TRUE TALE OF CONFEDERATE PRIVATE UNCOVERED
“Rebel Correspondent” by Steve Procko is the true story of Arba Shaw, a young man who joined the Confederate army seven days after his 18th birthday and served bravely for more than two and a half years until the war ended. He emerged as changed person.
Nine hundred fifty days of his life ticked by during his service and survival as a cavalry private. Then he returned to the peaceful farm life of his youth before all the madness. But he wasn’t just a farmer, he was also a writer.
Shaw served as a local correspondent from Cooper Heights writing regularly for the Walker County Messenger, the weekly northwest Georgia newspaper published in the town of LaFayette, under the tutelage of Nathan Campbell Napier and then his son, Nathan Campbell Napier Jr., from around 1880 until Shaw’s death in 1909. Shaw met Napier during his time in the 4th Georgia Cavalry in the Civil War as Napier served as a captain in the 6th Georgia Cavalry. The 4th and the 6th often traveled
together, which is how they likely met.
His autobiography was serialized in the Messenger between 1901 and 1903. And then it was all but forgotten. Steve Procko, an Emmy-award winning documentarian and photographer stumbled upon Shaw’s account of his life as a private in Company F of the 4th Georgia Cavalry under the command of Col. Isaac W. Avery while searching for information for a documentary series, “There’s History Around Every Bend.”
The down-to-earth accounts of the everyday life of a lowly private just struggling to survive one of the greatest events in American history fascinated Procko. As he read the series of articles, he began to realize that this was a remarkable cache of history.
Shaw’s memories of the events are rich in details of the names, places and events that he personally experienced during the Civil War. He was a son of the South, just a lowly cavalry private, one of hundreds in his regiment trying to survive day-to-day life, trying to understand the purpose of the turmoil he suddenly found himself thrown into.
He was there as the 4th Georgia rode into Tennessee in early 1863 and during the brutally cold winter campaign at Knoxville and Eastern Tennessee. He was seriously wounded at the Battle of New Hope Church and witness to the wounding of his commanding officer Col. Isaac W. Avery (who would one day become the editor of The Constitution, today known as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) on the very same day.
Recovering from his wounds, Shaw returned to the war and was wounded seriously again just five months later. He would suffer from the effects from these wounds for the rest of his life.
His eyewitness accounts are perhaps the only written record of some of the day-to-day activities of the 4th Georgia Cavalry that survive today.
In “Rebel Correspondent,” Procko, brings Shaw’s complete, original account and enhances it with research of his own, uncovering the backstories of many of his
Rebel comrades and offering historical perspective on places and events Shaw described so richly.
The book introduces to its 21st-century audience an important in-depth first-person account of one enlisted man’s experiences in the bloodiest and most controversial war in the country’s history.
“Rebel Correspondent” will be released as a paperback on Sept. 1. It will be available at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and other websites. The eBook will be released Oct. 1 on Amazon.com.
More information on “The Rebel Correspondent” and Steve Procko can be found at RebelCorrespondent.com, SteveProcko.com and HistoryBend.org