Sixth Kansas Cavalry in the Civil War & Appanoose County Volunteers

  During the Civil War a number of Jerome and other Appanoose County men served in Company B of the Sixth Kansas Cavalry, including my Great-Great-Grandfather David H. Hawkins; and William Bell, Calvin R. Jackson, Peter Sidles and Addison Pendergast who are buried in the Jerome Cemetery.   A complete list of the Appanoose county men who served in this unit during the Civil War was included in The History of Appanoose County, Iowa (1878) on pages 422 & 425.

  Some of the history of the Sixth Kansas Cavalry is provided in Wiley Britton's Memoirs of the Rebellion on the Border, 1863.   Philip Thomas Tucker writes in the Introduction to the Bison Book Edition:  "As no other Civil War account does, [it] fully illuminates and illustrates the character of the little-known conflict on the western border of the trans-Mississippi theater during the decisive year of 1863...It is considerably more revealing than many Civil War memoirs.  The publication date of 1882, almost two decades after the war, is misleading because Wiley Britton offers an intimate, first-person account.  His work is quite unlike the typical post-war memoir written long after the war and mostly from memory, resulting in many inaccuracies and exaggerations.  Indeed, it is actually a diary written during the decisive year of 1863 by the young soldier of the Sixth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry...and then rewritten by him as a published memoir.  He begins his remarkably factual and reliable account of the western border conflict on Christmas Day 1862." 

  The original edition of Memoirs of the Rebellion on The Border, 1863 by Wiley Britton [Chicago:  Cushing, Thomas & Co., Publishers, 1882] can be downloaded free from the Google Book Project. 

  Or, you can purchase the Bison Book Edition published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln & London, in 1993.