Confederate Soldiers

This article focuses on the chronological sequence of events which affected the people of Gum Neck, a remote fishing village on the Alligator River, Tyrrell County, NC, just south of the Albemarle Sound. This is the first detailed account of the upheaval experienced by the people, especially those who fought, on both side, but also those who were enslaved. The numerous tables name and document the plantation owners, the freed slaves, those who fought for the Confederacy, and those who fought for the Union. It documents specific people who experienced salt and food shortages.  Published by the Tyrrell County Genealogical and Historical Society, Columbia, North Carolina

This article provides details on the recovery of five rare and important military buttons by metal detectorists in Limestone County, Alabama. The author is currently working on a collaborative report on Civil War sites with the collecting community in his region, in hopes that other collectors and historians can follow suit and leave a record of this hobby and its rewards for the next generation.

California once housed over a dozen monuments, memorials, and place-names honoring the Confederacy, far more than any other state beyond the South. The list included schools and trees named for Robert E. Lee, mountaintops and highways for Jefferson Davis, and large memorials to Confederate soldiers in Hollywood and Orange County. Many of the monuments have been removed or renamed in the recent national reckoning with Confederate iconography. But for much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, they stood as totems to the "Lost Cause" in the American West. Despite a vast literature on the origins, evolution, and enduring influence of the Lost Cause myth, little is known about how this ideology impacted the political culture and physical space of the American West. This article explores the commemorative landscape of California to explain why a free state, far beyond the major military theaters of the Civil War, gave rise to such a vibrant Confederate culture in the twentieth century. California chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) carried out much of this commemorative work. They emerged in California shortly after the organization's founding in Tennessee in 1894 and, over the course of a century, emblazoned the Western map with salutes to a slaveholding rebellion. In the process, the UDC and other Confederate organizations triggered a continental struggle over Civil War memory that continues to this day.

Biography of Francis "Frank" Watkins Carter (1842-1923), a San Diego pioneer, rancher, miner, inventor and Confederate soldier during the Civil War. He traveled to Venezuela via the Amazon River and the Colombian Andes to secure a land grant for ex-Confederate soldiers desiring to leave the USA after the Cival War. His life story starts in Franklin, TN, moves through Texas, northern South America and ends in San Diego, CA.

Frontier life required grit and daily struggle on the land. Fiery sermons took a congregation by storm, and the preacher’s passionate truth moved every heart.  The Texas-style spirit of delivery was fueled by fierce animation and matching gesticulation, along with vigorous impassioned pleas. Pioneer preachers fought against tangible hostile forces, spiritual forces, their own thoughts and human opinion. This daily groundwork served to ease the shift from domestic life to becoming chaplains and soldiers for the Confederate Army, and to face the potential hardships of a bloody Civil War. They merely transitioned from fighting to win a wilderness and souls to fighting a military war. The language of the scriptures, hymns, and sermons all contributed to a mindset equipped for battle, whether supernatural or natural.

In the wake of the shooting of nine parishioners of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in June 2015, there have been calls to remove or reconsider monuments to the Confederacy in the United States. In addition, monuments have been targeted with graffiti linked to the “Black Lives Matter” movement. In order to decide how to deal with these phenomena, communities must understand the link between Confederate symbols, America’s racial past, and the current epidemic of police violence against black Americans.

This essay will explore the history of Confederate monuments from the Civil War to the present, including the relationship between Confederate symbols and the most violent aspects of the struggle for civil rights for all Americans. The discussion will then turn toward Reidsville, North Carolina, where a freak traffic accident in 2011 toppled the local Confederate soldier monument and forced citizens to confront their relationship with Civil War history. In exploring the history of Confederate symbols and the ways in which one town reckoned with them in recent years, this essay will provide necessary guidance for individuals and communities grappling with the legacy of Confederate memory in the age of “Black Lives Matter.”