About the Author

James Dinkins was born in Madison County, Mississippi on April 18, 1845, the son of a Southern planter. As a child, he was educated in private schools and later enrolled in North Carolina Military Institute at Charlotte in April, 1860 when he was fifteen years old. When the war began, he participated in the first battle at Bethel Church as a member of the corps of cadets and thereafter enlisted as a private in Company C of the 18th Mississippi Infantry, which became part of Barksdale's Mississippi Brigade, Army of Northern Virginia. In the first two years of the war, he saw action at Leesburg, Savage Station, Malvern Hill, Sharpsburg, and Fredericksburg. At age eighteen, he was promoted to the rank of Lieut. of Cavalry in April, 1863 and returned to Mississippi to serve as aide-de-camp to James R. Chalmers. When Chalmers' command became part of Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry in January, 1864, Dinkins had opportunity to observe the famed Confederate leader and participated in most of Forrest's raids and campaigns for the rest of the war. After the war, he was employed with the Illinois Central Railroad Company, working in Memphis and Jackson, Tennessee and Aberdeen, Mississippi. In his later years, he went into banking in Louisiana, edited a column for the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper and was a member of several historical societies. He died in Saluda, North Carolina on July 19, 1939 at the age of ninety-four.