Linda, the rest of the story -- the other conscripts -- is a bleak one, indeed. I have copies of some letters one of them wrote to his wife back in Calhoun County -- several of the conscripts were neighbors there.

His letters are real heart-breakers. When he was conscripted, he left a wife and several young children behind. He wrote how terribly he missed his family, and he was especially concerned that his youngest child, a little girl apparently 3 or 4 years old, would forget him before he came back from the war. He wrote of the small, poignant things of home that he missed. He also wrote about some of his fellow conscripts -- neighbors of his -- who had died, and asked his wife to inform the families. He may have had a premonition of his own death, because in his last letter, written before the battle of Gettysburg, he asked his wife to make sure his children didn't forget him if he was killed.

After that letter was written, he was wounded and captured at Gettysburg, and died as a prisoner of war -- almost five months to the day after he was conscripted. His wife never remarried, and in her latter years lived on a Confederate widow's pension.