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    Simple Story Of A Soldier: Life And Service in the 2d Mississippi Infantry
    Simple Story Of A Soldier: Life And Service in the 2d Mississippi Infantry
    Simple Story Of A Soldier: Life And Service in the 2d Mississippi Infantry
    Ebook84 pages1 hour

    Simple Story Of A Soldier: Life And Service in the 2d Mississippi Infantry

    By Samuel W. Hankins and John F. Marszalek

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    The camp, battle, and prison experiences of a common soldier

    This fast-paced memoir was written in 1905 by 61-year-old Samuel W. Hankins while he was living in the Soldiers Home in Gulfport, Mississippi. It vividly details his years as a Confederate rifleman from the spring of 1861, when at a mere sixteen years of age he volunteered for the 2d Mississippi Infantry, through the end of the war in 1865, when he was just twenty years old and maimed for life.
     
    The 2d Mississippi was part of the Army of Northern Virginia and as such saw action at Bull Run/Manassas, Seven Pines and the Peninsular Campaign, and Gettysburg. Besides being hospitalized with measles, suffering severely frostbitten feet, and being wounded by a minié ball at Railroad Cut, Hankins was captured by Federal forces and sent to a prisoner of war camp on David’s Island, New York. Later, he was transferred to a South Carolina hospital, returned home on furlough, joined a cavalry unit that fought at Atlanta. He was stationed in Selma, Alabama, when the war ended.
     
    The strength of Hankins’s text lies in his straightforward narrative style virtually free of Lost Cause sentiment. Both Union and Confederate veterans could relate to his stories because so many of them had faced similar challenges during the war. Full of valuable information on a common soldier’s experience, the memoir still conjures the sights, sounds, and smells of warfare.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Alabama Press
    Release dateJul 31, 2015
    ISBN9780817389833
    Simple Story Of A Soldier: Life And Service in the 2d Mississippi Infantry

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      Book preview

      Simple Story Of A Soldier - Samuel W. Hankins

      Simple Story of a Soldier

      SAMUEL W. HANKINS

      With a new Introduction by John F. Marszalek

      THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

      Tuscaloosa

      Copyright © 2004

      The University of Alabama Press

      Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Typeface: Perpetua

      ∞

      The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Hankins, Samuel W.

          Simple story of a soldier : life and service in the 2nd Mississippi infantry / Samuel W. Hankins ; with a new introduction by John F. Marszalek.

                   p.  cm.

          Originally published: Nashville, Tenn. : Confederate Veteran, 1912.

          Includes index.

          ISBN 0-8173-5157-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

        1. Hankins, Samuel W. 2. Confederate States of America. Army. Mississippi Infantry Regiment, 2nd. 3. Soldiers—Mississippi—Biography. 4. Mississippi—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives. 5. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives, Confederate. 6. Mississippi—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Regimental histories. 7. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Regimental histories. 8. Soldiers—Confederate States of America—Social conditions. 9. Confederate States of America. Army—Military life. I. Marszalek, John F., 1939– II. Title.

          E568.52nd .H36 2004

          973.7′62′092—dc22

      2004006299

      ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8983-3 (electronic)

      CONTENTS

      Preface

      Introduction

      Explanatory

      Simple Story of a Soldier

      Index

      PREFACE

      To fulfill a promise of long standing made to the boys, I give my experiences as a private soldier boy in the War of the States from the early spring of 1861 to its close.

      I do not attempt to explain the causes of the war, as that theme engages the attention of the best historians; but I sincerely believe that no truer men ever espoused any cause. Suffice it to say that our leaders were well selected. As chief executive of our Confederacy Jefferson Davis stands the severest tests. Our generals were brave and true. Our women were good and ever faithful, and they have never been reconstructed. The cause of our failure was not in lack of efficient leaders, but of resources.

      My personal experiences, with such incidents as came under my own observation in camp, on the march, and in prison, are given to pay tribute to the merit of my comrades and people.

      SAMUEL HANKINS.

      MERIDIAN, MISS., January, 1912.

      INTRODUCTION

      John F. Marszalek

      At one time, Civil War history was primarily the tale of generals moving regiments, divisions, corps, and armies across battlefields, the conflict appearing as a giant game of chess. Although this is no longer the case, modern Civil War historians are still interested in the clash of armies, but now they investigate the impact of battles on society: the men, women, and children who did not carry a weapon yet were essential parts of the war. They are concerned with how the Civil War conflict impacted a town, county, or region and slaveholders and slaves. And what about the soldiers themselves—the nameless, faceless men who died from disease or were shot, maimed, and killed while implementing the orders of their superiors? In short, modern Civil War historians attempt to analyze all aspects of the conflict, thereby producing new insights.

      The study of the common soldier has been a particularly important aspect of this modern approach, referred to as a new military history. Soldiers’ lives and experiences in warfare are crucial to understanding how the tide of war waxed and waned, and why the Civil War lasted so long and became the type of war it was. Soldiers wrote letters home telling about their experiences as the bullets flew in combat or when they tried to find ways to fight boredom in between the battles. They kept diaries, some detailed, others only a few lines a day describing nothing more spectacular than the weather. They wrote to their home newspapers telling about their adventures. After the war, some of them wrote memoirs, recalling what their lives were like in those days when, as Union soldier and later Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it: In our youth, our hearts were touched with fire. The common soldiers’ experiences in Civil War units were the formative events in their lives. No matter how long they lived or what they did, their civilian activities could not match the excitement and horror of taking part in combat. This was one of the main reasons so many of them joined veteran organizations and, in that way, tried to maintain a tie to the most significant time in their lives.

      In 1905 sixty-year-old Samuel W. Hankins—while living in the Soldiers Home in Gulfport, Mississippi—put onto paper his remembrances of his role as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War. His Simple Story, as he called it, was serialized in the United Confederate Veteran’s magazine, Confederate Veteran, and also published as a 1912 pamphlet. What makes Hankins’s tale particularly poignant is the fact that he entered the Confederate army when he was only sixteen years old. When the war came to an end in 1865, he was barely twenty. He experienced combat as a teenager, significantly not the only such youngster in both armies. The Civil War, in general, was fought by men (and a few women) who were the age of today’s college students.

      Hankins was a native of Guntown, Itawamba County, in northeast Mississippi. When secession came in 1861 and the war followed, he joined a company of volunteers from his hometown. In nearby Corinth, his unit merged with nine others from Tishomingo, Tippah, Itawamba, and Pontotoc counties to form the Second Mississippi Infantry Regiment. This unit left by train for Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, where, nearly 800 strong, it joined the Eleventh Mississippi, the First Tennessee, and the Fourth Alabama to form a brigade under Barnard Bee. (Later, before dying at First Bull Run/Manassas, Bee would give Thomas Jackson his nickname Stonewall.) The Second Mississippi became part of the Army of Northern Virginia.

      Despite the shock of Bull Run/Manassas, Hankins said that the war began in earnest only in April 1862, when Union General George B. McClellan launched the Peninsular Campaign against Confederate troops under Joseph E. Johnston. Hankins unfortunately came down with measles and ended up in a Richmond hospital, actually a converted tobacco warehouse. He stayed there less than

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