William G. Stevenson

After a boyhood in Kentucky, William G. Stevenson moved to New York and then to Arkansas, where he entered into a business partnership with George Davis, a gentleman from Memphis. His heart and opinions still largely with the abolitionists and the North, Stevenson found himself surrounded by Southern firebrands, ready at the drop of a hat to fight and die for the right of their region to live and work as it always had. One April morning in 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, Stevenson found himself forcefully persuaded to join the Confederate army.

He described his wartime experience in Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army, a book published by the New York firm of A.S. Barnes in 1862. Stevenson's account—part memoir, part propaganda—was intended to shock and move the Northern public into throwing itself wholeheartedly...