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He died before I matured sufficiently to know what to ask about his experiences during the war. In researching this history I have often longed to talk with him in order to unravel some knotty question. His extant memoirs are all short, tantalizingly laconic, and	lacking in	detail. At Fort Donelson,	for instance,
"We whipped	the Yanks	and were surrendered."	What a	story is
behind that	statement,	involving the disgrace	of	two	general
officers of	the Confederacy, the beginning	of	the	Nathan
Bedford Forrest legend, and the elevation of U. S. Grant to the attention of the nation.
I resolved some day to research, develop, and write the story of his service with Adams Rifles, Company E, 20th Regiment, Mississippi Volunteers. His service took him to western Virginia in 1861 to serve under Robert E. Lee, for both a first campaign. It ran the gamut thereafter from Fort Donelson and capture, prisoner at Camp Douglas in Chicago, exchange at Vicksburg in September of 1862, north Mississippi under Earl Van Dorn, Fort Pemberton, mounted infantry during the Vicksburg campaign, courier for Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman, rounding up deserters in south-eastern Mississippi, the Atlanta campaign, Franklin, and Nashville. After Nashville he became separated from his command and fought irregular warfare from Selma, Montgomery, (Fort Tyler to his final surrender in South Carolina.
We have tried in this book to chronicle the War for Southern Independence as it involved a young teenaged youth from south Mississippi. He was thirteen when he enlisted at Handsboro on the coast, and he was not yet eighteen when he surrendered and walked from Hamburg, S. C., to Handsboro, Mississippi.
Marion Francis Baxter, as did his namesake kinsman during the Revolution, fought for independence, an inherent and unalienable right; he fought with courage, manliness, and devotion; and in his own words states, "My heart is centered in the Lost Cause".
May this volume add to the understanding of our inheritance.
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