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Rereading the High Private: Restoring Class and Race to Co. Aytch

Rereading the High Private: Restoring Class and Race to Co. Aytch patric k a. lewis Rereading the High Private Restoring Class and Race to Co. Aytch Confederate memoirist Sam Watkins wrote from the perspective of the “high pri- vate,” and has been the voice of the common soldier in the Army of Tennessee for scholars, public historians, and viewers of Ken Burns’s documentary series. Yet this essay delves into the immense wealth and wartime slave-owning of Watkins him- self and his famous Co. H, First Tennessee Infantry. Watkins’s own camp slave, Sanker, makes no appearance in his memoir. Once seen, however, Sanker provides a lens through which to see the intentional manipulation of Civil War memory by an important author in the Lost Cause canon. In 1882, Tennessee Confederate veteran Samuel Rush Watkins published Co. Aytch: Maury Grays: Or, A Side Show of the Big Show, the title a play on an exaggerated drawled pronunciation of his military unit, Maury County’s Company H, First Tennessee Infantry Regiment. Watkins’s memoir was a hymn to the gritty, relatable enlisted soldier, valorizing his mundane struggles for survival in a war that seemed too big to comprehend and over whose outcome he had little control. Watkins has been remembered for his wit, dry humor, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Journal of the Civil War Era University of North Carolina Press

Rereading the High Private: Restoring Class and Race to Co. Aytch

The Journal of the Civil War Era , Volume 12 (2) – May 19, 2022
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright @ The University of North Carolina Press
ISSN
2159-9807

Abstract

patric k a. lewis Rereading the High Private Restoring Class and Race to Co. Aytch Confederate memoirist Sam Watkins wrote from the perspective of the “high pri- vate,” and has been the voice of the common soldier in the Army of Tennessee for scholars, public historians, and viewers of Ken Burns’s documentary series. Yet this essay delves into the immense wealth and wartime slave-owning of Watkins him- self and his famous Co. H, First Tennessee Infantry. Watkins’s own camp slave, Sanker, makes no appearance in his memoir. Once seen, however, Sanker provides a lens through which to see the intentional manipulation of Civil War memory by an important author in the Lost Cause canon. In 1882, Tennessee Confederate veteran Samuel Rush Watkins published Co. Aytch: Maury Grays: Or, A Side Show of the Big Show, the title a play on an exaggerated drawled pronunciation of his military unit, Maury County’s Company H, First Tennessee Infantry Regiment. Watkins’s memoir was a hymn to the gritty, relatable enlisted soldier, valorizing his mundane struggles for survival in a war that seemed too big to comprehend and over whose outcome he had little control. Watkins has been remembered for his wit, dry humor,

Journal

The Journal of the Civil War Era – University of North Carolina Press

Published: May 19, 2022

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