Dear friends:

This is totally haunting!

It is the actual voice of a soldier from the U.S. Civil War!   It is the voice of Julius Franklin Howell, a corporal in the 24th Virginia Cavalry.

Impossible, you say?

Here is how is happened.

On April 9, 2005, The Virginian-Pilot newspaper describes Howell's great-great nephew, Russell E. Darden, a Civil War buff.  It took years for Darden to uncover the full story of his distant uncle, Howell, the Civil War veteran who became a college president, and who addressed the U.S. Congress.  Howell lived for more than a century.

Finally, Darden got a telephone call from a man at the University of Texas who had somehow heard of his quest for knowledge about his relative. In the university’s archives was a recording of Howell on a wax cylinder (long before tape recorders) -– made in 1944, Darden believes, when his uncle was age 98.

That would have made Howell born in 1846, and age 15 when the war began.

The recording is extremely clear and totally intriguing.  He describes his motivation for fighting, and he says it was not to preserve slavery, which he opposed.  He said that General Lee had already planned to free the slaves.

His description of how, as a prisoner of war, he first heard of Lincoln's assassination is fascinating.

The article and recording can be found at http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=84525&ran=187608 (I hope this works).  Click on "Play audio."  (If too many people are trying to access it at the same time, keep trying.)

What a rare privilege and peek at actual history!

Jim