Diary of a Tar Heel Confederate Soldier

This is not the diary of a lieutenant or general, but instead that of an ordinary private. Leon Louis, at the age of nineteen, signed up to join the First North Carolina Regiment in 1861 and remained with them for six months before being mustered into the Fifty-Third North Carolina Regiment until the end of the war. He was not involved in strategic discussions or decisions but he was one of the many thousands who unquestioningly put their lives on the line for the cause of the confederacy. He reveals in stark prose the day to day drudgery of the war, from cutting down trees for the preparation of defences to creating bedding from collected leaves, which he described as ‘a bed fit for a king or a Confederate soldier.’ Louis saw conflict at number of occasions throughout the war including the Battle of the Wilderness where he was captured by the Union army. He spent the rest of the war in prison and details his life in those camps, but also gives details of the continuing action of the Fifty-Third Regiment from other sources until the end of the war. Also included in Leon’s account are details of all the men who fought in the two regiments that he served with. Diary of a Tar Heel Confederate provides an insight into the life of an ordinary soldier fighting for the South during the American Civil War. After the War Leon was actively involved in the organization “United Confederate Veterans” in which he became a major. This diary was published in 1913 and he died in 1919. There is a monument in Charlotte, North Carolina, honoring him and the twelve other Jewish Confederate soldiers who are buried in the Hebrew Cemetery.