Co. Aytch : A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War

Rating:
Summary: My favorite Civil War memoir!
Review: As the great author Bell Irvin Wiley put it, "No memoir by a Rebel participant is richer in detail than this engaging story..." There are plenty of Civil War memoirs available to us Civil War buffs today but those written by Confederate privates are few and far between. As another reviewer already stated, many memoirs that have survived are those by Union officers. This is simply the best Civil War memoir ever written in my opinion. It is brutally honest, tragic, & sometimes humorous, & is filled with rich details of the everyday life of the Confederate soldier: hard marches that never seemed to end, picket duty, the bloody battles he experienced as a private in the 1st Tenn. Regt. of the (Confederate) Army of Tennessee, etc. The combat descriptions are vivid & shocking: the desperate hand-to-hand combat in the trenches around Atlanta -"We were killing them by scores...", the bloodbath at Shiloh, the Confederate disaster at Nashville, etc. I'll never forget his descriptions of the "Dead Angle" at Kennasaw Mountain where Union regiment after regiment hurled themselves at the Confederate lines -"I am satisfied that on this memorable day, every man in our regiment killed from twenty to one hundred each". For anyone who wants to know what it was like to fight in the Civil War, this book is an absolute must-have!

Rating:
Summary: A treasure for every Civil War fan!
Review: I have read this book now the 5th time, and Im still fascinated by its honesty,wit and humor. First off, this book is, atleast to my best knowledge, one of the only books written by a private, rather than a 5 star generals. This is important because generals had a totally different view of the battle than privates. Privates had not the right to leave the army, generals did, and so on.

I loved the wit and humor of Watkins (author). In midst of all the horror the civil war had, he finds the time to reflect on things such as religion,morales etc. I guess this ability gave him the strenght to survive the war. Brilliantly written. I recommend this book to every person who is interested in history, simply because it is interesting to hear the words from a "commoner" rather than from a president, general.

Rating:
Summary: A RARE READ
Review: To find a first hand account of the Civil War written by a Southerner is rare and one writen by a private is even rarer. We have many accounts from officers (usually Union), but as many/most of the enlisted southern men were unable to read or write, this is a rare one indeed. The work is well done. I highly recommend you add this one to your collection. I do wish we had more like this one.

Rating:
Summary: War Stories by the Hearth
Review: Twenty years after participating in the war that reshaped American history forever, Sam Watkins sat down to write his memoirs, without benefit of journal or notes. He commenced his tale with a short, folksy parable of the cause of the war, as Southerners saw it. He then quickly launched into telling the tale as he viewed it - not from the heights of a general officer, but from the mud and dust covered ground-eye view of a common "webfoot" infantry soldier. In doing so, he created what is perhaps the best, most readable, and most compelling account of a Civil War infantry man that has ever seen print.
Watkins told his tale in an easy, conversational style. The book is not written as a single narrative, but as a collection of tales and memories, just as he might have told them to friends and family around his hearth. His antidotal style put side by side humorous tales and the horrors of war that he observed, showing how casual a thing gruesome death became to a soldier. He wrote with great feeling, telling the reader when recalling a particular incident left him overwhelmed with emotion still after twenty years, and constantly referencing his religious faith that he would someday see all of his fallen comrades again in a better world. He hid nothing of himself, and that candid emotion sets his book apart, and gives it its greatness.
This book is not a history, per say. Watkins constantly reminded his readers of this. It is a collection of impressions of what it was like to be one of the little men doing the shooting and killing - the men who history mostly overlooks. "Co Aytch" fills in the yawning gaps of how war is really fought and experienced that you will never find in any general's memoirs. This book is essential for a full understanding of the Civil War, and it is a pleasure and a joy to read. I highly recommend it.


Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Watkins' book is an unlikely masterpiece. As a literary memoir of war, it is at least the equal of such esteemed works as Sassoon's "Memoirs of an Infantry Officer" and Manchester's "Goodbye, Darkness." I cannot recommend it too highly.