"Alabama, We Will Fight for Thee": The Initial Motivations of Later-enlisting Confederates

“Alabama, We Will Fight for Thee”: The Initial Motivations of Later-enlisting Confederates LET US BEGIN IN TUSCALOOSA. Harden P. Cochrane was just seventeen years old when the Civil War began in 1861. He spent the first year of the war safely at home as a student at the University of Alabama. In March 1862, however, he and several other members of the University Cadet Corps marched away to train recruits for the Confederate army. His assignment was to help drill Company E of the new Twenty-eighth Alabama Infantry. Just after the Battle of Shiloh, but only a few days before the regiment left its camp of instruction in Shelby Springs, Alabama, for Corinth, Mississippi, Cochrane witnessed a significant moment in the short life of the regiment. On the night of April 11, the new soldiers of the Twenty-eighth Alabama gathered outside a hotel window to serenade their regimental colonel. Shiloh had been fought in Tennessee days earlier, and the men were in high spirits, believing that a Confederate victory had occurred. But when they demanded a speech in return, their colonel abruptly refused, handing the duty instead to the regimental adjutant. The adjutant’s oratory fell flat, and the mood soured even more when the commander of a nearby regiment rose to warn the men that, contrary to the initial reports they had heard, the Confederates actually had been “slightly whipped” at Pittsburg Landing.1 K E N N E T H W. N O E Kenneth W. Noe is the Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn University. This essay is drawn from Native to the Soil: The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861 (Chapel Hill, N.C., forthcoming 2010). Earlier drafts were presented at the B. B. Comer Memorial Library, Sylacauga, and for the Auburn University Department of History Research Workshop. The author wishes to thank Cate Giustino, Abigail Swingen, and Shirley Spears for organizing those events as well as for the many useful suggestions that resulted. This presidential address was read at the annual meeting of the Alabama Historical Association in Tuscaloosa, April 23–25, 2009. 1 Harriet Fitts Ryan, ed., “The Letters of Harden Perkins Cochrane, 1862–1864 (Part 1),” Alabama Review 7 (October 1954): 281; Alabama Department of Archives and History, “Twenty-Eight Alabama Infantry Regiment,” http://www.archives.state.al.us/referenc/ alamilor/28thinf.html. T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 164 Such an acknowledgment of defeat, however qualified, proved unwelcome . Indeed, unsatisfied with such dour tidings, the new recruits raucously demanded that Company E’s Capt. H. A. M. Henderson speak. Despite an illness, the popular Methodist minister from Walker County delivered the stem-winding address the men clearly wanted and perhaps needed on the eve of their deployment to the front. He announced that he “had a different opinion from that of some who had expressed theirs before.” He had not despaired of victory, he assured his men, for “he did not believe we could be whipped, that he did not believe there was a man in the whole regiment so debased as would not fight, and, if needs be, die for his country.” When the southern states had seceded, he went on, all had agreed that “it would be exterminated before it would submit, and that he would rather see our rivulets crimson with blood and every spot in our fair South from Shiloh to the Gulf of Mexico a soldier’s sepulchre.” But that would not happen, he added. Indeed, echoing William Shakespeare’s Henry V on St. Crispin’s Day, Henderson promised that “when we had gained our independence each man who had participated in the obtaining of it would be respected and loved by their wives, children, friends, and neighbors, be respected by all that knew them and on the other hand those who were killed would live in the mind of those who knew them and their names would be handed down by tradition to posterity .” Overcome with emotion, Henderson’s company immediately broke into song, promising, “Oh, Alabama, we will fight for thee.”2 Harden Cochrane ultimately did not...