I’m trying to learn what kind of experience my great-grandfather, Samuel Young, went through in the Civil War, and so I read a book which might, or might not, reflect that experience.
My great-grandfather, according to the story handed down in the family, enlisted in a Mississippi unit about 1863. I’ve found a record for an S.F. Young (right initials) in E Company, 2nd Mississippi Cavalry. The problem is that the company was formed in a county in northeastern Mississippi, near Tupelo. My grandfather was from Pike County in southwestern Mississippi, near the border with Louisiana. The 2nd Mississippi Cavalry became part of a corps under Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor, which surrendered in Alabama on May 4, 1865 (nearly a month after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox).
The family story put my great-grandfather farther east, with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia or Gen. Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee, which surrendered two weeks after Lee at Greensboro, North Carolina. The story says that Samuel, employed as a messenger boy because of his age (18 at the end of the war), had to make his way home to Mississippi mostly on foot. When he finally arrived home, some months after the end of the war, he found his family gone. They’d moved to eastern Texas to escape Federal control (in case you might wonder, they were small farmers who owned no slaves, at least according to census records). Samuel trekked across Louisiana to Texas, where he found them in the late fall of 1865.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
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