Confederates everywhere!

We've been watching Ken Burns' "The Civil War" PBS documentary lately. In doing family research, I discovered that I have at least 9 ancestors who fought in the Civil War, most, if not all, on the Confederate side. A couple were captains, most were privates. Some have a lot of documentation, some have very little, and one whose service I have not yet been able to document, it's pretty much just "family tradition" that he fought. And since he was from Missouri, he could've been on either side. Anyway, digging through all this information made me realize I didn't really know just tons about the details of the Civil War. So we've been renting the documentary from NetFlix (I will confess that I actually tracked down my own DVD set used on Amazon for just $20! It should be here any day. So, I liked it, I bought it -- I'm like that). It's an amazing documentary, very interesting. And because of it, and because I decided I liked one of the interviewees, Shelby Foote, a lot (he knew everything about the war, it seems, and I love his Mississippi accent!), I've also become the owner (via Christmas gift) of Mr. Foote's non-fiction 3-volume set about the Civil War (MASSIVE 3-volume set!), and I also got one of his fiction works, Shiloh, which is about the Battle of Shiloh as told from the perspective of six different participants. It's a very good, well-written book, I recommend it.

Anyway, back to the ancestors ... while I am deeply regretful that several of my ancestors had slaves, I still love these people, and I still find their lives interesting, especially the fact that they fought in this war. I may have written about this before in some form, but there are at least two of them who did not want the South to secede, once their state did they felt obligated to fight on their state's behalf. E. W. Smith was one of these, at the moment I can't remember who the other one was.

The whole thing is just so tragic. The South was doomed to lose from the beginning, since the North had almost all of the industry and the South was much more agrarian. This meant the North could make more munitions, weapons, etc., and in general had better access to uniforms and other comforts. So even though the South started off well and won a number of battles in the beginning (and throughout the war), they had no way of sustaining that advantage. And, honestly, the North could have won it fairly quickly if General McClellan hadn't been an idiot and waited so long to move his troops into Richmond -- he had several good chances in the first year or so.

So, anyway, I just think it's kinda cool that there are these records of my ancestors' service in the first place, and just having them there, present in one of this country's most historic events, knowing how it changed many of their lives ... for a historian like me, that's like finding gold! (Larger amounts of that "gold" would be appreciated -- like photos, letters home, etc -- but I'll take what I can get at this point!)

My ancestor Capt. John Milton McCreless (on my dad's mother's side) has quite a few records in the Civil War Confederate Service Records database (both at NARA -- the National Archives and Records Administration -- and at footnote.com), including requisitions for supplies. Here's one of those:
(You can click on the image to see it larger.)

And here's one of the Muster Roll records for John Wesley Reece (on my mother's mother's side):
(This isn't the original muster roll for his regiment, which would have all the men's names on it, but rather a record put together in the post-war years for him as an individual soldier. And I must say I like the way the Confederate records were done much better than the Union ones ...)

So you get an idea what these records are like. I know from these records that some of my ancestors died during the war (E. W. Smith and W. P. Dorn, for example), and that they died of disease rather than being killed in action. I know that some of my ancestors received furloughs for business purposes as well as for illness, and a couple of them (McCreless included) ended up as prisoners of war for a time. (None of my ancestors seem to have spent very long as POWs, which was a good thing given the photos I've seen of some of those poor men after they came out of the prisons.)
It's only a very small portrait of their Civil War service, not complete by far, but I'm happy to have that much! I really, really do wish I had photos of the ones who still remain faceless to me. Maybe someday I'll find a source that will have some. There are lots of Civil War photo sites, but none have so far had photos of any of my ancestors.