Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865

Carlton McCarthy enlisted in the Second Company of the Richmond Howitzers in October 1864, just after turning seventeen, and he set down the war as the ranks saw it rather than as headquarters reported it. Twelve chapters follow the ordinary Confederate soldier from his over-packed first outfit through the loss of romantic illusions, then on to marching, cooking, sleeping, joking, and fighting, before turning to the surrender, the walk home, and the way veterans afterward remembered one another around reunion campfires. William L. Sheppard, a lieutenant in the same battery, drew the illustrations. Published in Richmond in 1882, it became one of the most quoted accounts of Confederate camp life and one of the clearest early statements of the Lost Cause, which makes it worth reading as testimony and as evidence of how the South chose to remember.