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On that May morning in Handsboro when Marion Baxter presented himself for enrollment, he told the company clerk that he was 18, and that was the age that appeared on the muster list. He was tall for his age, and it?s unlikely that ages of volunteers were being examined closely at the time. Marion?s older brother, John Wesley Baxter, was also a volunteer in the Adams Rifles, but whether he had enrolled before Marion is not known. It seems probably that he had enrolled first; certainly this would have been a powerful incentive for a 13-year-old boy to embark on such a hazardous course.
Marion Baxter?s patriotic zeal was understandable. He had been born in South Carolina (Sumterville, Sumter County) from the union of J. H. Baxter and Sarah Flagler. And after the family moved to Mississippi City, the fervor for the Southern way of life (and later for the Confederacy), so typical of South Carolinians, remained undiminished. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union; South Carolina forced the surrender of Fort Sumter. These events must have been discussed with pride in the Baxter household, and their impact on the young boy proved to be strong motivation for his enrollment in the Adams Rifles.
Once enrolled, Marion Baxter (now Private Baxter) was taken to the Handsboro Masonic Hall where a local tailor measured him for a uniform and then cut the outfit from jean, a strong, cotton twill from one of the North Carolina mills. It was dyed a butternut color from walnut hulls and copperas and likely was more effective in wearing endurance and camouflage than any other uniform North or South.
The uniform proper consisted of a short jacket and a pair of loose-fitting britches cut from the twill jean. Once cut by the tailor, the uniform was completed by Handsboro ladies who took their sewing machines to the Masonic Hall and established a workroom there.
The Uniform that Private Baxter received proved to be of practical, enduring design, though it certainly succeeded in violating almost every Confederate Army regulation set forth in 1861. These regulations called for a fancy outfit consisting of gray tunics, sky-blue trousers, double-brested gray overcoats with
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