The Home Guard

NH Civil War Gal

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Regtl. Quartermaster Antietam 2021
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Feb 5, 2017
From Recollections of a Rebel Reefer - with a slightly acid tongue!

”I had neither ambition nor desire to take a trip North or to spend an indefinite time in a Northern prison, so with all speed I hied me unto the country behind the city, where I found a train waiting on a siding, and with neither money nor ticket and without invitation I boarded it without the least idea of where I was going —and I did not care much so long as my destination was outside of the limits of the city where I was born.

I found the train crowded with a lot of prosperous and ponderous old gentlemen who were members of the “Home Guard,” clothed in every conceivable garb, except that of a soldier — each one of them being hampered by a musket which he did not know how to handle. They were all swearing by a multitudinous variety of strange gods that death was preferable to existence under the detested Yankee’s rule. At the first stop at Manchac Pass it was noticed that their numbers perceptibly decreased, and after passing the second station there was plenty of room in the coaches and some people had even a whole seat to themselves. We arrived at Amite, where I had once been at school, and we de trained. General Lovell, who commanded the troops, had determined to make this place his headquarters and already there was quite a large camp there. The remnant of the “Home Guard” stood the rigors of camp life for a day or two, and then, deciding that the duty of a home guard was to guard his home, silently and singly, without consulting their superiors, they sneaked off to count how many railroad ties there were between Amite and their home comforts. It was afterwards said that the wretched condition of Napoleon’s soldiers on the retreat from Moscow was not a circumstance to the plight in which these fat old gentlemen arrived at their comfortable mansions in New Orleans, convinced that the killing of Yankees was work fitted only for butchers.”
 
General Lovell,
Mansfield Lovell.gif
 
The women from New Orleans were a lot tougher!
To be fair other Home Guard units such has those in Missouri and North Carolina did a fair amount of fighting and dying. Home Guards are a basic part of counterinsurgency from the ACW to the present day. Militas as a general rule don't do well in conventional warfare but are essential in any kind of Counterinsurgency campaign.
Leftyhunter
 
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