This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.


Tories in the Carolinas in 1780 and 1781, established his permanent home in South Carolina, and married Marion Francis Baxter?s great grandmother, Margaret Gregg Scott Gordon, one of the heroines of the Revolution.
Surely the spirit of his Revolutionary sires had an abiding place in the heart of Marion Francis Baxter.
This book recounts with graphic detail and with simple truth how a teenage Mississippi boy, Marion Francis Baxter, Private, Company E, 20th Mississippi Regiment, served the Confederacy with unwavering constancy and undismayed valor in hardship and battle from the autumn of 1861 when he underwent his baptism of fire in the mountains of western Virginia until the spring of 1865 when the Confederacy collapsed.
Reading it recalled some words I spoke several years ago when I had the honor of making the dedicatory address at the unvailing of a monument to the Confederate Color Bearer, which the eleven States of the Old Confederacy and the border States of Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri had placed upon the battlefield at Gettysburg.
In closing my dedicatory address of that occasion, I said:
"When one ponders the story of the soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy who fought at Gettysburg and in countless other engagements on land and sea, he cannot avoid putting this question to history: What inspired these men to fight so bravely, always against great odds and often unto death?
"The assertion that they fought to perpetuate slavery does not suffice to answer the question. Most of them did not own or expect to own a single slave. Indeed, few of them had any material stake whatever in the victory of the Confederacy.
"The question has been answered by one who knew these men well and loved them much. Almost two score and ten years after he had served with gallantry as a lieutenant of the Confederacy at Gettysburg, Dr. Randolph McKim, a beloved Episcopal minister of Washington, answered the question in words of unforgettable beauty, which are engraved upon the memorial
V


Baxter, Marion Francis Marion-Francis-Baxter-Bio.-v
© 2008 - 2024
Hancock County Historical Society
All rights reserved