Simple Story of a Soldier: Life and Service in the 2d Mississippi Infantry (review)

Personal accounts by soldiers tend to constitute a large portion of the yearly crop of Civil War books. The book under review is a republication of articles Samuel W. Hankins wrote for the Confederate Veteran, a popular magazine devoted to the Southern soldier. Hankins assembled his articles for publication as a pamphlet in 1912. This book, with a new introduction by historian John F. Marszalek, reproduces that pamphlet.

Hankins joined the 2nd Mississippi at age sixteen early in the war. A dedicated soldier, he was wounded in the fighting around the railroad cut at Gettysburg on 1 July 1863, and fell into Union hands as a prisoner of war. Hankins spent several months in the prison pen at David's Island, near New York City, until he was exchanged. Because his foot wound failed to heal quickly enough, he apparently was discharged from the 2nd Mississippi and joined an unidentified cavalry company in his home state. His company mostly operated in backwater areas of the Union-occupied South, although it was temporarily attached to a regiment which fought dismounted at the battle of Ezra Church during the Atlanta campaign. He frankly characterizes his company as poorly trained, yet he rose to become a lieutenant in it and served until the end of the war in April 1865.

There are many topics well covered by Hankins in this all-too slim memoir. He provides interesting material on the initial training of his company in the 2nd Mississippi, has many useful comments on morale among his infantry comrades, and discusses his personal feelings upon first entering battle. Hankins describes the difficulty of marching in rainy weather and frankly relates the troubles associated with being sick in the hospital. Likewise, he spares no blows in describing his wound, how it was treated by his Union captors, and the living conditions in captivity.

Unfortunately, Hankins deals all too little with the battles and campaigns in which he participated. This is not a battle memoir, but a selective retelling of some aspects of a soldier's life. Hankins packs quite a lot into a book that amounts to only seventy-three pages, but he curiously refuses to identify the cavalry company he served in for about a year of his life.

Hankins was an unreconstructed Rebel. He argues that his cause was just, his leaders good and wise. The South lost only because of lack of resources. By ignoring a lot of things in the experience of the Confederate soldier that could have tempered those views of the past, such as the role of slavery in southern motivation to fight, he created a comforting (for himself) and an interesting (for the modern reader) narrative of his experience as a young soldier.