Today at 12:46pm
First, I am a daughter of the Confederacy. Never had proof before today but I found out online. It is amazing. I was just kidding my brother that if you can't be found on Google, you don't exist. Well, I have nearly a whole page of listings. He had a few. The amazing part was that I gound a 395 page document with listings of my whole paternal side of my family back to the 1600s in some cases!
For sure I know that my great-grandfather, Samuel Moore Hufstedler, was a Confederate in the Civil War. In an article called, "Then and Now" one of his sons, David gave the following account:
"The Federals came and captured my father and gave him his choice to take the Oath of Allegiance or go with them as a prisoner of war. He took the oath and it meant death if he was ever caught in arms against the North again. They wrote down his name, weight, height, color of his eyes and hair. Then in about a year a man by the name of John Mitchell made up a Rifle Company of Rebels and he had to join or they would have conscripted him. So there he was. They took him about 50 miles from home and then he left them and came home and hid out for the rest of the war. We carried him his grub about a mile. I didn't think he did anything wrong.
The war had not been on long till our salt played out. Then everybody dug up the dirt from their smokehouses where the meat had dripped and put the dirt in a hopper like an ash hopper, poured water on it and boiled down the dirty water to make salt. When that played out six or eight of us went to Cape Girardeau, Missouri for salt and got only one bushel to the family. On the way back at the St. Francis River robbers took everything we had but our salt. We had a lot of coffee, dry goods, domestic, shoes, hats and calico, for that was what they wore in those days.
We was water bound at St. Francis (Arkansas) for about three days. We took logs and hauled them to the river and nailed them together to make a raft. We took our ox lines and made a rope to pull the raft back and forth. Then took our wagons over, unyoked the oxen, took our yokes over on the raft. We swam seven yoke of oxen and some of the boys crossed over to yoke the steers as they came out of the water. There was a big snow on the ground and it was the coldest weather I ever saw. Our bed would freeze to the ground. I was about 16 years old."
David was one of my great-grandfather's 22 children. He also raised a step-daughter and four children who belonged to his brother and his wife. When his brother died he took the widow and children in with his family.
You might wonder that it was only my great-grandfather in the Civil War. I come from a long line of long lived people. My own grandfather had twelve children and lived into his 90s. Samuel Moore Hufstedler lived well into his 90s and had one daughter, Great Aunt Lizzie, who lived to be 103. My brother remembers going to Pocahontas, Arkansas as a child to visit her many times. She died in 1974, the year before I got out of high school.
There will be more about my amazing family stories as I uncover them. Until then you will find me...Living Life.
