The Civil War memoir of Philip Daingerfield Stephenson, D.D. : private, Company K, 13th Arkansas Volunteer Infantry and loader, piece no. 4, 5th Company, Washington Artillery, Army of Tennessee, CSA
"Truth in history is sacred and these things must be said." So writes Philip Stephenson in this remarkable record of his four years of service in the Army of Tennessee. Written in 1865, when he was twenty, and revised and expanded thirty years later, Stephenson's diary relates his observations and reminiscences in painstaking detail. A private who quickly became a veteran infantryman and artilleryman, Stephenson saw the war in the west from Belmont to Peachtree Creek to Spanish Fort. He witnessed the death of General Leonidas Polk, shared a blanket with a sleeping General John C. Breckinridge, and watched a member of his battery gouge the eyes of a dead Yankee with a bayonet. Ably edited by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr., Stephenson's vibrant memoir indeed stands out, as he had hoped, "as though photographed in letters of fire." -- Back cover
Print Book, English, 1998
Louisiana paperback edition
Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1998