Our shopping cart is currently down. To place an order, please contact our distributor, UTP Distribution, directly at utpbooks@utpress.utoronto.ca.
Simple Story Of A Soldier
96 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Illus.
Paperback
Release Date:08 Sep 2004
ISBN:9780817351571
Simple Story Of A Soldier
Life And Service in the 2d Mississippi Infantry
By Samuel W. Hankins; Introduction by John F. Marszalek
University of Alabama Press, Fire Ant Books
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.
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.
The story is doubtless the most vivid record of a Confederate soldier’s life that has been or will be written. [Hankins] gives in detail the most ludicrous events vividly as if a mature, gifted writer had kept a diary at the time, and his truly ‘simple story’ will create sympathetic interest. It is so devoid of bitterness that a man who served on the ‘other side’ . . . would sympathize with him in the hardships and privations of prison life and deplore that the government he served did not, when it could, render more humane service to him.’
—ConfederateVeteran, 1912
John F. Marszalek is the retired William L. Giles Distinguished Professor at Mississippi State University and author of, among other works, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order and The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny, and Sex in Andrew Jackson’s White House.
