The Battle of Fort Sumter: April 12–14, 1861

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In spite of Captain Pegram’s refusal, I persisted in urging him to take me, and at last he said: “There is only one thing that can be done; if you like to go as a sailor before the mast I will take you, but of course you will not dream of doing that.”

And so begins Francis Dawson’s life as a Confederate.

After fainting, failing to spot an enemy ship, and throwing at least a dozen buckets overboard, the Englishman finally gets his sea legs just as he finds dry land.

Once with the Confederacy, Dawson rose up through the ranks, sees action at Gettysburg and Antietam, imprisonment at Fort Delaware and lives to tell the tale after permanently resettling in the South.

Dawson manages to mix the tragic and the comic in a way that gives a kind of English sense of humour to what seems like a uniquely American experience.

First published seventeen years after the end of the Civil War, this extraordinary memoir is an important historical document not just because of its unusual eloquence and humour, but also because it is the only memoir of an English officer who served in both the Confederate army and navy.

Francis Warrington Dawson was born in London in 1841 to a reasonably wealthy, Catholic family, christened Austin John Reeks. Around the break of the Civil War, his family’s fortunes changed and Reeks’ father declared bankruptcy. The war was heavily romanticised in England at this time and Reeks saw his chance for wealth, honour and freedom in America. Upon his father’s insistence that joining the Confederacy would shame his family, he changed his name to Francis Warrington Dawson and set sail with the first captain he could persuade to take him.