To All the Unknowns!
Virginia Tech history professor and War Between the States historian, the late James Robertson introduces us to a forever unknown Confederate soldier.:
I, like a lot of others, have ancestors in those ‘UNKNOWN’ graves. - DD
From the Virginia Flaggers:
People who say that nothing else needs to be published on the Civil War are woefully uninformed. Over 31 million Americans were involved in that conflict. Each had a story to tell. What most of them saw, and experienced, changed their lives just as permanently and just as dramatically as it changed the nation into an indivisible united stated. And knowing what each person endured has value because the individual stories illustrate how dear our heritage should be to all of us.
One such participant in the Civil War will forever be unknown. He was a Confederate soldier. In all likelihood, he hailed from Virginia. If the man fit the usual pattern, he was a farmer, in his early twenties, single, and devoutly Protestant. He had gone to war because his state (which was then his country) had been invaded by a Northern army that seemed determined to overturn illegally a Southern way of life in existence since colonial days.
The soldier probably had fought in a number of battles. His simple life had been shattered by the brutality of man, the sight of combat, the screams of the wounded, and the stench of death. He lived in filth, suffered from hunger, wore rags and the shoes of a dead soldier. He feared sickness more than the enemy, for diarrhea, typhoid fever, measles, and pneumonia were the biggest killers of all.
For three years this Johnny Reb survived everything that man and nature could hurl at him. Asked how he had managed to outlast adversity, the man likely would have answered that the protective hand of God had kept him safe. Religion was more a personal matter than a…