Civil War reenactment participant shot in Isle of Wight County(Reb halts Yankee victory celebration)

WAVY.com ^ | Sep 27, 2008 | Katie Collett

[Lazamataz]

A few more of these incidents, and the Civil War might start over it.

[Lazamataz]

I’m thankful it wasn’t a Parrot rifle.

He might have hit him in the Parrot Head!

[Pilsner]

The cap and ball revolvers used during the civil war era didn’t use cartridges. You poured a measured charge of black powder into each cylinder, then placed a round ball on top. The ‘ramrod’ is permanently mounted to the gun, under the barrel, and was used to seat the ball in the cylinder. Follow this up with a dab of grease over each ball, to lubricate and also to prevent multiple cylinder discharges. Cap each nipple at the back of the cylinder with a percussion cap, and the gun is ready to shoot.

As the song The Devil's Right Hand says:

My first pistol was a cap and ball Colt,
shoot as fast as lightening, but she loads a mite slow..

[Colonel Kangaroo]

I am doin what can be done. Though I would note that in several counties of southern Indiana and Illinois, there were towns where formations of young men left their communities heading south as a unit to avoid Yankee conscription and jine up with their Southron cousins.

There was also at least one wreck of a Yankee troop train near Washington, IN, near Tunnelton. Whether poor maintenance and increased wartime rail traffic caused a genuine accident or the event was the result of actions by Dixie agents, Copperhead sympathizers or both is not certain, though still suspected.

A mirror image of what happened in the mountain regions of the South. I had relatives take to the hills to avoid Confederate conscription and then joined up with the Union army when the liberators from the North came. Others didn't wait and crossed the mountains and rivers to join the US Army early in the war.

There even was a mirror image suspicious troop train accident in our old home county of Bradley in Tennessee when a reb troop train had a deadly derailment near the small hamlet of McDonald.

The presence of Confederate sympathizers in the North and Union sympathizers in the South would suggest that the conflict was more a civil war and less a war between the states.