Puritans in the woodpile, regicides too. The demons of the 17th century, or, 'that's not who we are.'

A new spirit entered history several centuries ago. Part one of two

In 1861, General Braxton Bragg, then in Mobile, Alabama training the volunteers flocking to the Southern colors, was ordered by President Jefferson Davis to the railroad junction of Corinth, Mississippi. There he would combine his men with those of General Albert Sidney Johnston and counter the U.S. move into Tennessee. The untested armies would clash in April 1862, a bloody chaos known now as Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing. But first, General Bragg needed as escort: bodyguards and to courier messages between headquarters and field officers.

Also knocking around south Alabama: Company K, 3^rd Alabama Cavalry. Raised in Dallas County by Robert Smith, a local planter and veteran of the Seminole Wars, it came to be known as the Crocheron Light Dragoons for John Jay Crocheron, a New Yorker of Huegenot origin who moved to Alabama in the 1820s. He bought land, planted a crop and was wildly successful. By 1860 he had over 200 slaves at his Elm Bluff plantation on the Alabama River.

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