The 39th Alabama Volunteer Infantry
1862 to 1865
By: Mark Owen, Longview, Texas
Updated May 14, 2008
In 1860, Louis Frazier was a teenager in a rural, mountainous area of southeastern Alabama. He was the oldest in a household of five siblings. His mother could not read or write, and ran the household alone. Louis earned money working on local farms as a hired hand. The Frazier homestead was on Creek Indian land that had recently been released for settlement. Although there were more slaves in his county than free persons, Louis and his family were not slave holders.
Louis, together with several friends in the spring of 1862, enlisted in a confederate infantry unit organized by an Alabama State Representative. Over the next three years Louis and his comrades would suffer from malnutrition, exposure, sleep deprivation, and hypothermia. Some days, regardless of whether they were starving, freezing, sick, weak, tired, lice-ridden, diseased, or exhausted, the men of the 39th would be called upon to face an enemy that was almost always more numerous and better equipped.
Louis and his comrades would spend one cold evening less than a week after Christmas 1862 lying on the cold, damp ground by the side of a dirt road - their thin wool uniforms their only comfort. Campfires would be forbidden that night, as the enemy were near and light could draw musketry fire. Two years later, in Franklin, Tennessee, Louis Frazier and the few that had survived to that point in time would be ordered to assault an enemy in the pitch darkness of a cool November evening. The assault would require the men march over hundreds of dead and wounded comrades to lead an attack on an enemy position that could only be seen by sporadic flashes of musketry fire in the darkness.
Three years after his enlistment, Louis Frazier's infantry unit would be decimated. Out of 1,100 officers, enlisted men, surgeons, quartermasters, teamsters, and others in the 39th Alabama in early 1862, only a handful would remain by 1865. The regiment buried their dead in camps and battlefields in Tupelo, Nashville, Franklin, Chickamauga, Dalton, Atlanta, and Bentonville. Louis Frazier hobbled back to Mount Andrew in the late spring of 1865 permanently scarred for life with arthritic rheumatism from outdoor exposure. This is his story.
Preface and Acknowledgements From the Beginning - The Kentucky Campaign to Chattanooga Chickamauga to the Recovery at Dalton, Ga. The Atlanta and Tennessee Campaigns - To the Bitter End Footnotes