George Rabb: The Civil War Memoir of a Catawba County Tar Heel

Born of Newton in Catawba County, North Carolina, George Washington Rabb (1841-1935) enlisted in the Confederate Army as a sharpshooter on April 27, 1861. Standing on the shore at Sewell's Point, he witnessed the Merrimac and Monitor duel to a draw. His regiment, the Twelfth, fought in many of the Civil War's major battles--the Seven Days, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg--culminating in Rabb's loss of limb at Fisher's Hill. With a remarkable memory and eye for detail at eighty-eight years of age, Rabb recorded the entirety of his deployments. Vivifying the war's brutality and its interludes of mercy, Rabb's memoir recalls the brutal realities of combat, a game of Seven Up during a flag of truce, scavenging the pockets of fallen Federals, and meeting a red-headed visitor after his amputation whom he would marry fifty-five years later.
With a foreword by Michael Hill, research supervisor at the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, and an introduction by Rabb's grandniece Rebecca Ikerd Alghrary, this memoir shows the costly toll of the Civil War from the vantage point of a Tar Heel combatant.

A brazen memoir of a Confederate soldier and the United States at war and in peace during the 1860s