A Year of Starvation Amid Plenty or How a Confederate Soldier Suffered from Hunger and Cruelty in a Prison of War During the Awful Days of the Sixties

Belton, TX, 1910. Three Quarter Leather. Very Good+ binding. 16mo. 40 pp. First edition in book form. Issued in self-wrappers, this copy has been bound in three-quarter morocco with corners and cloth over boards by Sangorski & Sutcliffe. Binding bright; contents clean throughout. From the library of noted Confederate collector, Charles R. Sanders, Jr. with his bookplate on the rear pastedown.

Born in Georgia, Robert Little (1837-1926) served in Company I, Alabama 44th Infantry. In this narrative he recounts being captured in Racoon Valley, TN and then being moved from "inn" to "inn" starting with the Chattanooga penitentiary, then to Nashville, and Louisville, KY where he spent a night or two until he and his comrades finally arrived at Camp Morton in Indianapolis where he was held from October 1863 to March of 1865. He catalogs numerous, gratuitous cruelties and abuses endured at the hands of guards as well as deprivations of food and means of warmth during two bitter Midwest winters. The stories are largely a series of vignettes that are roughly chronological throughout with occasional anecdotes gathered from fellow prisoners in the years following the war. A fascinating account from a Confederate prisoner of war.

Originally these stories were printed in his local newspaper in 1891. He writes in his Foreword, "Since [1891] the years have come and gone and with my few remaining comrades I am growing old and not many days or years remain to me here below" (p. 4). This first edition in book form is undated but given his Foreword was likely issued the first decade or so of the 20th century. Extremely rare in commerce. Even institutional holdings are remarkably thin with only 2 copies according to OCLC (24298714), both held at University of Texas libraries. Dornbusch II, 78. Modern reprint of Little's work will be included in the purchase; uncommon in its own right.