Recollections of Thomas D. Duncan, a Confederate Soldier

by Thomas D. Duncan

I enlisted in the Confederate army, at a very tender age, in April, 1861. My first enrollment was in an infantry company known as the “Corinth Rifles,” then being formed and drilled at Corinth, Miss., under the leadership of Judge W. H. Kilpatrick, a worthy and cultured gentleman and a scion of a distinguished Southern family. He was elected captain of the company. The organization was among the first of the Mississippi soldiery and one of the best that enlisted in the cause of the South. But, on account of my youth and rather fragile body, my father objected to my going out with the infantry, and urged me to secure a transfer to a cavalry company that had been organized at Corinth under the guidance of another good Mississippian, the noble-hearted and gallant gentleman, William M. Inge, my older brother being first lieutenant in the company.

My father gave me a good horse, and I was transferred accordingly. Naturally, the first call that came for troops was for infantry and artillery; and the “Corinth Rifles” went to Pensacola, Fla. This was trying indeed to the pride and metal of the young patriots left behind—to see our kin and friends leave for the war. This inner pressure became so strong that a large number of the membership of our cavalry company left our ranks and went with the infantry to Pensacola.

I would have gone, but as I was under the lawful age for enlistment and still subject to parental rule, my father objected; and as the patriotic spirit in me was welling up so strong as to throw out a defy, my father told me that if I did not obey him I should not go to war at all. Such things were different in those days from what they are to-day. The average boy, however high-spirited, was careful to heed a father’s command. Nevertheless, in his kindly solicitude, fearing that I might be persuaded by my comrades to run away, my father earnestly counseled me to remain with the cavalry company, with the understanding that he would offer no objection to my entering the service on account of my age. This settled my obedience to his will, and I was glad to be permitted to be a cavalry soldier.

None knew, except those who lived during those stirring times, the atmosphere of excitement that pervaded this Southern country. Our captain had telegraphed to every possible point to have our company ordered into active service; but no call came, and after the opening gun on Fort Sumter, nothing could longer restrain him, and he left us and went as adjutant, with a Mississippi infantry regiment, to Virginia. This loss came near to disrupting our company, and the ranks were depleted to twenty troopers. It was discouraging indeed to those who remained.

Here I wish to tell you what was then going on in Corinth and what contributed to holding the nucleus of our company together.

A unit of the first army of Virginia was assembling and organizing at this place, embracing the flower and chivalry of the South—men of culture, wealth, and position mingling with the honest and fearless yeomanry of hills and mountains and valleys; and in most cases it was the first time they had ever spent a night or satisfied a hunger beyond the parental roof or a comfortable home. Indeed, the number in that vast host of the first volunteers who had ever failed to lie down to slumber on an old-fashioned feather bed was small. Few were those who had not known the luxury of the carpeted room or satisfied their appetites from any source except that bountifully laden table so conspicuous in the old Southern home.

It will be remembered by Corinthians of that period who still live that Corinth was dealt a severe and hurtful blow by the soldiers who composed that army. They pronounced it the most unhealthful place on the Western Hemisphere. Evidently they thought it the supreme upas of human ills, overlooking the fact that all was due to the conditions of their camps rather than to any natural causes from water or climate.

From close observation of those camps I was led to believe that under the same conditions the result would have been the same had our men been encamped around the peaks of Ben Vair or on the slopes of the Rockies.

I saw those young, white-handed men, who had never been exposed to a hardship, attempting to cook bread and meat in a frying pan that scorched the outside and left the inside raw. Eating such food and drinking water from surface wells only a few feet deep, into which every rain washed the refuse of the camps, were not diarrhœa, typhus, and many other diseases, very natural consequences?

Thus did insanitation and infection become more deadly enemies than the armed foe, reaping an inglorious harvest of loathsome death among those gallant and fearless boys of the South who had sought to stake their lives beneath a fluttering battle flag.