A Mississippi Rebel in the Army of Northern Virginia

Book excerpt: David Eldred Holt was born in 1843, the eighth child of a wealthy plantation family in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. Eighteen years later, after his state seceded from the Union, he enlisted in Company K of the 16th Mississippi Regiment and was soon on his way to the northern Virginia theater, where he served throughout the Civil War. Late in his life, at a time when many former soldiers on both sides of the Civil War were reliving their memories of that event, Holt penned this memoir, recounting the idyllic life of an affluent southern boy before the war and the exhilarating, sometimes humorous, and frequently terrifying experiences of a common soldier during the war. Although Holt's antebellum observations are enlightening, he is at his best when describing his wartime experiences. Holt saw action in most of the major campaigns and battles of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, and his battle descriptions rank among the most graphic, dramatic, and poignant accounts written by any participant in the war. He was gifted with the ability to record the salient details of any situation, to penetrate the confusion of battle and see the human emotions behind the faces of anonymous combatants.