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INTRODUCTION
On June 14, 1928, at the home of his oldest daughter in Logtown, Mississippi, death removed Marion Francis Baxter from the thinning ranks of the Confederate living. He was my grandfather, and he occupies a small niche in the history of the War for Southern Independence.
Grandpa was forty-three years old when my father, Joseph Clay Baxter, was born on August 17, 1890. He was almost sixty nine when I was born on July 16, 1916. When he died I was not quite twelve. Yet, he left me with an indelible memory of him -stalwart, head erect, penetrating blue eyes, shoulders square, chin up, 6 feet 2 inches tall, and at eighty weighed 185 pounds. From the first conscious moment of meeting him, I looked upon him with awe and adulation.
In the mid-twenties, father and mother took their four sons from our home in Jackson to the Mississippi Gulf Coast for a vacation with kinfolk in Logtown and Pearlington. We stopped on the Old Spanish Trail at Mississippi City and visited Beauvoir, the last home of President Jefferson Davis. Beauvoir had become a home for Confederate veterans, their wives and widows, and grandpa was living there. I remember him sitting on a rocking chair that sunny summer day. He had a commanding presence.
For several years he stayed with us when the Legislature was in session in Jackson. Confederate veterans were given priority on certain jobs at the Capitol. Grandpa was Sergeant at Arms for the House of Representatives in 1926, and had held other jobs in other years. When he came home from work I would climb up on his lap and ply him with questions about the great conflict. My abiding interest and fascination with the War for Southern Independence had its genesis on my grandfather?s lap.
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