Washington Louisiana of Artillery During the Battle of Fredericksburg
Today Daniel Hubbard Willis, Jr. (born 1839) enlists in the Confederate Army at Camp Moore, Louisiana, as a Private in the 5th Company Battalion, Washington Artillery of Louisiana. In March 1864, he fights in Raxdale’s Company E of the 16th Louisiana Regiment, and is promoted to 2nd Sergeant on March 5, 1865, as the war is drawing to a close. Captured and imprisoned by the Union army, he is paroled at Meridian, Mississippi on May 14, 1865.
Following the war, Willis returns to Louisiana and marries Julie Ann Graham, a Methodist who soon converts to Willis’ Baptist faith. The son and grandson of Baptist preachers, Willis after the war becomes a rancher and the father of eleven children.
Willis dies in 1900, and his obituary notes his wartime service and lifelong devotion to the Confederacy in glowing language:
He participated in all the hard battles of that army and for bravery, soldierly bearing, discipline and devotion to duty, he was unexcelled in his entire Brigade. He was made Orderly Sergeant of his Company at an early period of the war. It has always been said by his surviving comrades that when any particularly dangerous service was required, such as scouting parties to ascertain the position and movements of the enemy, he was always selected for the place, and never hesitated to go, let the danger be what it may.
He was for a long time connected with the famous Washington Artillery, and at the battle of Chicamauga so many horses of the battery to which he was attached were killed that they had to pull the guns off the field by hand to keep them from falling in the hands of the enemy.
He was paroled at Meridian, Miss., in May of 1865, and brought home with him a copy of General Gibson’s farewell address to his soldiers and of him it can be truly said that through the remaining years of his life he followed the advice then given by his beloved commander.
His love for the Southern cause, and for the men who wore the gray, was not dimmed by years, but he lived and died firmly convinced of the justice of the cause for which the South poured out so much of her best blood and treasure…Before death he expressed a wish that he might see his children who were at home, especially Randall L., his baby boy, whom he had named in honor of his beloved Brigadier General, Randall Lee Gibson. He also requested that his Confederate badge be pinned on his breast and buried with him.
White Baptists in the South – veterans of the war and the generations following – by and large remain convinced of the “southern cause” (white supremacy and black slavery) for decades following the war. With slavery abolished, many white Baptists (as do many other whites in the South) turn to violence (often in the form of the Ku Klux Klan) and laws favoring white citizens to keep black citizens in subservience and poverty and away from polling stations. Willis may or may not have been a member of the Klan, but if he were, he would have been in company with many other Baptists of the South.
Sources: Randy Willis, “The Life and Times Daniel Hubbard Willis, Jr. & Julia Ann Graham Willis” (link); see obituary, Alexandria Town Talk, June 23, 1900, and Andrew B. Booth, “Records of Louisiana Soldiers and Louisiana Confederate Commands,” (New Orleans, La. 1920) Vol. I: 1115)
