A Hard Trip: A History of the 15th Mississippi Infantry, CSA
This volume is a reprint of the 2003 hardcover edition. The 15th Mississippi served throughout the war, through some of the Western Theater’s hardest battles, from Shiloh to Bentonville. Ben Wynne follows the 15th through all these hard-fought campaigns and battles with the help of some great maps. However, the best part of the book is the regiment’s social history. From letters, diaries and memoirs, Wynne utilizes first-person accounts to place the 15th in the context of the times. He starts with these infantrymen’s reasons for going to war in the first place, the prelude to secession and the organization of the 15th Mississippi in five counties in the north-central region of the state. There were large numbers of slaves in all these counties, and the white populations of none favored emancipation. On the other hand, few of the young men (the average age was 23) were large slaveholders, most of them being farmers or farm laborers. Wynne keeps checking with the home front so the reader never loses sight of what happens to the folks back home during the war. The 15th Mississippi Infantry was typical of many regiments in the Confederacy. Throughout the war, they saw their numbers steadily plummeting due to death, disease and desertion. Wynne continues to track the “hard trip” of the 15th after the end of the war: veterans’ organizations, monuments and the embracing of the Lost Cause mythology universal to most Confederate veterans. This is a well-written unit history that greatly deserves a reprint. I recommend it highly to all those interested in regimental accounts, the Civil War in the West, or Mississippi Civil War history. Reviewer: Robert L. Durham Robert L. Durham is a computer specialist. A longtime Civil War buff, he is also interested in Old West history and has written articles and book reviews for Alamo Journal, True West, Journal of the Alamo Battlefield Association, and Alamo de Parras web site at www.flash.net/~alamo3
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Photographs, maps, notes, appendix, bibliography, index, 193 pp., reprint, 2010, Mercer University Press,