Recollections of a Maryland Confederate Soldier and Staff Officer Under Johnston, Jackson and Lee

by McHenry Howard

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455 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2007

Reviews

[Nick Willner]

An honest and intimate account of the civil war from the perspective of a Confederate staff officer from Maryland. Mchenry Howard, grandson of a Maryland hero of the revolution John Eager Howard, left home in Baltimore to join the Confederacy. His recollections are very detailed and seem to be accurate. I find the most interest not in accounts of the battles he participated in but in excerpts such as this,
“I remember idly pulling a small pinkish white flower from the bank on the upper roadside and enjoying its fragrance and thinking that a botanist in peace time would find many new wild flowers in this wild country, But I know now that it was the common arbutus.”
The book is large part accounts of battles but its maybe 30% of this type of reflective personal thought and specific experience in the war that is so hard to glimpse from most civil war literature as it can only be gained first hand. Camp life, small anecdotes, practical jokes soldiers played on each other (and the opposing army, one account of the men in his regiment finding two wagon wheels and setting it up with an old dead tree trunk between them directed at a union picket line and miming as if they were prepared to fire on them just to watch their foe scramble to action as they had a good laugh) and things like this that make that time and the men who fought in the war seem more real.

[Shannon Pritchard]

The War as it really was

An honest look at the War, its causes, its leaders and its soldiers, with an emphasis on Maryland's part Excellent!