“Where are we drifting?” asked Thomas Fearn on the eve of the Civil War, “and at what point shall we land? God grant that it may end as well with us, as with the great many too.” Fearn was not an overly religious man, but he had reasons for invoking this small prayer. The Huntsville resident was seventy-two years old and not in good health; his career as a medical doctor had long passed, so too had his work as a cotton merchant, public works champion, and institution builder. What was left—his family, his farms, and his slaves— would soon be under siege from advancing Union forces.
For 125 years she lay, inconspicuous, her final resting place marked with only the simplest of stones: a sandstone rock with no name, no dates, no epitaph—no inscription at all.
They stare intently into the camera lens, perhaps having a "likeness struck" for the first time. Some wear dark-blue uniforms prescribed by state regulations. Others are clad in Confederate gray. They are but a small sampling of the thousands who answered the South's call to arms from 1859 to 1865. These images--more than four hundred in all--are part of the extensive collection of Confederate photographs housed in the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery.
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