A Narrative of the Campaigns of the 39th
Alabama Volunteer Infantry
Deas' Brigade, Army of Tennessee, Confederate States Army (1862 to 1865)
Written
by Mark E. Owen, P.E., Longview, Texas
November, 1997 - Updated 11-12-03
In 1860, Louis Frazier was a teenager in a rural, mountainous area of southeastern Alabama. He was the eldest boy in a household of five younger siblings. His mother could not read or write, and ran the household alone. Louis helped out by earning money working on local farms as a hired hand. The Frazier homestead was on land that had recently been given to white men for settlement by Creek Indians. Although there were more slaves in his county than white persons - Louis and his family were not slave holders.
Louis, together with several of his friends in the spring of 1862, enlisted in a confederate infantry unit that was being organized by an Alabama State Representative. Over the next three years Louis and his comrades would suffer almost continuously from malnutrition, exposure, sleep deprivation, hypothermia, and other ailments. On some days, regardless of whether he was starving, freezing, sick, weak, tired, lice-ridden, diseased, or exhausted, the men of the 39th would be called upon to face an enemy that was almost always more numerous and better equipped than they were, and many times, the 39th would emerge the victor in battle.
Louis and his comrades would spend one cold, star-lit evening, less than a week after Christmas of 1862, lying on the cold, damp ground by the side of a dirt road - their thin wool uniforms their only comfort. Campfires would be forbidden that night, as the enemy was so near that light might draw musketry fire, and the men had left their blankets several miles away. Two years later, in Franklin, Tennessee, Louis Frazier and the few comrades of his that had survived to that point in time would be ordered to assault an enemy in the pitch darkness of a cool November evening. The assault would require the men to march over scores -perhaps hundreds - of dead and wounded comrades to lead an attack on an enemy position that could only be seen by sporadic flashes of musketry fire in the darkness. One hundred and ten years later, a great-grandson of Louis Frazier would settle and live in the very same town in Tennessee where Louis and his comrades spent arguably the most frightful evening of the entire war. Many Confederate veterans after the war would soberly attest to seeing an Angel of Death hovering over that terrible field of carnage in the dim twilight of that November evening.
Three years after his enlistment, Louis Frazier's infantry unit would be destroyed. Out of 1,100 officers, enlisted men, surgeons, quartermasters, teamsters, and others in the 39th Alabama in early 1862, only a handful would remain by 1865. The regiment buried their dead in camps and battlefields in Tupelo, Nashville, Franklin, Chickamauga, Dalton, Atlanta, Bentonville, and other areas hallowed by their presence. Louis Frazier was one of the few men that would hobble back to Mount Andrew in the late spring of 1865 - not a victim of a bullet, nor a victim of disease - but permanently scarred for life nonetheless, with arthritic rheumatism from extreme outdoor exposure. This is his story.
Preface and Acknowledgements From the Beginning - The Kentucky Campaign to Chattanooga Chickamauga to the Recovery at Dalton, Ga. The Atlanta and Tennessee Campaigns - To the Bitter End Footnotes