The Memoir of Campbell Wood

This past weekend a reenacting friend named Pete Gunn, who is an avid genealogy researcher, gave me a big envelope containing an unexpected gift. The envelope was sent to Pete by one of his online genealogy research contacts. It contained a stack of documents about the Wood family, of which one member served in the Fifth Texas Infantry during the first three years of the Civil War.

The man’s name was Campbell Wood, and he enlisted in the Confederate army in 1861 as a 19 year old straight from a military school in LaGrange, Texas. 

The treasure in the envelope among the family tree charts and correspondence was part of the unpublished memoir that Campbell Wood wrote in 1908 for his children. I say “unpubished” as the only place online I can find reference to the memoir is that a paper copy, or maybe the original, is housed in the library at Emory University in Atlanta.

After the war Campbell Wood became a medical doctor who for decades served  the small, now long gone, community of Cherokee, near Johnson City, the location of LBJ’s ranch.

The introduction to the memoir includes this short letter that Wood ascribes to his father, who sent his son these instructions:

“My dear Son,

I hand you herewith a check on W.M. Rice of Houston. Pay your bills, come home and join the army.”

Affectionately, your father,

Green Wood

Now that is a clear piece of writing, and son Campbell did as father Green directed. (Green’s parents had to have had a sense of humor to name a new-born baby Green Wood.) Campbell joined the new Confederate army company that was in training in Grimes County.

Several pages of the memoir focus on Wood’s service as a Confederate officer, first as a company lieutenant during the early months of the war, then as the adjutant of the whole Fifth Texas Infantry Regiment.

Wood relates the train ride on open flat cars from Houston to Beaumont, Texas, in route to Virginia. The tracks were poorly laid causing the cars to bounce and sway dangerously and many of the soldiers were drunk and made sport shooting at the alligators seen in the ditches along the track.  He mentions alligators again during the march through west Louisiana towards New Orleans, as the column would encounter the gators on the road and have to fire their six-shooters at the beasts to move them off the road.

Adjutants were the office managers of a regiment during the 99% of the time the regiment was not engaged in a battle. During a battle, the regiment’s adjutant took a position on the very right end of the regiment’s battle line and served as a guide, the man who set the location where the right-most company needs to be. Being the regiment’s adjutant was a dangerous job, as the guide was usually plainly visible to the enemy who were firing at the regiment, and as an officer his uniform and sword would draw extra attention.

With that background about the combat duties of the regimental adjutant as a context, one section of the memoir describes Wood being wounded in the foot during the attack on Devil’s Den and Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg in July, 1863. That part of the memoir reads like a good war novel.

I’m still pumping my fist in joy that friend Pete gave me the envelope containing the war portion of the memoir. In writing both of my first two Civil War novels, I’ve leaned heavily on commercially published memoirs to add the spark of truth and credibility to my descriptions of life as a Civil War soldier.

Some of those memoirs are long out of print, but Amazon has been a great source to find used copies or to buy a cheap paperback print-on-demand reprint. But the short Campbell Woods memoir is the first I’ve had access to that is not in the general published body of memoirs by Texas Confederate soldiers.

To have handed to me an unpublished memoir of a junior officer, a piece of primary source history about the very regiment on which the second novel’s action is based, is absolute serendipity.

I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised to discover that the memoirs of soldiers, usually written long after the war ended, often contain more exciting anecdotes than the fictitious vignettes I could think up for my characters.  On reflection, I suppose it makes sense, because as time passes we forget the mundane everyday details of life, but we do remember the unusual and unexpected and dangerous things that happen to us.

Having my attention suddenly drawn to Campbell Wood, who I knew before only as another name on the regimental roster, also serves another good service. He is a perfect guy to form a peer-friendship for John McBee, my main character.

Wood is not sidekick material, but rather another officer whose duties as the regimental adjutant give him “inside information” that the ten company commanders in the regiment would not learn about as quickly, if ever.

Until his battle wound forces him to leave the regiment, Lieutenant Wood will also be a useful guy for “data dumps,” as my writer circle friends call the scenes where necessary background information is passed along to the reader by one of the characters.

Look for Lieutenant Wood in McBee’s Bloody Boots and the next as-yet-untitled volume in the McBee trilogy.