Seventeen-year-old goes off to war

By Jim Bradshaw
jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net

mos Anselm was seventeen years old in May 1861 when he rode away from his home in Pine Prairie. He was the fourth son of the widowed Eleanor Anselm to join the fight for the Confederacy.

To her grief, only one of her boys came home.

Amos had no premonition of death when he wrote on May 8 from Opelousas to caution his mother not to feel uneasy as he and other members of the Opelousas Guards went off to an unknown future. "Tomorrow we take a boat at Washington [La.] -- and away," he wrote.

He was on his way to the hastily constructed Camp Moore in Tangipahoa Parish, where two thousand other young men from Louisiana were training, enticed by the dream of glory and a bonus offered by the Confederate government. He and other members of the Opelousas Guards had been made part of the 8th Louisiana Infantry Regiment, which would soon see action in some of the first real fighting of the war.

He wrote to his mother on June 14 that provisions were slim at the camp, but that it was a beautiful place in pine woods, "75 miles above New Orleans the Tangipahoa River on one side and a creek on the other [both of them running] pure, clear water."

He told his mother, "I wish you could be here an hour or two. It is a more interesting place than New Orleans."

William H. Russell, a writer for the London Times, visited Camp Moore while Amos was there and shared Amos's view. Russell described, "The white tents crouching close to the pines, the parade alive with the groups and colors as various as those of Joseph's coat, arms stacked here and there, and occasionally the march of a double line in green, or in mazarine blue, up an alley from the interior of the wood, to be dismissed in the open camp, [resembling] a militia muster, or a holiday experiment of soldiering, rather than the dark shadow of forthcoming battle."

Amos shared a tent with five others, probably like one described by Russell with dirt floors and "blankets, boxes, and utensils stowed in corners with a disregard to symmetry."

Among the trainees, Russell found "a company of professional gamblers, one hundred and twelve strong, recruited in a moment of banter by one of the patriarchs of the fraternity" as well as country boys from across the state, Irish and German companies recruited in New Orleans, and, all and all, as sundry a collection of would-be soldiers as could be found anywhere.

Russell thought it would take many months of training to turn this motley conglomerate into a fighting corps, but the Confederacy didn't have that much time. On July 14, "a quiet Sunday," Amos took time write to his mother from Manassas Junction, Virginia, just to let her know where he was and that he was doing OK.

The next Sunday, July 21, was very different. At 5:15 a.m. Union cannons began firing into the Confederate ranks, beginning the first big battle of the war.

Amos dashed off a quick note while he was on guard duty at the Confederate camp, about two miles from fighting on the Bull Run, the stream by which that battle gets one of its names.

"The hottest sort of battle has been going on," he wrote to his mother. "The latest news I heard was unfavorable to us, but reinforcements are coming. I don't feel the least alarmed. About two miles off I hear the cannons bang, bang faster than you could count 1-2-3 sometimes so fast you can't distinguish them at all."

The Confederate reinforcements did arrive in time, and troops under Louisianian P.G.T. Beauregard rallied to "give the Union boys a whipping," as Amos later recounted. His letters home continued to be upbeat over the next several months even as he and other Rebel fighters began a slow retreat through Virginia.

But then the tone of his letters began to change.

"We have had a hard time since we left Manassas," he wrote on June 16, 1862, a year after that big battle. "In the last 40 days we have marched upward of 400 miles without any exaggeration, fought four battles, successful in all of them, captured 3,500 prisoners and millions of dollars worth of stores. "

But the glamour of battle was gone. He confessed to his mother that fighting had become "hot and disagreeable work."

Amos had enlisted for a one-year term, but he didn't get to go home when that time was up; the Confederate Congress had extended the duty of all of the men in the field. That had fatal consequences for Amos.

The minie ball that killed Amos Anselm struck him just a few weeks after he was told that his duty had been extended, and a little more than a year after writing in that first, optimistic letter home that he would soon be on the march to aid the Confederacy and "then away."