You Are NOT Going to Cut Off My Legs

I almost let it slip by, again. Today, May 6th, is a day of personal remembrance for me. I don’t indulge in the Chinese sort of ancestor worship. I mean, it’s not a religion for me. But I have adopted one old McBride as a personal project. It’s hard to honor a man who died in 1879, never married, and has no direct descendants.

If you’ve been reading my blog posts for a while, you might know already who I’m talking about. The ancestor is my great, great, great-uncle John J McBride, who was a lieutenant, then captain, then acting major of the 5^th Texas Infantry Regiment, CSA, in the Civil War.

He’s the man who inspired John J McBee, the main character in my three Civil War novels about the 5^th Texas regiment and the war in Virginia. I affectionately call him Uncle JJ.

Uncle JJ was twice wounded in two of the great battles of the Civil War. He was first shot in the shoulder late in the afternoon on August 30, 1862 at the Battle of Second Manassas (or Second Bull Run, as we Southerners prefer to call it).

Two years later, having soldiered through the 1863 battles at Gettysburg and Chickamauga unharmed, Uncle JJ was severely wounded in both legs, near his hips, at the Battle of the Wilderness early in the morning on May 6, 1864. 

That was 152 years ago today. 

I find Uncle JJ’s war experiences to be fascinating, but war service records are only a skeleton of facts. I wanted to bring his tale alive for others, but not just as bare-bones history. 

So, I’ve built personalities for the real-life McBride’s in the Civil War--Uncle JJ, his widowed mother Elizabeth, his brother James who was a Confederate cavalryman, and his real-life manservant Levi (his slave), who now has his own Wikipedia page for what he did during the Civil War. It’s worth a look. I even created a fictional love interest for JJ with a saucy woman named Faith.

Those books are why I started writing this blog, and why I keep putting out new posts.

So, around sundown today, I’m going to sit on our back porch with several other McBride’s. At least one or two of us will lift a cold Lone Star beer in honor of Uncle JJ, while I retell the story of the old soldier who 152 years ago today told the field surgeon:

“You are not going to cut off my legs. I am not going to die from this wound. The Yankee bullet hasn’t been made that’s going to kill JJ McBride.”

Or so it was reported in the Houston newspaper a month or so later.

Snarky and stubborn, Uncle JJ lived until 1879, walking on both legs after a long year of recovery, to die at the age of 60.

Here’s a photo of Uncle JJ’s grave in Palestine, Texas, and a post-war oil painting portrait of him.