Exploring Soldiers and the Military Experience:

In this exhibit, you will discover educator resources for the topic: Soldiers and the Military Experience during the Civil War. These resources include teacher lesson plans for fourth grade through high school students.

Click the links below to access lesson plans:

Fourth Grade Level

Middle School Level

High School Level

Additional Context for Soldiers and Military Experience:

(Written by Susannah J. Ural, Ph.D.)

The sample documents in this section help site users explore the wartime experiences of Mississippi soldiers and their families. They reveal men's frustrations with military discipline, hardships suffered by families with their men absent, and the gradual increase of dissent and desertion across the state.

New Recruits: Letters or petitions from new recruits reveal their resistance to strict military discipline, especially in the earliest days of the war. A great example of this appears in James Gates's June 1861 letter protesting his commander's strict treatment of the men, refusing to allow them to return home for a few days, and withholding their pay. Gates served in the Tallahatchie Rifles, organized in Charleston, MS, which later mustered into Confederate (national) service as Company F, 21st Mississippi Infantry Regiment.

State Forces: Men who served in state-level forces also submitted protests to the governor, but these usually related to lack of pay, weapons and supplies, or to transfers to national service. State-level volunteers were usually older men with families who opted for service closer to home to stay near their families and work their farms. You can see this in this January 1863 petition from the men of the 1st Regiment, Mississippi Minute Men, explaining why they specifically sought state-level service and protest their transfer to national service. Note that they were not seeking discharges. This can be seen as a form of dissent, but it is not disloyalty and certainly not desertion, which surfaces in other records. These men were willing to stay in service, but along the terms of their original enlistment.

Wartime Pressures: As the war dragged on, the documents reveal how white Mississippians responded to the need to recruit, supply, nurse, and feed soldiers. There are also concerns about counties' need to fulfill draft laws and increasing rates of desertion. See, for example, this 1863 petition by 1st Lieutenant W. A. Mitchell, Company K, 4 Regiment Mississippi State Troops, for a 20-day furlough to provide for his impoverished wife and five children. Mitchell had been in service (first at the national-level, then state-level) since the beginning of the war. There is also a June 1862 telegram from Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard that speaks to the rising number of deserters and Confederate leaderships' determination to address this. His telegram clarifies that soldiers who do not have official leave for sickness or furloughs must be arrested as deserters.

African-American Enlistments: At about the same time white soldiers' desertion rates became dangerous to the Confederate war effort in Mississippi, African-American enlistments in U.S. forces proved an equal troubling issue for the South. This November 1863 telegram from the commander-in-chief of the Confederacy, President Jefferson Davis (a Mississippian), reveals those concerns as Davis discusses the recruitment (or conscription, as Davis phrased it) of African-American men into U.S. forces. It is unclear exactly what Davis proposes should be done about this, but the CWRGM research team is digging into the documents around this item in the collection to learn more.

Desertion and Dissent: Most of the documents related to desertion and strong dissent are in the "Memory and Commemoration" and can be found by keyword searches for "desertion." Examples of desertion by soldiers and dissenting attitudes by soldiers and civilians include this letter by 1st Lt. P. G. Norman, 1st Mississippi State Troops, expressing his frustration in March 1863 that the residents of Canton, MS, were encouraging desertion and local authorities seemed to be doing little to arrest soldiers who were absent without leave. Lewis Pipes of Natchez, MS expressed similar frustrations in June 1863 (during the Vicksburg Campaign) noting that there were 500 deserters in the county living off of food meant for the army or families in the area. This does not mean, however, that all white Mississippians had abandoned their support for the Confederacy by 1863. Documents can be found from as late as February 1865, like this one from M. S. Ward in Enterprise, MS, suggesting ways that the state could more efficiently capture deserters and return them to military service.

The Fog of War: Site visitors with an interest in military history will want to study the telegrams in this sampling and in the larger collection as it becomes available. They reveal the immediacy and urgency of military intelligence during campaigns, sometimes on a daily or even hourly basis.

See, for example, this telegram from November 1863 warning the governor that 10,000 U.S. forces had left Vicksburg and were marching toward Jackson, or this 1864 telegram from Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, warning the governor of a sizable Federal force moving through the northern part of state.