Chattanooga: Times Printing Co., 1900. 8vo, 223pp, Original Green Cloth. Near Fine.
1 of 2000
Second edition. We find this edition to be scarcer than the first edition. The second edition was published in Chattanooga whereas the first was produced in Nashville. The pagination differs and the same plates were not used. This copy is the only copy of the second edition we have seen in original cloth rather than the standard wraps. Recently this book has earned acclaim through the PBS television documentary "The Civil War, wherein Watkins' memoirs are dramatized by an actor.
Watkins participated in a number of battles with the 1st Tennessee, including Shiloh, Corinth, Murfreesboro, Shelbyville, Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Resaca, Atlanta, and Franklin. Aside from the excellent battle content, this narrative contains a great deal of information about life in camp and on the march.
"His military movements led him over most of the Confederacy south of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi." - Coulter 466. Dornbusch II, 1002. CWB I, 174.
--
Told from the point of view of an ordinary foot soldier, this personal memoir has been hailed as one of the liveliest, wittiest, and most significant commentaries ever written on the Civil War.
Among the plethora of books about the Civil War, Company Aytch stands out for its uniquely personal view of the events as related by a most engaging writer—a man with Twain-like talents who served as a foot soldier for four long years in the Confederate army.
Samuel Rush Watkins was a private in the confederate Army, a twenty-one-year-old Southerner from Tennessee who knew about war but had never experienced it firsthand. With the immediacy of a dispatch from the front lines, here are Watkins' firsthand observations and recollections, from combat on the battlefields of Shiloh and Chickamauga to encounters with Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, from the tedium of grueling marches to the terror of fellow soldiers' deaths, from breaking bread with a Georgia family to confronting the enemy eye to eye.
By turns humorous and harrowing, fervent and philosophical, Company Aytch offers a rare and exhilarating glimpse of the Civil War through the eyes of a man who lived it—and lived to tell about it.
