The Boys of Company K

By Eugene Scruggs

Company K, in the infantry regiment of the Holcombe Legion, was formed mostly by men from Upstate South Carolina. They were patriotic sons of their state and enlisted long before the draft by the Confederate Government. All the "boys" of Company K had strong independent streaks and thus, were well-suited for service in the unattached brigade com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Dec 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648952784

Eugene Scruggs

Eugene Scruggs is professor emeritus at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. Since retiring from teaching and administration, Scruggs has authored several books, among them The View from Brindley Mountain: A Memoir of the Rural South. That study depicts the life of a young lad who dreams of a wider world beyond the hard-scrabble farm where he is raised. The present work traces the slow and sometimes arduous path to that larger and diverse world he could scarcely imagine.

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Author’s Note

The following story is a work of fiction based on oral history, notes, and letters, and a meticulous search of the official records housed in the national library. None of the boys of Company K are products of imagination. They were all real-life combatants who fought for what they felt was duty and honor. The military engagements, the casualties, the paroles, and the furloughs are all based on reports and extant records. Imagination (or fiction) plays a role in the creation of dialog between individual members of the company.

A significant part of this historical novel can be found in a previous genealogical and biographical study titled Tramping with the Legion, which traces the lives of many of my ancestral families up to the twentieth century. The present story focuses only on the various exploits of the men and boys who formed Company K of the Holcombe Legion of South Carolina Volunteers.

These men felt strongly that they were engaged in a life-or-death struggle to defend families and homeland. To a man, none of these combatants ever owned slaves. They were farmers and artisans who owned little property and no wealth. The men of Company K were hardy stock who withstood almost unimaginable hardship, disease, and starvation. Those who survived endured traumatic stress for the remainder of their lives in an era when no one could understand their psychological pain. These men were far removed from the plantation owners who sent them to war to save the luxurious lifestyle they enjoyed at the expense of slavery. Wealthy landowners often hired substitutes to fight the war for them.

I do not glorify the boys of Company K, nor do I treat them as heroes. In any case, they did not see themselves in that way. It is easy to condemn their actions, yet they had lives that cannot be ignored. What they believed and felt must be recognized and what they sacrificed need to be known. We cannot sweep their exploits into the dustbin of history as though they never lived.

In this work, I attempt only to tell the real story of the wartime experiences of the boys of Company K. I do not seek to aggrandize or augment their actions. Since they share a bit of the code in my DNA, I cannot deny them.

A Few Words about the Dialect

I attempt to create a feeling for the dialect that would have been common in the non-com foot soldiers of the southern hill country. This is not an easy task. I did not want to create something that would be so faithful that it would be difficult to read. I believe the feel for the spoken word can be illustrated with just a few spelling changes.

I drop the /g/ off most present participles, so instead of running, I write runnin’.

Often an /a/ is used attached to a present participle, so one has an expression such as, He was a-talkin’.

I show that these speakers regularized strong verbs (what our English teachers called irregular verbs).

knowed rather than knew

drawed rather than drew

heered rather than heard

The third-person plural verb to be is often used in the singular form—they was in lieu of they were.

The boys of Company K use many mountain colloquialisms:

Chaw for chew

Get shed of for get rid of

Coal oil for kerosene

Faggedout for tired out

Fit as a fiddle for to be in good health

Goobers for peanuts

An extensive list of these colloquialisms can be found at the end of the final chapter.

Acknowledgments

During the recreation of this story about infantrymen in Company K of the Holcombe Legion, I received assistance from librarians and archivists North and South who freely offered their valuable time. Special attention came from two archivists at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC—Trevor K. Plante (Old Military and Civil Records Division) and Mary Beth Rephlo (Office of Records Services).

I am grateful for the kind assistance of the head genealogist at the Spartanburg County Public Libraries in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Ms. Susan Thoms. Additional help came from archivists at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History in Columbia, who graciously directed me to records relating to the early years of Spartanburg District.

Research on the infantry regiment of Holcombe Legion was made easier by the prior efforts of Charles D. Cox. His report titled Tracking the Holcombe Legion (self-printed in 1992) gave me a valuable head start and served as a frequent reference while tracing the regiment’s trampings across the South.

I spent three days in Elmira, New York, learning what I could about the Union prison camp for Confederate noncommissioned officers that was opened in that city in the summer of 1864. Nothing but a plaque remains of the prison camp. I discovered that the citizens of Elmire whom I met did not even know that there had been a prison camp in their town. However, the members of the staff at the history museum, the archivists at the Booth Library at the Chemung County Historical Society, and the staff in the Genealogy Department of the Steele Memorial Library all offered significant expertise and encouragement.

Helpful suggestions concerning the Union Military District and provost marshal’s records were passed along by the staff of the National Park Service at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. This information was valuable in recreating the final chapter of the book.

Probably few people know more about Confederate camp life and military tactics than those who spend weekends involved in reenactments. One reenactor, Jim Crocker, offered valuable advice and expertise. Jim is a member of the States Rights Gist Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (a camp that includes members from the Spartanburg and Union Counties of South Carolina, many of whom are descendants of infantrymen in Company K). I am especially indebted to manuscript readers—the late Dr. Roger Cole, Linguistic Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida He was particularly helpful with dialectology. Finally, I am indebted to Dr. DeWitt B. Stone Jr. Special assistant to the president, Lander University, Greenwood, South Carolina. Dr. Stone is editor of Wandering to Glory, a publication containing stories told by the men in General Nathan Evans’s Brigade, to which the Holcombe Legion was attached.

Background Notes

The bloody conflict that raged in America from 1861 to 1865 has been variously characterized over the years. The default term is C ivil War , but other frequent labels include War Between the States , War of the Rebellion , and War of Northern Aggression. Regardless of how that fratricidal struggle is characterized, the horrific conflict has held the fascination of readers, domestic and international, for a hundred and fifty years, continuing over a half century after the last participant has died.

No wars are fought more intensely and with more fervor than civil wars. Indeed, such conflicts are likely to be the most un-civil of wars. The bitterness that can surface during and after an internecine struggle are far greater than those arising from international conflicts. Civil conflicts do not just pit one section of a country or one social class against another. Such struggles often result in brothers siding against brothers, fathers against sons, and families against families.

The American Civil War was no different. Yankee Rebels and Southern Unionists complicate the picture. To add to the poignancy, the Civil War was the first war in human history to be recorded in vivid images for posterity. Much of the glory and gore on the fields of battle was documented by the newly invented art of photography.

The hideous carnage in battle was depicted in thousands of plates by Matthew Brady and his assistants and by many other freelance photographers. In addition, Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper hired a large contingent of artists to sketch many of the war’s ten thousand engagements and skirmishes. All this tended to sensationalize the ghastly conflict and bring it to life for the people back home. Even now, in the twenty-first century, numerous workshops, reenactments, documentaries, reprints of Confederate and Yankee memoirs, historical novels, and Hollywood movies continue to fuel a seemingly tireless infatuation with this defining moment in our national history.

This phenomenon reaches well beyond the borders of the fifty American states. Reenactments are common in England, Germany, Austria, Russian, Turkey, and Egypt. These countries are part of the Confederate States Allied Command-Europe. The Germans, Austrians, and Czechs have created a documentary film (in German!) about the CSA submarine, the H. L. Hunley. The British have printed the fourth volume of Confederate Graves in England, Scotland, and Wales. Furthermore, the world’s largest Gone with the Wind Museum is in Australia.

This midnineteenth-century conflict between states was fought using strategies and tactics of a half century earlier—the age of Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet the industrial revolution and the era of ever-expanding inventions brought numerous new technologies to the art of killing. The hi-tech weapons of 1861–65 far outstripped the theories of warfare taught at West Pointand made all previous wars seem rather quaint. More fearsome technologies were invented as the war progressed.

By late 1861, the old smooth-bore muskets—hardly accurate at a hundred yards—had, for the most part, been replaced by rifled barrels with the potential to be deadly at a range of a quarter mile. Nevertheless, the early engagements of the war pitted lines of infantry facing off against each other at close range just as had been done in all prior military conflicts.

Many weapons of mass and impersonal destruction—generally associated with the twentieth century—were already being used to some degree by 1863. Huge cannons launched shells more than two miles and spread fire and shrapnel over wide areas.

Other diabolical inventions were available by the final year or so of the war—land and sea mines, hand grenades, and primitive submarines equipped with attached torpedoes. To a limited degree, breech-loading rifles and multishot carbines made appearances. Fortunately, Dr. Gatlin’s hand-cranked rapid-fire machine gun saw little action.

Since the killing machines vastly surpassed battle tactics, our civil war remains the deadliest conflict in US history—over 600,000 men killed and many more left with permanent disabilities mental as well as physical. The conflict holds the dubious record of bringing death to the greatest number of infantrymen in the shortest amount of time—7,000 men in twenty minutes—during the Battle of Cold Harbor. In July of 1861, the Battle of First Manassas (Bull Run) was the earliest major engagement involving large numbers of infantry. However, it was the Battle of Shiloh (ironically, the place of peace) in the late winter of 1862 that set the tone for the subsequent killing fields—23,000 casualties (dead and wounded in both armies over a two-day period)—more than the number of dead and wounded in all previous US wars combined.

Later that same year (1862), the Battle of Second Manassas resulted in 25,000 overall casualties. A few weeks later, the Battle of Sharpsburg, Maryland (Antietam), brought death to 8,000 men on the field of battle by ten o’clock in the morning of the first day of the engagement! At the close of that battle, General Lee had lost one quarter of his force. But the rate of killing would become still worse. The real carnage began the third year of the struggle—spring and summer of 1863—with the Battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg as horrendous examples.

This ungodly war was a crossroads of our being, as historian Shelby Foote has so aptly written. Yet the path to that crossroads began seventy years earlier with the creation of the Federal Republic in 1788. Several Southern States most surely would not have ratified that particular Constitution if they had believed that in joining the Federal Union, they could not at some point remove themselves from it.

From the beginning, the North and South represented two diverse cultures. Many foreign visitors—the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville is just one example—were fascinated by the marked differences they observed. The fast-paced Northerner contrasted immediately with the more easygoing Southerner—even in speech patterns. A change-seeking, inventive North rode the waves of industrialization while the South was content with the deep-rooted traditions of staple agriculture.

In broad (and general) terms, Northern society was constructed on compromise and consensus while Southern society showed a much greater reliance on independence and individualism. In the political sphere, this meant that the North was comfortable with a strong central government while the South clung tightly to the privileges of States’ rights. Of course, the most glaring difference between the two regions was the existence of overt slavery in the South.

In 1860, as secession talk became more heated, the sturdy, independent-minded pioneer families in upstate South Carolina were forced to jump on the rebel wagon or be viewed as cowards or traitors. Those self-reliant men were not warmonger. However, South Carolina’s vociferous politicians eventually convinced them that their state and their families were threatened by the North.

Most felt that they could make no other choice but to fight for family, district, and the New Republic. Honor and shame were fundamental to the ethos of the South. Most Southerners were taught from birth that it was preferable to die with honor rather than to live in disgrace. Consequently, to refuse to fight by hiding in the hills to avoid conscription would be the grossest of cowardice. Such behavior would cast shame on a man’s wife, his children, and his extended family.

On the last Thursday in February 1861, the front page of the Carolina Spartan carried word of Jeff Davis’s inauguration in Montgomery, Alabama, as president of the Confederacy. Two weeks later, the newspaper gave details of the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln in Washington, DC. Every Thursday for the next several weeks, the Spartan carried news of Union threats to retain Fort Sumter despite South Carolina’s assertion that the fort belonged to the now independent Republic.

When Lincoln decided to resupply the fort, Confederate General Beauregard obtained approval to fire on the supply ship as it entered the harbor. The news of these first shots created great concern, especially among the women.

Parson Jud, who will narrate the story of Company K, was ultimately caught up in the conflict and spent nearly three and a half years away from his wife and children except for parole time and furloughs. Jud served in three separate regiments, was once elected lieutenant and later, in another company, elected sergeant. He saw combat in four states—South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Mississippi. He and the boys of his company were engaged in major action around Charleston, Malvern Hill, Rappahannock Station, Second Manassas, Kinston, Jackson (Mississippi), and finally in defense of Petersburg. He was wounded once and captured twice. His first capture ended with parole, his second cost him weeks in some of the most horrific prisons camps the North ever devised (Fort Monroe, Point Lookout, and Elmira). In this latter hellhole, Parson Jud was involved in one of the most spectacular escapes of the war and trekked through hostile territory and inclement weather for weeks seeking to regain his freedom.

When the fictionalized history of Private Inman, the Confederate soldier from Cold Mountain, North Carolina, was told in novel and film, I felt it was time to show readers that other Confederate soldiers often walked greater distances and under more severe conditions—not to escape further military service—as in the case of Inman—but to rejoin their units and renew what they sincerely believed was a struggle for survival.

I retraced as best I could the route that Jud took as he walked south through Pennsylvania and Maryland and crossed the Potomac River into Northern Virginia. After seeing the rugged terrain he traversed during an exceptionally cold autumn and winter season, I was more anxious than ever to reconstruct his story.

The military engagements in this narrative are presented as recorded in the official records and other archival documents. Details about Jud brothers and cousins and other boys of Company K are reconstructed using documents housed in the National Archives in Washington, DC, and in the South Carolina Archives and History Center in Columbia.

Naturally, the dialogue and the fleshing out of anecdotes passed down via recollections of family members are carefully crafted fiction. The major details of Jud’s walk to freedom—from Elmira to Harpers Ferry on the Potomac—are contained in a letter he personally wrote to Sergeant Berry Benson, a fellow escapee. This letter was composed in the 1870s and was printed in Benson’s autobiography. Subsequently, the letter has been reprinted several times in books and articles written about the great tunnel escape.

In preparation for the writing of this book, and in an effort to depict the war in a manner consistent with the way it was viewed by the participating foot soldiers, I read many memoirs and letters written by privates and noncommissioned officers in infantry regiments of both the Confederate and Union armies. I have not sought to glorify the actions of the boys of Company K nor any unit or leader of the Confederacy. The exceptional courage demonstrated on both sides of that conflict has been frequently and more than adequately chronicled by such writers and historians as Stephen Crane, Bruce Catton, Shelby Foote, and Bell Wiley, and more recently in film by Ken Burns.

The Southern soldier fought stubbornly and tenaciously on the field of battle, but once his cause was lost, with few exceptions, he did not continue the fray through revengeful acts or cowardly sabotage. He walked wearily home to devastation, poverty, and grieving kin, and he immediately began the long road toward rebuilding his life and his land. H. M. Calhoun describes this well in his preface to Twixt North and South when he writes: No fault can be found with the Confederate soldier after the war. He at once discarded the implements of combat for those of peace and began the battle for existence uncomplainingly with little on his side but an indomitable will.

The surviving members of Company K went back to what was left of their homes in Spartanburg District and tried against great odds to rebuild their lives. At first, they were not permitted to vote, but were required to pay taxes—which they often could not do. It was years before many of the veterans received a pension, regardless of their physical condition. Eventually veterans were forced to move their families west to seek a new beginning.

In Jud’s case, this new beginning took the form of a homestead in Northern Alabama in 1882. He, along with his younger children and his wife, Kate, traveled west in ox-drawn wagons. Jud built a log cabin, a barn, a mill for grinding grain and sawing lumber on one of the rapid creeks running through the homestead. Jud did little farming except for a patch of tobacco he grew for his own use. He prefers to work with his hands at crafts he learned before and during the war. Jud tanned leather, shod horses, sawed lumber, ground corn,