GEORGE
RABB
The Civil War Memoir
of a Catawba County Tar Heel
Edited by Rebecca Ikerd Alghrary
Foreword by Michael Hill
Published by Nathan
W. Moehlmann and Goosepen Press
Cloth: $18.95 | 80 pages | ISBN 978-0-9793631-1-5 |
August 2008
View sample pages
“When I told my father, he wanted to persuade me not to go. ‘No, don’t go, George, and I will send you to school,’ he told me. He warned me that I was not going into a frolic, but I wanted the excitement.” George Washington Rabb, of Newton in Catawba County, North Carolina, enlisted in the Confederate Army as a sharpshooter on April 27, 1861. He was nineteen years old. Standing on the shore at Sewell’s Point, he would watch the Merrimac and Monitor duel to a draw, “a dog fall,” he describes it. His regiment, the Twelfth, would fight in many of the Civil War’s major battles – The Seven Days, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg – and Rabb would lose his leg at Fisher’s Hill. At eighty-eight years old he recorded his deployments. A remarkable memory and eye for detail distinguish Rabb’s account, vivifying the war’s brutality and its interludes of mercy, as retiring across the Potomac after Sharpsburg, he shoots down McClellan’s pursuit “right and left” and nearly jams “the river with dead men and horses”; accepts an enemy invitation to a game of Seven Up during a flag of truce; scavenges the pockets of fallen Federals; protects a prisoner, whose hat bears the near-miss of a minie ball; and is attended, during his convalescence as a new amputee, by a red-headed visitor with “curls hanging down her back” whom Rabb would marry five and a half decades later. With a foreword by Michael Hill, Research Supervisor at the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, and an introduction by Rebecca Ikerd Alghrary, the editor and Rabb’s grandniece, George Rabb: the Civil War Memoir of a Catawba County Tar Heel ?“will lend,” as Alghrary writes, “to further appreciation of our Union and the cost of its preservation. And the cost was high.”
George Rabb is available directly from the publisher: please add $4.00
shipping & handling and for in-state purchases 7% sales tax ($1.33).
Thirty percent of the sales price benefits the Catawba County Museum of History,
Historic Murray's Mill, the Harper House/Hickory History Center, and the Hickory
Museum of Art when GEORGE RABB is purchased in their respective stores.
Very little could be added to GEORGE RABB - The Civil War Memoir of a Catawba County Tar Heel that would convey a better picture of this Catawba County hero. Researchers will seldom find the account of a soldier's life written in a way that better captures the imagination as this book does. Rebecca Ikerd Alghrary has done a marvelous job of research and has skillfully presented it. The war background and the letters of George Rabb are prerequisite to understanding Catawba's participation in the War. Never before seen pictures, together with footnotes and a bibliography make this book a worthy biography and a great read about a local hero. --Derick S. Hartshorn |
| Clothbound, 80 pages, $18.95. George
Rabb is available directly from the
publisher. Please add $4.00 shipping &
handling and for in-state purchases 7% sales tax
($1.33). Catawba County residents may
wave the shipping and handling fee and opt for
free delivery within Goosepen
Studio & Press - George Rabb Book |
