CAPTAIN BEN LANE POSEY
Commander, Company K, 38th Alabama Infantry Volunteers CSA

By Art Green

Kate Cumming, the Scots nurse from Mobile, in her book written soon after the War Between the States called Ben Lane Posey eccentric. It appears that she was correct. Ben left a wide path to follow but even at that it is difficult to learn all the answers after 145 years.

Ben Lane Posey was born in South Carolina and was educated in law at South Carolina College in Columbia. He served for a time in the Mexican war with Company E of the Palmetto Regiment of Abbeville. That period of his life is sketchy but must have given him the experience and skills that he thought useful to the Confederacy.

He moved to Mobile, Alabama, and began practicing law upstairs at 12 Dauphin Street. Governor A. B. Moore commissioned Ben on February 25, 1861, to serve 12 months in the Battle for Southern Independence. He was age 32 when he enlisted. During the first year of war he commanded an artillery battery in Pensacola, Florida, called the Red Eagle Battery, Co. D, 1st Alabama Volunteers. A poem called The Battle Song exists that was dedicated to Ben Lane Posey and his Red Eagle Battery.

After the South learned that a long and hard struggle would ensue Ben sought and was authorized to form a company of men to serve in the Confederate Infantry. He was a tireless recruiter and signed a few men far north in Alabama of his Mobile location. The company was to become Company K and assigned to Colonel Charles T. Ketchum’s 38th Alabama Infantry Volunteers. Ben called his company the “Joe Murrell Bayonets.” The name possibly came from a local supporter who contributed money for arms, ammunition and uniforms.

Early muster rolls indicate an unusual situation in Company K. First it only contained just the bare minimum with 63 men, even with the recruiting in central Alabama. Most of the men were from Mobile and Baldwin Counties area but the last nine men mustered are from Fayette County and may have been “borrowed” to make out the required numbers. Then apparently the trouble began.

The first muster roll dated on June 12, 1862, and signed by Posey shows four of the men under arrest awaiting trial by Court Marshal. At least one of the men appears unblemished in later muster rolls. Ten men are shown as having deserted. It appears that the men all deserted in May 1862. This was early on while the regiment was at camp in Mobile and had not seen any action as yet. All of this was out of character with the other nine companies of the 38th.

Captain Ben Lane Posey apparently loved to see his writing in print and several lengthy articles by him appear in Mobile papers of the time. Some articles are signed Ben Lane Posey, and some others signed Bayonet are suspected to be his work. Later we see some letters to the paper signed only Ben Lane. After the regiment was assigned to the Army of Tennessee in spring of 1863, and after the serious loss of the Army of Tennessee at Missionary Ridge, Captain Posey wrote a very long article to a lady friend in Mobile that was printed in the Mobile paper.

He tells of being lost in the dark on Lookout Mountain, having been left with some of his men, after falling asleep as the regiment withdrew. He was able with difficulty to locate the 38th on Missionary Ridge and rejoined them the next day. After the rout on Missionary Ridge, Ben charged into a group of mounted officers, thinking he was among Confederates, only to be confronted and asked to surrender by a Union Officer.

He was then taken with many others to a warehouse prison in Chattanooga to be transferred to a more northern permanent site. Ben, to his credit, jumped from a moving train of boxcars south of Nashville and escaped his captors. He writes of his hardship and struggle walking south to the Tennessee River where he will be safe on the Confederate-controlled south bank and makes it home for Christmas in Mobile in December 1863. In his letters to the newspaper Captain Posey was extremely critical of his superior officers and their loss at Missionary Ridge. He expressed his opinion that he possessed the key to winning the war.

Posey returned to his regiment during the Atlanta Campaign and began his letter writing to the press again. He even wrote a letter to Confederate President Jefferson Davis on September 22, 1864, just before the President’s visit to the Army of Tennessee on September 25, 26 and 27, 1864, near Palmetto, Georgia. He criticizes the Army command, and particularly General John Bell Hood and the withdrawal from Atlanta, with the destruction of the Army’s munitions. “This army has no confidence in the skill & capacity of General Hood. It has on the contrary, a fixed, ineradicable distrust of him, in this respect. I cannot be mistaken in this matter. This army will not, cannot make a successful fight under his command.” It is very surprising that the President granted him time on September 26, 1864. Their conversation is not recorded but there is the expected letter from Captain Posey to the press soon after outlining his complaints and recommendations.

In his Compiled Military Service Records are found some puzzling entries. Ben Lane Posey appears on a register of Ross Hospital in Mobile, admitted June 25, 1864, with vulnus sclopeticum (gunshot wound). Note that the regiment and Company K were north of Atlanta at the time. It is not known why he would be admitted to a hospital in Mobile. He was returned to duty on July 8, 1864. He was paid $260 dollars (2 months' pay) on December 15, 1864, awaiting trial by Court Marshal at Montgomery, Alabama, under arrest by order of Major General (H. D.) Clayton, Special Order No. 40/15 dated February 17, 1865. He was dropped from the rolls on February 17, 1865. At this point his story and trail are dim for a while.

Ben Lane Posey again appears around 1875, as editor of the Rosita Index in the silver mining town of Rosita, Colorado. He leaves Rosita in 1876, to practice law in Denver. Rosita is now one of the several western ghost towns. It is reported that Ben’s first wife died in 1881. He married Kate M. Lang on September 20, 1882, in Harrison County, Mississippi. Ben Lane Posey is shown as the owner of a local paper The "Seacoast Republican" in 1883. He died May 2, 1888, and is buried near downtown Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, in a family plot at Cedar Rest Cemetery with his wife and family. He had children and stepchildren.

Thus ends the story, for now, of Captain Ben Lane Posey.
August 23, 2005.

See the Confederate Veteran, Vol, 1, 2003, page 11- 23 for “Ben Posey’s Saga” and the Red Eagle Battle Song. By Art Green.

Read also Posey's Letter to the Newspaper about the Battle of Chickamauga
Posey's Grave
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