A Year of Reading the Civil War

For a few years before 2022, I’d been occasionally reading about the American Civil War. It’s something I grew up with; my grandparents were all born after it was over, but their parents lived through it. Tw sets of great grandparents lived through the Union occupation of New Orleans; one set lived in an unoccupied part of Louisiana; and one set survived the war as parts of Mississippi were ravaged by war (and often repeatedly).  

This last group was the Youngs. Three sons and a son-in-law all enlisted in the Confederate army. One, the youngest, was too young to enlist when the war began but somehow signed up as a messenger boy. He was the only one to survive, and he was my great-grandfather Samuel. Not long after the wat, his father died, and Samuel became the family patriarch at the ripe old age of 23 or 24. Samuel lived until 1920; my father was four years old when his grandfather died. 

To continue reading, please see my post day at Dancing Priest.

Photograph: Camp scene, Union soldiers guarding Confederate prisoners; National Archives.