Southern Soldiers Shared Stories

Early issues of Confederate Veterans are filled with fascinating articles. For example, this story from a Southern soldier: “My first experience as a vidette (mounted sentinel) was near Mobile, Alabama, where I met a Federal vidette at midnight and swapped half a plug of tobacco for half a pint of green coffee. Our posts were only 30-40 yards of each other. We could talk and joke in a very low tone.”

But, “My coffee did me no good, for I was severely wounded the next day.”

Just before sundown while taking his beans to the cook to be parched and boiled “shots and shells were coming over as thick as hail. I was shot down and my coffee scattered in every direction.”

He lay where he fell until 11 than night before being toted off “to the amputating table to have the ball extracted.

“I was put on top of a steamboat and sent to Mobile. When we got there, the blood had run full ten feet to the gutter and had clotted in it for two feet. I was too weak to even bat my eyes much less move a single limb. Thank God, I am yet alive and able to work for my family and the Veteran.”

Another story tells of Capt. Charles Frazer, a soldier of the 5th Confederate and a prisoner on Johnson’s Island. His wife procured a pass from President Lincoln to visit her husband, but when the prisoners attempted an escape, her visits were curtailed.

“Then, Capt. Frazer was on a detail to cut the grass off the graves of the prisoners who had died, and his wife, having heard when he would serve, crossed to the Island and was watching him from a point as close as she (and her baby girl were) permitted to go.”

Recognizing her father from pictures, the baby girl began to crawl toward her father but was abruptly stopped by a bayonet planted between them by a guard.

“‘Take that child away,’ the guard said. Mrs. Frazer then answered, ‘I thought this was a war of men, not one against women and babies.’ The sarcasm had its effect, and the baby was not removed, though the barrier was still held between father and child.”

The widow of Charles J. Williams is credited with originating Memorial Day. She and her young daughter visited her husband’s grave every day. While she “sat abstractedly thinking of the loved and lost one, the little girl would pluck weeds from graves of unmarked soldiers near her father’s and cover them with flowers.

“After a short while, the dear little girl was summoned by the angels to join her father. The sorely bereaved mother then took charge of these unknown graves for the child’s sake, and as she cared for them, thought of the thousands of patriot graves throughout the South, far away from home and kindred, and in this way the plan was suggested to her of setting apart one day in each year that love might pay tribute to valor throughout the Southern States.”

A local Family History Center can order microfilms of the Confederate Veteran magazine. I predict that you will be caught up in the reading as I was.

, DataTimes MEMO: Donna Potter Phillips welcomes letters from readers. Write to her at The Spokesman-Review, Features Department, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210. For a response, please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Donna Potter Phillips The Spokesman-Review