A Thrilling Narrative
The Memoir of a Southern Unionist
By Captain Dennis E. Haynes
Edited by Arthur W. Bergeron Jr.

A never-before-seen and firsthand look into the dissent of one Southern soldier

This Civil War memoir of Capt. Dennis E. Haynes is both unique and rare. Not only did few southern unionists write of their experiences after the war, Haynes’s is the only publication by a Louisiana unionist. Furthermore, it is the only account by a member of the First Louisiana Battalion Cavalry Scouts, a unit that existed for less than three months and saw its only real action during the Red River Campaign of 1864.

Haynes’s memoir is a historic collection of his wartime experiences as a unionist in the Confederate South. Among his writings, Haynes describes how he opposed the secession of Texas and thus became a hunted man. He also tells of his harrowing odyssey to reach Union troops in Louisiana. Every step of the way, Haynes provides details, sometimes graphic, of the harassment and cruelty he and many others like him suffered at the hands of his Confederate neighbors.

“This meticulously edited edition of a rare southern Unionist’s account will be welcomed by anyone interested in the trans-Mississippi theater or dissent during the Civil War. . . . Readers seeking insights into the social, military, and political underside of the Confederate experience will turn to this book with profit.”
—Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Confederate War

“[Haynes’s] spirited account of his experiences, along with the insightful context provided by editor Arthur Bergeron, reveals an internalized war dramatically at odds with our assumptions of both military and home front situations in this part of the trans-Mississippi South.”
—John C. Inscoe, coeditor of Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South

Dennis E. Haynes organized a company of Southern Unionists in the spring of 1863. His narrative begins when he is appointed captain of this, the First Louisiana Battalion Cavalry Scouts. Following a distinguished civilian career as a district attorney and surveyor in New Orleans, Haynes disappears completely from public record in 1873.

Arthur W. Bergeron Jr. is an archivist with the United States Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. He is a veteran of the United States army, having served in the Vietnam from 1969 to 1970. He is the author, coauthor, and editor of nearly a dozen books, including The Civil War in Louisiana, Louisianians in the Civil War and “Duty Called Me Here”: The Soldier Comrades of the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier.

April 2006
186 pages, 6"x 9"
$34.95 (s) Cloth
ISBN-10: 1-55728-811-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-55728-811-0