A History of the 3rd South Carolina Regiment: Lee’s Reliables
Illustrated, maps, endnotes, regimental roster, bibliography, index, 479 pp, 2008. Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1907 Buena Vista Circle, Wilmington, NC 28411-7892, $40 plus shipping. One of the latest additions to Tom Broadfoot’s South Carolina regimental history series is also arguably the best: Mac Wyckoff’s history of the 3rd South Carolina Infantry, one of the regiments that made up the hard-fighting Kershaw Brigade in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The second edition of a book first published in 1995, A History of the 3rd South Carolina Regiment: Lee’s Reliables, is exhaustively researched, well-written and packed with action. Like other books in Broadfoot’s expanding series, Wyckoff’s history consists of two parts: a history of the regiment followed by a roster of the men who served in the regiment. The history part is particularly impressive, running to over 350 pages and reflecting more than 20 years of research by the author as well as his intimate knowledge of the battlefields where the regiment fought. The regiment earned a reputation as “Lee’s Reliables” for its fighting prowess, but paid a high price for the honor, suffering more than 1,000 casualties during the war, including over 260 killed in action. Wyckoff tells much of the regiment’s story through the letters and diaries of some of its leading soldiers. Readers come to know men like James Nance, the regiment’s colonel for much of the war, a prewar lawyer and life-long bachelor who fell at The Wilderness; William “Drate” Rutherford, a cousin of Nance and another prewar lawyer who served as lieutenant colonel of the regiment for most of the war and died fighting in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1864; and Cpl. Tally Simpson, who left college in 1861 to join the regiment, spent much of the war searching vainly for a girlfriend and was killed in action at Chickamauga. Nance and Rutherford were superb leaders and fighters. Their loss not only deprived Wyckoff of first-hand accounts during the last year or so of the war, but it also contributed to the fall- off in the regiment’s morale and fighting effectiveness late in the war. A battery of maps, photos of several of the men and endnotes helpfully placed at the conclusion of each chapter enhance the text of Wyckoff’s history section. The endnotes and extensive bibliography attest to Wyckoff’s thorough, almost relentless, research. Besides ferreting out numerous personal letters and diaries, Wyckoff combed through South Carolina newspapers of the Civil War era, mined archival sources both inside and outside South Carolina and communicated with descendants of men who served in the regiment. The upshot is the best researched Confederate regimental history this reviewer can recall. A roster of the nearly 1,400 men who served in the 3rd South Carolina Infantry follows Wyckoff’s history. The roster is alphabetically arranged and entries range from one line to more than a dozen. The author spent more than four years compiling the roster. Its informational content goes well beyond the soldiers’ compiled service records in the National Archives. Readers with the patience to pore over the roster will find that it adds to their understanding of the history of the regiment and its men. A retired National Park Service historian, Wyckoff writes well and he tells a compelling story. Regrettably, his book is potholed with numerous typographical and grammatical errors, a few of them annoying (like using the word “imitative” twice within a single sentence when Wyckoff meant “initiative”). Editorial warts and all, this reviewer strongly recommends Wyckoff’s book to readers with an interest in Confederate regimental histories. It sets a high standard. Reviewer C. Michael Harrington is a member of the Houston Civil War Round Table and Civil War Aficionados. He has written several articles on South Carolina Confederates. A practicing lawyer, he has degrees in economics from Yale and Cambridge and a law degree from Harvard.
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