The Prince Edward Dragoons mustered on June 24, 1861, near Farmville, Va. They rode to camp at Ashland, where they would become Company K of the 2nd (later 3rd) Virginia Cavalry. There were 58 men on Company K's rolls for 1861. Each would have joined with his own horse, clothing, blankets, and arms.

Richard Henry Watkins, 36, joined as a private. He left behind his wife, Mary Purnell Dupuy, 22, and their daughters Emmie, 3, and Minnie, a baby. According to the 1860 census, Watkins enslaved 27 people aged 6 months to 69 years at his plantation near Moores Ordinary Post Office.

When Richard left for Ashland, Mary took charge of the plantation and its household. When Mary and the children moved to her mother's plantation near Worsham, at most nine miles away, she left an overseer in charge of daily management.

The Confederate States of America had a postal service, but Richard and Mary Watkins relied upon friends or extended family to deliver letters. Richard kept Mary's letters (and those of others) in his haversack and took them home on his furloughs.

Richard's company rode 30 miles on June 26. They arrived at Richmond after dark and slept in a tobacco factory. Richard wrote to Mary the next morning that they had been cheered along by people who lined the roads and provided ice water and other refreshments. Finding insufficient fare at their lodgings in the morning, the members of Richard's company received permission to breakfast in hotels.

Captain Thornton of Company K appointed Richard quartermaster after their arrival at Ashland on June 28. "Think that after keeping house during the war for 60 men," he wrote, "I will be able to relieve you entirely of housekeeping when I return."

Richard asked Mary to send him a small trunk "packed with shirts drawers & socks & collars" via their tobacco agents, McKinney and Dupuy. On July 1, 1861, Mary wrote that she was packing a trunk, and that her mother had brought "a pillow, four or five bottles of blackberry bounce and some ginger cakes" to put in the trunk.

Blackberry bounce is made by combining blackberries, sugar, and liquor and letting the mixture sit for months. Mary's mother was Emily Howe, a native of Princeton, Mass., who came to Virginia as a schoolteacher in the 1830s and married planter Asa Dupuy.

The family was long associated with the Presbyterian Church, which makes Emily's proffered gift of liqueur a matter of some interest to those who would sort the totally abstemious from the merely temperate. Sadly for Richard and his messmates, there was too much room in the trunk and Mary could not secure the bottles to her satisfaction.

Richard's situation early in the war--comfortable, able to receive a trunk from home--stands out in contrast to that of men and boys coming from farther afield. Shortly after Arkansas' secession from the Union (the final vote was May 6, 1861), Virginia native William H. Tebbs and Hamburg lawyer Van H. Manning raised two companies in Ashley County.

When the two companies arrived at Vicksburg, the Confederate army rejected them. Manning traveled on to Montgomery (then the Confederate capital) to petition Arkansas delegate Albert Rust for help. Rust got the companies into the army and returned to his home at Champagnolle in Union County, to help raise eight more companies. All 10 would come together in Lynchburg, Va., to form the Third Arkansas Volunteer Infantry Regiment (CS).

On June 24, 1861, the day the Prince Edward Dragoons mustered, Captain D.A. Newman led his Company F out of Rockport, Hot Spring County. They arrived in Little Rock within two days and boarded the steamboat Chester Ashley for Pine Bluff.

Meanwhile, at Tulip in Dallas County, Captain George Alexander organized his Company I. They marched to Pine Bluff and joined Company F on the Chester Ashley. All sailed down the Arkansas and up the Mississippi to Memphis, where they boarded the Memphis, Charleston Railroad for Lynchburg. They arrived on July 3.

It is not clear how the other eight companies got from Arkansas (or Vicksburg) to Lynchburg. Ashley, Dallas, Desha, Drew, Hot Spring, and Union counties were all represented at the formation of the Third Arkansas Regiment at Lynchburg on July 5, 1861. They mustered in for three years, or the duration of the war. The regiment elected Albert Rust to be its colonel.

The letters quoted above are from the collection of the Virginia Museum of History and Culture (formerly the Virginia Historical Society). They are printed in "Send Me a Pair of Old Boots & Kiss My Little Girls: The Civil War Letters of Richard and Mary Watkins, 1861-1865," edited and published by Jeff Toalson (2006). Toalson's notes and appendices are a rich source of information as well.

Information about the Third Arkansas Volunteer Infantry Regiment came from their Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry (written by Mark Christ) and an article by Orval E. Allbritton published in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly (Vol. 16, No. 2; Summer 1957).

Additional information came from the free and slave schedules of the 1860 U.S. Census. In 1860, Albert Rust enslaved 21 people in Bartholomew Township, Desha County. Van Manning owned five slaves. W.H. Tebbs (sometimes spelled "Tibbs") does not appear in the slave schedule, but a likely brother named Obadiah (of Union County) enslaved 15 people.

Brooke Greenberg lives in Little Rock. Email brooke@restorationmapping.com.

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