The Rebel Yell

I am currently reading a just-released book about the 15th Alabama Infantry Regiment by James P. Faust. For genealogy enthusiasts obsessed with detail and who have ancestors who fought in that unit, it's a gold mine of information about the formation of the volunteer regiment, their transport by rail to the Richmond area, descriptions of the battles in which they fought, their conduct in those battles, and what they were saying and doing.  All of these are directly applicable to my own genealogical research and I'm quite excited about the book. I intend to find or make detailed maps of every move relevant to Company A (to which both David Averett and his brother Alvis belonged).

Company A was one of two companies that were issued with Mississippi rifles at Fort Mitchell, Alabama in 1861. The remainder of the regiment had to be issued smooth-bore muskets, because that was all that was available at the time.  By virtue of possessing these rifles, Companies A and B were designated "skirmishers", whose function was to advance in front of the main body of soldiers in battle, attempting to destroy the enemy formation and generally spoil whatever plan they had in mind until the main body of the 15th Alabama could reach them with the shorter-range muskets. When they did, they would fade back through their own advancing lines, reload, and then catch up again.

Reading this was significant to me because one of the obituaries I have for David Averett describes him as being a "skirmisher" before he was so badly wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864. Until beginning to read this book and finding additional information on the web, I had not found a satisfactory definition of the term and didn't really know what it meant. This, by itself, makes the book worth the price to me.

So, I'm about a third of the way through and Faust has mentioned several times the "rebel yell" that Confederate soldiers would employ to both encourage their own side and to intimidate the other. From other books, I've read that it was terrifying to hear. So what did it sound like? There are no audio recordings from the 1860s of course, but it turns out that there exists audio visual material kept by the Smithsonian Institution that shows elderly Confederate veterans at reunions demonstrating what it sounded like. Smithsonian Magazine has posted such a video to YouTube that was recorded in the 1930s. Seeing both American and Confederate battle flags in profusion, this looks to me like it was a reunion of some kind, perhaps the famous one at Gettysburg? At some point in the past, I watched another video about that particular reunion, which showed old men in blue facing old men in gray across a fence, shaking hands in a symbolic final reconciliation of the erstwhile foes. Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed that gathering in 1938, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the battle.

Even as rendered by these old veterans, it really must have been terrifying to hear it coming from thousands of men in their late teens and early twenties, coming at you with guns blazing and fixed bayonets. These were brave men — on both sides.