The Civil War memoir of Philip Daingerfield Stephenson, D.D
Phil Stephenson wrote his Civil War Memoirs late in 1865, when he was twenty, full of hate and pain, and wandering the streets of St. Louis, back home but unwelcome. Thirty years later he revised and expanded these memories with the longer view of a fifty-year-old. He kept the smells of the battle field, the cries of the wounded and dying, the agonies of the surgeon's table, yet he did his best to interpret for himself and for others these war experiences, "so fresh they stand out from the rest of my life as though photographed in letters of fire." Passionate in his honesty, Phil spares no man - priest or commanding general or slave holder or himself. "Truth in history is sacred and these things must be said.". Phil tells the story of the Army of Tennessee as known by a sixteen-year-old private who survives to become a veteran infantryman and artilleryman. Fighting with the 13th Arkansas and the 5th Company, Washington Artillery, Phil Stephenson saw the war in the west from Belmont to Peachtree Creek to Spanish Fort. He knew the crack of Pat Cleburne's voice and sat squirming in a parlor under the penetrating eyes of Gen. Hardee. He saw Leonidas Polk killed, shared a blanket with a sleeping Gen. Breckinridge, and stared into the commanding eyes of Joseph Johnston. His pages yield stories of drunks and heroes, kind nurses and cruel sergeants, the brilliant and the blundering. . The significance of Phil's story is not his depiction of grand events. It is the details of the war within the war, having to go house to house begging for a blanket, creating "jumble lia" as his New Orleans battery mates look on condescendingly, freezing in an open railcar and watching fellow passengers lose their hold and fall to their deaths. Phil sits on the piazza with the master and shares bread in a cabin with a slave. A dying South comes alive once again. Phil Stephenson is a charming, compelling story teller whose narrative rewards aficionados and students of the Civil War.