Sir Henry Morton Stanley: Confederate

Sir Henry Morton Stanley, the nineteenth-century journalist and explorer now legendary for the comment "Doctor Livingstone, I presume?" was already on the road to high adventure in his "May of life". In 1859 at age eighteen, he arrived at the port of New Orleans, having left behind a harsh upbringing in Wales; he then traveled the Mississippi Valley as the protege of Henry Hope Stanley, a cotton broker and his adopted namesake, and later served in both the Confederate and Union armies and in the Union navy during the American Civil War. This section of Stanley's complete autobiography contains his exuberant, vivid recollections -- an entertaining mix of fact and occasional fabrication -- of commerce, manners, individuals, and attitudes in the late antebellum South, as well as his graphic, sobering descriptions of combat and captivity.

In a highly engaging style part Dickens, part Twain, Stanley recounts some of the details of his childhood torments to contrast them with the freedom he finds in America and his sonlike relationship to Henry Hope Stanley. He eve

Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr. is a recipient of the New Orleans Civil War Round Table's Charles L. Dufour Award for a lifetime of scholarship in the field of the Civil War. He lives in Chattanooga