Born the eighth child in a wealthy Mississippi plantation family in 1843, David Eldred Holt joined Company K of the 16th Mississippi Regiment in 1861 and served in the Virginia theater throughout the Civil War. Late in his life, at a time when many former soldiers, both Union and Confederate, were reliving their memories of that event, Holt penned this memoir, recounting the idyllic life of an affluent southern boy before the war and the exhilarating, sometimes humorous, often terrifying experiences of a common soldier in camp and in battle. This new paperback edition has been expanded to include Holt’s never-before-published diary entries from the last year of the Civil War. 

Thomas D. Cockrell is a professor of history at Blue Mountain College, and Michael B. Ballard is university archivist at Mississippi State University. They are coeditors of A Mississippi Rebel in the Army of Northern Virginia: The Civil War Memoirs of Private David Holt.