Nelle Mulligan’s father served in the Confederate Army

By Rachel Haynie

Veterans sometimes close up around their war memories. They can’t or won’t talk about what happened out there. Fortunately, Nelle Horton Mulligan’s father was one who talked, and he passed on to his baby daughter many of his experiences.

As one of the state’s few remaining Daughters of the Confederacy, Mulligan has lived out her own sequel to Allan Guganus’ best–selling novel and screenplay, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. She crafted the sequel simply by living 103 years. She remembers her father’s stories with great fondness and respect.

Howell Foster Horton, born December 4, 1844, slipped away from his up-country home at age 15 to enroll at the Citadel. By mid-year 1862, cadets set aside their books and took up their rifles in defense of beleaguered Charleston. Federal blockades united off Charleston Harbor.

One June 4, cadets formed a company in the South Carolina Partisan Rangers. A month later, the Rangers were incorporated into the 16th Battallion, South Carolina Cavalry, later to become Companies A and F, 6th South Carolina Cavalry.

By now a legal age 18, Horton enrolled in the 6th, returned to Charleston, and was sent to Adams Run to join his classmates, already hard at work defending the swampy coastal islands around the harbor. “The closest thing to training most of them had was hunting squirrels and rabbits,” Mulligan said.

Horton’s picket post on John’s Island was attacked, then overwhelmed February 9, 1864. By nightfall he was a prisoner in the hold of a Federal warship, on his way to a prison camp on Hilton Head Island. “It was a man-made mud cave,” Mulligan said. “They had no blankets and very little food each day.” She said they developed every disease imaginable.

The Union captors figured death for the prisoners was eminent and didn’t relish the idea of digging graves in the frozen earth, so they let their wards go. Horton disappeared off the rolls of both armies. Although the young soldiers were assumed dead, they were trudging through South Carolina swamps, living on wild berries and whatever animals they could catch and kill.

“They made it for nine months,” Mulligan said. “Then they reached Virginia, and my father was placed under the command of General J.E.B. Stuart,” a Confederate leader Horton so admired he kept his picture on the wall for the rest of his life.

Howell’s return to his unit got him there just in time for the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5–6 and Spotsylvania Court House on May 8–19. Mulligan believes her father, captured for a second time, arrived at Pea Patch Island off the Delaware coast in mid–May, not April 21 as Union records indicate.

“Fort Delaware was the most dreaded prison camp of all,” Mulligan said. Rations were reported to be hard tack (small crackers), thin soup, and a small square of meat. Howell’s way out, after surviving horrible treatment, was as part of a prisoner exchange. He received an honorable discharge in late-October, 1864, and returned home.

As his health returned, he sought a future and married young Margaret Roach from near Rock Hill. “He carried the mail for a while,” Mulligan said, “until he realized it cost him more to buy hay for his horse than the $1 a day he was paid. He knew he couldn’t support a family on that. Somehow he bought those 240 acres, which wasn’t considered much, and started carving out a farm.”

A good provider, for his family and his neighbors, Horton remained patriotic throughout his life. “My father went to every (veterans’) reunion held in South Carolina,” Mulligan said.

Mulligan said her father loved to sing the old war songs like Tenting Tonight, and of course Dixie. “He would dance when they started singing that, and he’d throw his hat in the air.”

“The last one he went to was in Orangeburg in 1925, and I went with him.” He was 80 years old; a year later he died, leaving his 22–year old daughter to cherish his memories.

Mulligan recounted many of these stories for prize–winning author Mary W. Schaller for her compendium of Confederate Daughters’ stories, Papa Was a Boy in Gray. Mulligan said she is still proud to be his daughter.