By Starr Munro: Riverbend News
The following is history told from Sylvanus M. Hankins, Private Company D, Florida Reserve Regiment, of America's Confederate soldiers. Initially written in longhand in an old account ledger, it was typed up for future generations to read. The original account was given to his nephew, also a S.M. Hankins, of Tampa It is unknown what year "My recollections of the Confederate War" was written.
Private Hankins begins his account in the year of 1861, the year Florida succeeded from the Union. "It was then that men began making fiery speeches, and the drum and fife could be heard night and day." Being merely 14 years old, he writes first about a visit to Madison His personal account reports of one man insisting, "I can drink all of the blood that will be spilled in that war," and another proclaiming to the crowded street that "Grass would grow in the streets of New York in less than a year." From there, he tells of how the first company out of Florida to join the war came from Madison, and how their captain, Richard Bradford, was the first soldier from Florida to be killed in the battle. After that, Captain Pillius put together a very large company of over 150 men from Madison, Taylor and Lafayette counties. They were to join the Second Florida Regiment and sent to Virginia and by his account, very few of them ever came back home alive.
Although he and his family lived in Lafayette County, he visited Madison often as a young man before his enlistment. Private Hankins writes of the year 1862 in Madison before going into his experiences with deserters and the army at his family’s homestead. He recounts this as a time when a lot of Yankee prisoners were brought through Madison. "That is what we called all Northerners-- 'Yankees.' It was the first Blue Coats most of us has ever seen. A great many people gathered in town to see a sure enough live Yankee. One lady said, Is them Yanks? and when somebody replied, ‘yes,’ she said she did not believe a word of it because they're people just like we are, and I heard they have horns!"
A large part of these recollections are about the regiments that were dispersed to areas in Lafayette, Taylor and Madison counties with a mission to find deserters who hid in the areas easily. "These counties were thinly settled, mostly by stock men and hunters. It was a wild country with a great many hammocks and swamps, a most natural hiding place for deserters from Georgia, Alabama and Florida." He writes of a Major Campfield who took his job very seriously.
Private Hankins was a proud Confederate, even before joining the army, but writes of how this particular major "went through these counties, laying everything to waste as he went. He burned houses and furniture, and destroyed everything of value. Women or children that could not establish the fact that their husbands, fathers or sons were in the Confederate Army were made prisoners. So strict was he that in some cases, the places and homes were just put in ashes and their owners were put behind the britch of a musket in Virginia.
Private Hankins goes on the mention how it felt to watch what was "so unjust and cruel for women and children to suffer as some of them had to for what their fathers, husbands, sons and brothers did. They were women that had worked hard, lived hard. They were forced out of their humble little log cabins and had to stand by and see what little they had all laid to ashes." His own family’s home was not spared and priceless heirlooms were lost in a blaze, for the head officers of Florida had ordered Major Campfield and his regiment to burn every house in these counties, with few spared, eradicating any homes where deserters may have been hidin
Major Campfield and his command reached Hankins' father's home in the early spring of 1863. The home was located in Lafayette County at Cooks Hammock. With the calvary coming first and the infantry following them the next day, the young Hankins was "scared out of his wits," having never seen so many men and horses. In his mind, they may have well been 10,000 of them. But he also mentioned in his writing that they were very orderly and respectful to his families homestead. They had nothing to eat or even cook with, so his mother and her help, "kept every oven, pot, skillet and frying pan red hot" until they left five days later. His father and his help ran the old rock mill that ground corn day and night. The ground corn would be the meal that his mother would cook and serve to the soldiers who shared their table. Hankins wrote that "many wanted to pay for their meals, but mother would not take a cent from them for anything."
Hankins' account then explains a long talk that his father, Private Hankins, and Major Campfield had may have been instrumental in saving lives of several men in the area, as well as a lot of property that would have been destroyed. Later on, he writes that deserters found their way to those properties anyway, burning anything that belonged to Confederate soldiers and others who were loyal to the Confederate States. Estates all along the Suwannee River were ruined and burned by deserters. These deserters also brought those loyal to the Confederacy closer together, and united them like never before. Private Hankins tells a tale of a man who was seen being marched near their property in Cooks Hammock, a local man named Bell, who was accused of being a deserter. When Hankins' father asked Major Campfield for a word with the man, he was permitted to do so and learned that he had in fact been on a three-day leave to attend to his wife who had fallen ill. Bell told the older Hankins that his father-in-law was trying to reach them with a sworn affidavit and if he could be spared until the next day, he would have the proof that he was no deserter. At first, Major Campfield would not hear a word of it but eventually agreed to wait until the next morning to shoot the man he considered a traitor to the Confederacy. The following day, the father-in-law was met halfway by the elder Hankins and the two of them made their way back to camp where Bell was waiting. He was sent back to Tennessee to his regiment and lived to come home after the war, thanks to Hankins' father.
Sylvanus M. Hankins' recollections of the Confederacy has a world of knowledge. Knowledge of Lafayette County and Cooks Hammock during the war, and of battles and missions that took place throughout the southern states. They all have the risk of being forgotten if not for the dedicated individuals who took the time to ensure records like these were taken care of and made public for citizens of all generations to read. His memoirs are 35 pages long and it's truly a marvel how much can be learned from them. History is always worth recording, and America is a nation that recognizes how true that is, and that's evident in documents such as this