A Confederate Artilleryman at Shiloh

A CONFEDERATE ARTILLERYMAN AT SHILOH Barnes F. Lathrop The fall of Forts Henry and Donelson in February, 1862, imperiling as it did the whole Confederate military situation in the West, resulted in desperate attempts to gather forces for a new Confederate concentration. One of these efforts was an appeal by General P. G. T. Beauregard for 5,000 Louisiana troops to join him at Jackson, Tennessee .1 Among the outfits that took the field in answer to Beauregard's call was the 5th Company of the Washington Artillery of New Orleans. A proud organization, the Washington Artillery had early sent a battalion of four companies to Virginia, there to fight with distinction from Manassas to Appomattox.2 Shortly after the battalion departed, the 5th Company was raised, the privates again being drawn from the select young men of New Orleans and vicinity. Indicative of the tone of the company was one of its recruiting notices: "Gentlemen desirous ... of joining this command, to be enlisted for the term of the war, may malee application in writing with . . . references."3 The enlisted man of the 5th Company through whose eyes we are to look at Shdoh was Richard Lloyd Pugh (1837-1885). Youngest among five sons of a wealthy sugar planter of Assumption Parish, Dick had graduated from Centenary, a Methodist college in Jackson, LouisiBarnes F. Lathrop, professor of history at the University of Texas, is currently writing a book of which this article, in slightly different form, will comprise a chapter. 1 New Orleans Daily Crescent, Feb. 25, Mar. 3, 1862; American Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events, 1862 (new ed.; New York, 1868), pp. 552-553. 2 Two histories of the Washington Artillery exist. William Miller Owen, In Camp and Battle with the Washington Artillery of New Orleans (Boston, 1885), is the better, but the work of Napier Bartlett, issued in at least three forms, is the more interesting bibliographically. It is not restricted to the Washington Artillery. The edition used here is entitled A Soldier's Story of the War; Including the Marches and Battles of the Washington Artillery, and of other Louisiana Troops (New Orleans, 1874). According to Owen, most of the 5th Company's original papers were lost during Hood's Tennessee campaign. 3 Daily Crescent, Feb. 26, 1862. That drivers, unlike privates, were not expected to be gentlemen is obvious from the prevalence among them of fine immigrant names like Dooly, Kelly, and O'SuUivan. Owen, Washington Artillery, p. 405. 373 374BARNES F. LATHROP ana, and had later purchased Dixie Plantation in the upper part of Lafourche Parish. The location of his plantation had soon begun to shape the events of Dick's life. Across Bayou Lafourche and some three miles down was Leighton Plantation, formerly the property of Bishop Leónidas Polk,4 now belonging to the Williams family. To Mary Williams, a girl of eighteen or nineteen, Dick Pugh was married at Leighton in February, 1861. Among the invited guests, almost certainly, were Dick's neighbors, Braxton and Eliza (or Elise) Bragg, master and mistress of Greenwood or Bivouac Plantation and 110 slaves. By the time Dick Pugh started to war Bragg would be on the eve of appointment as chief of staff and corps commander under General Albert Sidney Johnston . Dick Pugh's closest companions in the 5th Company were his elder brother Robert, a bachelor, nominal lawyer, and sometime planter; his brother-in-law Willis P. Williams, recently a schoolboy, still only sixteen or seventeen years of age; and John Merryman Davidson, a New Orleans attorney who was Dick's cousin by maniage. Having voted to offer their services for ninety days, the members ofthe5th Company were mustered into the Confederate army on Thursday , March 6, 1862.5 The next Saturday Dick, Robert, Will, and John Davidson went with the company and a large assemblage to the First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans to listen to a farewell address by the Reverend Dr. Benjamin Morgan Palmer, one of the great pulpit orators of the South.6 In the afternoon the company, composed of six officers, thirty noncoms, six artificers, eighty-six privates, thirty-four drivers, and one bugler, and provided with...