Page 14 - Sorghum

Sorghum
13
died of pneumonia at Chattanooga and lies in an unknown grave with only jack rabbits to keep vigil.”
A year later Newton was old enough and joined the cavalry of a “nervous man,” Dr. J.S. Smythe, and drilled in Montevallo, Alabama. Upon completing the training he was sent to General Joe Johnston’s Army of Tennessee in Resaca, Georgia. On the way he passed a “farm house where there was a party and they were swinging the corner singing Honey My Love My Turtle Dove. This was enough to make me homesick.... We were in the Georgia campaign from Dalton to Atlanta and then under Hood from Atlanta to Nashville.” Thus he probably took part in the battles depicted in Gone With the Wind, including the burning of Atlanta.
He and his father became scouts for a General Loring near Nashville and met the famous cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forest, who after the war, founded the Ku Klux Klan. Newton was slightly wounded by “a piece of a shell” in the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, “the most desperate battle of the war. Seven thousand of the 20,000 engaged on our side were shot down in a very short time.”
From there he fought in Bentonville, North Carolina, the last large Confederate