Sam Watkins and Co. Aytch: A Tennessee Corporal's War From Shiloh On

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Samuel Rush Watkins was born in June 1839 in Mount Pleasant, Tennessee, and was educated at Jackson College. When Tennessee seceded in May 1861, the 21-year-old enlisted in Company H of the 1st Tennessee Infantry, the unit he later spelled out as Co. Aytch. As a corporal in the Western Theater he fought at Shiloh, the siege of Corinth, Perryville, Chickamauga, the Atlanta campaign at Rocky Face Ridge, Resaca and Kennesaw Mountain, and the Battle of Nashville, and was wounded at Stones River and again at Atlanta.

In April 1865, Watkins was one of only seven men from his original company who surrendered to William T. Sherman in North Carolina. He returned to Maury County, married Virginia Mayes that year and farmed for more than a decade. In 1881, surrounded by children who never knew the war, he began writing columns for the Columbia Herald, collected in 1882 as Co. Aytch. Uninterested in defending secession or grand strategy, he wrote with humor and grief about hunger, cold, stolen chickens and lost friends.

Shiloh in 1862 produced more casualties than all previous American wars combined up to that point.
Watkins described the morning of Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, 1864, with a sky like brass, ground like baked iron and a lone woodpecker tapping before the guns opened.
The fighting at Kennesaw's Dead Angle was so intense that it cut down full-grown trees.
Watkins died in July 1901 at 62 and was buried with military honors at Zion Cemetery in Maury County.
Ken Burns quoted him heavily in the 1990 documentary The Civil War, and his Kennesaw account inspired the folk song Kennesaw Line.

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