Daniel Wadkins Cantrell

GEDCOM Note

Notes from Military Service event: Daniel was a Confederate soldier in the American Civil War. He being from DeKalb County, Tennessee, enlisted in the Confederate Army at Smithville for a year, and was sent to Estell Springs near Tullahoma, Tennessee. On may 24, 1861, he was placed in Company A under Captain L. N. Savage and sent to Camp Trousdale north of Nashville where his company was organized into the 16th Regiment of the Tennessee Volunteers under Col. John H. Savage in June 1861.
The latter part of April, 1862, Daniel's year of enlistment expired, but a Confederate conscript law was passed at Richmond which retained men of his age in military service for the duration of the war.
Daniel was wounded at the battle of Chickamauga and left for dead. A story passed down through his descendants related that after the battle, nothern soldiers looking for their wounded and dead, found him alive sitting humped over at the foot of a tree with a bullet hole through his chest and back. When offered medical aid, he refused it while saying that he wanted to get on with the business of killing damn yankees. He was taken prisoner, however, and given medical care which involved drawing a silk cloth through his chest to clean the wound.
His discharge from federal prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, dated November 20, 1865, states that he enrolled in the U.S. Infantry, on October 20, 1864, for a year. It may be that he did this to escape hard prison life. One unofficial report stated that he worked in the nothern military mail service after being taken prisoner.
His discharge papers describe him as being twenty years of age in 1865, five feet four inches tall, dark complexion, dark hair, and hazel eyes.