Prisoner of War documents (photocopies)

File — Box: 3915.001, Folder: 11

Scope and Contents

From the Collection: This collection contains letters written by Benjamin J. Gaston, who served as a first lieutenant with the Independent 2nd Battalion Alabama Volunteers and as a private in the 10th Alabama Cavalry. A few letters were written in 1859 to his parents while he was in school in Pulaski, Tennessee. Gaston may have been born in Alabama or Tennessee.

The bulk of the letters were written during his service with the Confederate States Army and are to his mother, father, and siblings, from the middle of 1861 until the Battle of Shiloh on April 6, 1862. They give a detailed account of life in camp near Mobile, Alabama. Rations were short, and weapons and ammunition for his company were not issued until just before the unit went to Corinth, Mississippi. Lack of weapons was a great concern, since according to Gaston, his men were training by learning movements without firearms. When later that year when the Confederates was able to place a governor loyal to the South in office in Kentucky, the Army of Tennessee, under General Braxton Bragg, invaded Kentucky (August 1862) and Lt. Gaston was part of this invasion which failed.

During the Confederate withdrawal, Lt. Gaston was put in charge of a Union prisoner of war. The prisoner escaped from the rail car in which he was being held, and Lieutenant Gaston, who left the car and his prisoner to buy bread, was court martialed. He lost his commission and returned home, then enlisted as a private in the 10th Alabama Cavalry. In the summer of 1863, he was captured near Murfreesboro, and spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war in Rock Island, Illinois.

The letters are written from places like Corinth, Mississippi; Mobile, Alabama; Camp Gov. Moore, Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana; Bethel Spring, Tennessee; Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and Rock Island, Illinois. Sixteen (16) letters are written from Rock Island.