A Simple Commemoration

The fall semester is over, and my holiday break has started! In honor of this momentous occasion, I started reading Little To Eat And Thin Mud To Drink: Letters, Diaries, and Memoirs from the Red River Campaigns, 1863-1864 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2007), a book that has sat on my shelf for too long. The general editor of the book is Gary D. Joiner who is probably the leading expert today on the Red River campaign. The book itself is an interesting concept…a volume devoted entirely to primary accounts of a single Civil War campaign.

A passage about the commemoration of the battle of Mansfield caught my eye:

“The memories of the terrible struggle of the Civil War linger, particularly in the South. A victory such as the Battle of Mansfield was long celebrated, and even today the church bell at Christ Memorial Episcopal Church in Mansfield rings at 4 P. M. on April 8, as it has each year since the battle” (p. xxvii-xxviii).