Editor’s note: part of a series on Civil War notables.
Sam Watkins was a young Confederate private from Tennessee whose vivid memoir of serving in the 1st Tennessee Regiment gives one of the best firsthand accounts of what it was like to fight at Chickamauga and other Civil War battles.
He was born into a wealthy family in 1839 in Maury County, Tennessee, near Columbia. His father, Frederick Watkins, owned a large plantation and more than 100 enslaved people.
Swept away by the patriotic fervor and thirst for adventure taking hold of a generation of young men, Watkins and many childhood friends enlisted in the Confederate Army, joining Company H of the 1st Tennessee Infantry. They marched off to war, little knowing of the four years of horror ahead, and saw action in almost every major Western Theater battle, including Shiloh, Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, Atlanta, Franklin and Nashville. Out of the 120 young men who formed Company H in the spring of 1861, seven lived to see the end of the war.
Afterwards, he wrote his memoir, “Co. Aytch: Or, a Side Show of the Big Show,” famous for its brutally honest portrayal of common soldiers’ experiences rather than grand strategy or politics. (“Aytch” was spelled to match the Southern pronunciation of “H.”)