Columbia, Tennessee native Sam Watkins’s 1881 Civil War memoir, Co. Aytch, is one of the most popular personal accounts of the conflict. Taking up the postwar Confederate apologist tune about which Gary Gallagher, David Blight, and others have written, Watkins portrayed himself and his comrades as innocent Southern farm boys, far removed from the politics and practice of slavery which had caused the war. The portrayal was pure fantasy. Sam’s unit had among the highest per capita wealth and rates of slave ownership in the Army of Tennessee. Watkins’s enslaved camp servant, Sanker, was one of approximately fifty slaves who labored for the First during the war, none of whom are present in the pages of Co. Aytch.
Despite these facts (or perhaps because of them) Sam’s book formed part of a literary genre that imagined a whitewashed world largely without both slavery and enslaved people, a pure setting to imagine an idyllic South which could be marshaled in support of white conservative political and social goals in the late nineteenth century. Sam’s book, the fictitious world it imagined, and many of the same conservative goals are still with us today. This paper will explore Sam Watkins’s life in the twenty-first century. On YouTube, Facebook, Amazon.com, Sons of Confederate Veterans webpages, and personal sites, Watkins—or, more precisely, the fictional proxy Sam wrote in his memoir—is held up as a paragon of Confederate virtue and a touchstone for white southern conservative identity politics. How does Watkins fit into a world of interactive hyperreality alongside “Birther” chain emails and Glenn Beck conspiracy theories, and what can Sam’s life on the web tell us about the continuing relevance of the Civil War for all Americans regardless of ideology?
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