By JOHN MILTON HUBBARD Company E, 7th Tennessee Regiment Forrest’s Cavalry Corps, C. S. A. ST. LOUIS, MO.: NIXON-JONES PRINTING CO. 1911 Copyright 1909, By J. M. Hubbard.   To those Southern soldiers who, regardless of their sentiments as to the abstract right of secession, whether sleeping in known or unknown graves, hobbling through life on crutches, or trying to meet the demands of the best citizenship, went into the Confederate Army, at the behest of an overwhelming majority of the Southern

In writing this book the author has relied almost entirely on his own memory for such reminiscences, sketches and portraitures of character as are printed on its pages. He served the entire period of the Civil War in Company E, Seventh Tennessee Cavalry, which regiment was commanded successively by Colonels W. H. Jackson, J. G. Stocks and W. L. Duckworth, assisted by Lieutenant-Colonel W. F. Taylor and Major C. C. Clay. Few private soldiers saw more of the war, or had better opportunities for ob

On the first day of June, 1909, the first copies of this book were placed upon the market, and within the first thirty days my personal sales paid the entire cost of the edition, which was exhausted within a few months. Its success may be said to have been immediate, and for this I am greatly indebted to those who bought the book, read it, and gave me personally many a kindly expression of the pleasure they had derived from its perusal. Many of the expressions came from capable men and women, he

I am to write here of men with whom I was associated in a great war, and of things in which I was a participant. To do even and exact justice shall be my aim, and there shall be no motive other than to give truthful accounts of men and events as they came under my personal observation. When we mounted our horses at the Bills Corner, in Bolivar, Tennessee, and started for the war, there were one hundred and one of us. This company was composed largely of a jolly, rollicking set of young men from

The reader will remember that in closing the previous chapter I stated that Company E had been ordered to leave Missouri and take post at Columbus, Kentucky. The company was not then designated by letter, as it belonged to no regiment, but was known as the Hardeman Avengers. In company with our sturdy friends, the Haywood Rangers, afterwards Company D of the Seventh Tennessee Cavalry, we reached Columbus the first day of September, 1861, being about the first troops to occupy an advanced post am

When we had somewhat recovered from the fatigue and demoralization incident to the Armstrong raid, four companies of the Seventh Tennessee and four of the First Mississippi were ordered to march under Lieutenant Colonel F. A. Montgomery of the latter regiment in the direction of Hernando, Miss. Colonel Grierson with his Sixth Illinois Cavalry was making a scout from Memphis, and the eight companies were to watch his movements. I remember we passed down through Byhalia and Cockrum and across Cold

After the battle of Corinth the Confederate army under Van Dorn was entirely on the defensive. Grant and Sherman advanced from Memphis into Mississippi with the evident purpose of taking Vicksburg in the rear. The cavalry had frequent skirmishes with the Federal advance and no little excitement. There was an encounter with Sherman’s troops near Old Lamar in Marshall County, Miss. In relating this incident, I feel the need of a faculty that would enable me to tell three or four things at the same

When Van Dorn reached Ripley on his way south, Dr. Bob Mayes and I concluded that we would take a short respite from camp life and make an expedition of our own into Alabama. While maturing our plans we fully realized that we had to take the chances of being reported absent without leave. We reasoned that it was mid-winter and that neither army would make an offensive move for some time. Then everybody was in good humor because of our late success, and besides we knew that we were not serving un

When the snow began to fly, Company E was comfortably quartered in the vacant storehouses at Coldwater, thirty-one miles from Memphis. The men provided themselves with heavier clothing, some articles of which were brought through the lines from home, while others were secured through blockade runners, as those citizens were called who carried cotton to Memphis and brought out supplies on a Federal permit. The service was light, with no picket duty, for the winter was so cold and the roads so bad

In the beautiful month of May, and it is a lovely season away down in Mississippi, the Seventh Tennessee was moved around so much and camped at so many places, that it is difficult to remember which places came first. The service was not especially irksome and the weather was fine. A half dozen men of Company E were sent on a tour of observation up through Holly Springs and in the direction of Memphis, which I remember to have greatly enjoyed. The danger of the service was sufficiently great to

That the great victory at Brice’s Cross Roads had revived the spirits and brightened the hopes of Forrest’s men there could be no doubt. Flushed with victory, they believed that what had been done on the 10th of June could be done again. In a word, they concluded that Forrest now knew better how to defeat a superior force than ever before. Their confidence was so implicit that, even if conditions should not improve in other parts of the Confederacy, Forrest would continue to defeat superior forc

The rest of the month of July, 1864, was spent by the Confederates in the rich prairie country below Okolona. About Gunn’s church we found the fields full of green corn, some in the roasting ear and much of it in that state of maturity when it is best to make jaded horses thrifty. Watermelons were cheap and abundant. There was no talk of scant rations. The farmers had been raising corn and hogs for war times. These conditions wonderfully revived the spirits of the men. Cornbread now and no biscu

An entire reorganization of Forrest’s Cavalry Corps was effected just after the Memphis raid, by which a new brigade, composed exclusively of Tennesseeans, was formed for Colonel Rucker, who was absent on account of a wound received at Harrisburg. The regiments in this were the Seventh, Twelfth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Forrest’s old regiment, commanded respectively by Duckworth, Green, Neely, Stewart and Kelly. The other brigade of Chalmers’ division was that of McCulloch, composed of men from

We had not more than gotten the last three men with their horses and accoutrements across the Tennessee river, as related in the preceding chapter, than two gunboats and two transports came puffing along. It was easy to conjecture what would have happened to five men and three horses, if our little craft with its burden had been met in midstream by the gunboats. And yet we had been taking the risk of being sunk or captured all that day. We rode leisurely to Bolivar and the men dispersed to their

When I was a boy in Anson County, North Carolina, where I was born “with a full suit of hair” about the time “the stars fell,” I had two brothers living in Sumter County, Alabama, which was said to be six hundred miles away. That seemed to me then to be about as much as six thousand miles seem now. It was an inscrutable order of Providence that, after having lived in four other States, attended two colleges, become the father of a family, and served four years in a great civil war, I should lay

Fitted to the occasion and apt in expression, the reading of this address falls upon the ear like that of a classic, while it does not suffer by comparison with more pretentious compositions of its kind. Coming from an unlettered man at an eventful period, as did Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, or Chief Logan’s speech, though written in small compass, it leaves, like them, little else to be said. In sentiment, it is lofty and full of patriotic fire. In literary form, though somewhat rugged, like t

After a lapse of forty-six years, the author readily recalls to mind the names of most of the one hundred and eighty-nine men who were, first and last, enlisted in Company E, Seventh Tennessee Cavalry. As a token, either of friendship, begotten by association in the hardships of camp and march, or of gallantry on the field, these names are herewith preserved: Captains J. J. Neely, W. J. Tate, J. P. Statler, Lieutenants T. G. Patrick, W. W. McCarley, Leonidas Bills, J. Fiske Weaver, T. N. Crawfor