Rebel Correspondent by Steve Procko is the true story about a young man who joined the Confederate army seven days after his eighteenth birthday and served bravely for more than two and a half years until the war ended. He emerged as changed person. Nine hundred and 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.
A little over 36 years later, he decided to tell the world about his experiences. His autobiography was serialized in the Walker County Messenger, the weekly northwest Georgia newspaper published in the town of LaFayette, between 1901 and 1903. And then it was all but forgotten.
Review for Rebel Correspondent:
Mr. Procko, an Emmy-award winning documentarian and photographer stumbled upon Arba F. Shaw’s account of his life as a private in Company F of the 4th Georgia Cavalry under the command of Colonel 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 Mr. Procko. As he read the series of articles, he began to realize that this was a remarkable cache of history.
Mr. 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 Colonel 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, he 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 (Avery) that survive today.
In Rebel Correspondent, Mr. Procko, brings us Arba Shaw’s complete, original account and enhances it with meticulous research of his own, uncovering the backstories of many of his Rebel comrades and offering historical perspective on places and events Mr. 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 our 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 on Amazon.com on Oct. 1.
More information on The Rebel Correspondent and Mr. Procko can be found at RebelCorrespondent.com, SteveProcko.com, and HistoryBend.org