Watkins, a Maury County native, is an unpretentious narrator, professing no special qualifications or insight concerning either the Constitutional questions behind the war or the military issues that shaped it, and making no claim to a thesis: “I had no object in writing the book, only to interest and amuse the public.” In 1861 at age twenty-one, as he describes it in Company Aytch, he joined the First Tennessee simply to fight “in Defense of Southern Homes and Liberties.” This edition, revised according to Watkins’s notes from the 1890s, includes many corrections and additions and should be considered the definitive text of the book.Ĭompany Aytch is a valuable resource for understanding the life of a Confederate foot soldier. Now this classic is being rereleased by Turner Publishing in Nashville with an introduction by Franklin historical novelist Robert Hicks. In Company Aytch, Watkins, a private in the Army of Tennessee, explains what it was like at a whole series of major battles-Shiloh, Stones River, Missionary Ridge, Atlanta, Jonesboro, Franklin, and Nashville, among many others-doing his duty as the musket balls and artillery shells whizzed by him. First published in 1882, this view from the ranks fills a void left by most other historical sources, which tend to concentrate on generals, strategy, troop movements, and battles.

Historians, documentarians, and novelists-from Ken Burns to Margaret Mitchell-all rely, for Civil War period detail, on the text of Company Aytch or A Side Show of the Big Show by Sam R.

Sam watkins company aytch