  Between the author's death in 1901 and the Civil War Centennial in the early 1960s, Co. Aytch was seldom reprinted and always in small editions. In 1962, Collier Books opportunistically published it along with seven other out-of-copyright Civil War books, such as edited versions of the memoirs of Union Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. However, in Ric and Ken Burns's groundbreaking 1990 PBS documentary, The Civil War, Watkins's memoir was quoted frequently and as a result the book has become quite popular.

  Although from an ordinary background, Watkins had some formal education. His memoir includes a number of Latin phrases.1 There are also multiple references to Shakespeare and Greek mythology, as well as numerous biblical ones. But his spelling reflected the era when convention had not yet determined the way to write some words, and his paragraphs are often very long and unnecessarily run together; not uncommon at the time. I have seldom corrected his spelling, but have broken up long passages into smaller paragraphs for ease of reading.

  Sam Watkins was born in the summer of 1839, in Maury County, Tennessee, which is about forty-five miles south of Nashville. When he was twenty-two, he enlisted in a company of Confederate soldiers that adopted the name “Maury Grays.” They were officially designated Company H of the 1st Tennessee Regiment.

  Originally about one hundred men joined the company, but when it surrendered almost precisely four years later, only seven of the initial soldiers remained, including Watkins. During the war, Sam was wounded three times. He was also captured three times, but returned to his comrades by escaping instead of participating in a formal prisoner exchange or a parole violation. He fought in nearly all of the major battles of the principal Confederate army west of the Appalachians. Examples include Shiloh, Perryville, Murfreesboro (Stones River), Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, the 120-day Atlanta campaign, Franklin, and Nashville.

  Aside from fighting, Sam endured the constant hardships of marching and camping in an ill-provisioned army. Like most of his fellow soldiers, he was often barefoot and hungry. It was especially hard to stay warm in winter. Nonetheless, like Harold Keith's fictional Rifles for Watie,2 which draws upon thorough interviews with twenty-two aged Civil War veterans during the Great Depression, Sam's memoir provides convincing evidence that a soldier's “business was to starve to death, take guff from the officers, march all night, and be shot to pieces in the daytime without ever opening his mouth in protest.” Sam's death in 1901 at age sixty-two may have been premature as a lingering consequence of such deprivations.

  Although Watkins was unmarried when he marched off to war, he had a sweetheart named Jennie Mayes who was his age. When the two were teenagers, their families owned adjacent farms. Two of the most touching entries in Co. Aytch are a poem and letter from Jennie, which Sam read “500 times.” They married shortly after the war, and Sam clerked at his father-in-law's general store. Within a dozen years they had seven children, and Sam owned a general store in Columbia. Just before the end of the 1870s, their oldest child died of typhoid, which was thought to have originated from the household's source of potable spring water. Consequently, Sam moved the family to a farm outside of town in 1880, where he started work on the memoirs.

  Eventually he had eight children, and the older ones recalled observing him writing late at night and early mornings. They remembered he sometimes laughed and sometimes cried, depending on what he was writing. He continued to write thereafter, with stories appearing in magazines like Confederate Veteran and Southern Bivouac, in addition to articles in local newspapers. Jennie lived until 1920.

  Occasionally Sam refers to other companies in his regiment by their nicknames. Just as Company H was informally known as the Maury Grays, the other companies of the 1st Tennessee had unofficial monikers. Examples include the “Rock City Guards,” “Martin Guards,” and “Rutherford Rifles.”

  Since Watkins presumes readers are familiar with Confederate army organization, a brief description is warranted.

  The basic unit is a company, which at the beginning of the war was typically composed of one hundred soldiers. But with attrition over the years, particularly severe among the Confederates, that number would shrink. A captain normally commanded a company.

  A regiment is composed of ten companies, thereby equaling about a thousand troops. It is normally under the command of a colonel. Sam's regiment was the 1st Tennessee, which originally totaled eleven hundred soldiers. By the time of its final surrender, only 125 remained. Four to six regiments were aggregated to form a brigade, commanded by a brigadier general.

  The original leader of the 1st Tennessee was Colonel George Maney. After the battle of Shiloh in April 1862, he was promoted to brigadier general, and Colonel Hume Feild took command of the regiment, which became one component of Maney's Brigade. (Sam misspells Feild's name as Field. It is one of the few spelling corrections I make.) Owing to illness and other factors to be explained, Maney left the army after the fall of Atlanta in September 1864. Thereafter, Maney's Brigade was led by General John Carter until his mortal wounding in November 1864 at the battle of Franklin. Carter was succeeded by Hume Feild. As a result of attrition, the 1st Tennessee regiment was combined with the 27th Tennessee after the battle of Murfreesboro that straddled the 1862–63 new year.

  A division consisted of three to four brigades and typically was led by a major general. Maney's Brigade was assigned to various divisions depending on the battle. During the heart of the war, at ba
ttles such as Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, and the Atlanta campaign, it was a part of Major General Benjamin Cheatham's division. At Chattanooga it was briefly part of William “Hell Fighting Billie” Walker's division.

  Two to three divisions could be combined to form a corps, typically led by a lieutenant general. Leonidas Polk was one of Sam's corps commanders, but following Polk's death, Cheatham's division was a part of Lieutenant General William Hardee's corps until Hardee left the Army of Tennessee after the fall of Atlanta. An army, such as the Army of Tennessee, or the Army of Northern Virginia, comprises two or more corps and is led by a general, such as Robert E. Lee or Braxton Bragg. A similar structure was found in Union forces.

  At various times the 1st Tennessee belonged to different Confederate armies. Early in the war it was a part of the Army of the Northwest in the present state of West Virginia. On returning to the western theater to fight at Shiloh, it was incorporated into the Army of the Mississippi. After Bragg led that army on an invasion into Kentucky in summer 1862, he combined it with a smaller force from east Tennessee, thereby creating the Army of Tennessee. This last name is the one most commonly identified with the army Sam Watkins fought with. It battled Union armies for almost two years at Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Dalton, the Atlanta campaign, and at Franklin and Nashville.

  I am familiar with nobody worthy of greater respect for commitment to his “band of brothers” and the civilians who depended upon them than Sam Watkins. In Co. Aytch we have what is considered one of the finest military memoirs ever written. Both general readers and historians can enjoy Watkins's story, “a better book,” as Margaret Mitchell claimed, “there never was.”

  * * *

  1. The epigraph on the original title page of Co. Aytch—“Quaeque ipse miserima vidi, et quorum pars magna fui”—is from the Roman poet Virgil's Aeneid. It describes an episode where Aeneas is relating events of the Trojan War to an audience in Carthage. The translation is, “those terrible things I saw in which I played a great part.”