Appalachian Figures
On a warm May day in 1865, at Meridian, Mississippi, a Confederate cavalry colonel from tiny Scooba stood in line and signed his name to defeat. The printed form in front of him was titled simply “Parole of Honor.” In a neat hand someone filled in the space for his rank and identity: “Colonel R. O. Perrin.” The document recorded that he had been a physician and farmer from Kemper County before the war, and that he had commanded the 11th Mississippi Cavalry Regiment in the Western Theater.
That slip of paper, now in the U.S. National Archives and digitized on Wikimedia Commons, is one of the clearest surviving traces of Robert Oliver Perrin. It hints at a life that stretched from the upland backcountry of South Carolina, through the Alabama frontier and the hill country around Scooba, to a postwar medical practice in Eutaw, Alabama. Census schedules, muster rolls, pension files, and county newspapers let us follow that path and place Kemper County’s cavalry colonel back in his world.
From Edgefield to the Choctaw Corner
Robert Oliver Perrin was born 3 November 1823 in the Edgefield District of South Carolina, a hotbed of secessionist politics that produced more than its share of Confederate officers, including his younger brother, Brigadier General Abner M. Perrin.
By mid century the Perrins had joined the broader stream of white families moving out of the older plantation belt into Alabama and Mississippi. The 1850 U.S. census lists Robert O. Perrin in Pickens County, Alabama, where he appears as a young physician and farmer.
A decade later the 1860 population schedule for Kemper County, Mississippi, shows “R. O. Perrin” in the Scooba post office district with his wife E. A. and children, including a son Abner, evidence that family naming traditions had followed them west. The census that year recorded 5,641 enslaved people in Kemper County, a stark reminder that Perrin’s medical and farming career unfolded inside a slave society where Black labor underwrote white prosperity.
Later biographical sketches and the structured data attached to his National Archives and Wikimedia entries echo the census trail. They place him in Pickens County in 1850, in Kemper County in 1860, and in Eutaw, Alabama, by the late 1860s, always as some combination of physician, farmer, and army officer.
“Southern Guards” and a Kemper County cavalryman
When secession came, Perrin was well positioned to help mobilize his neighbors. In April 1861 he mustered a local company at DeKalb, Kemper County, known as the “Southern Guards,” into state service for one year. Later sources on the 13th Mississippi Infantry and First Manassas note that this company was mustered in by Captain R. O. Perrin, a local printer named Jacob Rosenbaum among the men who signed on that spring.
Kemper County genealogical pages and unit histories also show Perrin as the original commander of a mounted company raised around Scooba. MSGenWeb’s sketch of the Second Mississippi Cavalry Battalion notes that Company C, the Kemper County company, “was originally commanded by Captain R. O. Perrin, later to head the 11th Mississippi cavalry as its Colonel.”
Dunbar Rowland’s Official and Statistical Register of the State of Mississippi provides the official state summary. In his section on “Perrin’s Battalion” he lists Lieutenant Colonel R. O. Perrin and Major Abner C. Reid and notes that the battalion drew its companies from Kemper and neighboring counties. Those companies included Perrin’s own, enlisted around Scooba and the rail line that gave the little town its reason to exist.
By the early war period Perrin had become one of the men through whom state and Confederate authorities reached Kemper County. When troops went from Scooba and DeKalb into Confederate service, his name appears again and again in muster summaries and regimental sketches as the officer who raised them.
Perrin’s Battalion and the “maligned milish”
As the Confederacy shifted from offensive campaigns to desperate defense, Mississippi turned to state troops to guard railroads, depots, and bridges. These units occupied an ambiguous status. They were not quite militia, not quite regular Confederate formations. In wartime correspondence they were often mocked as “milish,” a term that later historians like Tracey L. Barnett have used to explore their reputation.
Perrin’s men belonged squarely in that world. According to Rowland’s Military History of Mississippi and the later compilation by H. Grady Howell Jr., Perrin’s Battalion of Mississippi State Cavalry was organized from several county companies on 7 July 1863. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s Confederate regimental finding aid lists “11th Mississippi Cavalry Regiment (Perrin’s Cavalry Battalion)” and “Perrin’s Battalion Cavalry, Miss. State Troops” among its series, indicating that muster rolls, correspondence, and veteran questionnaires survive in Box 306 and related files.
The battalion’s composition shows how deeply it was rooted in east central Mississippi. A widely used transcription based on Rowland and Howell lists “Perrin’s Company,” raised in Kemper and Neshoba Counties, as Company A, with other companies drawn from Choctaw, Noxubee, Winston, Newton, Monroe, Oktibbeha, Chickasaw, and Leake Counties. Later, when the battalion expanded into a full regiment, Company F, “Steele’s Company,” represented another Kemper based outfit.
MSGenWeb’s roster for the 11th Mississippi Cavalry, Company A, adds an important local detail. It notes that Co. A, or “Perrin’s Company,” enlisted at Scooba on 26 April 1863 for three months, with Robert O. Perrin as captain. From there the company and its colonel stepped onto a much larger stage.
From state troops to the 11th Mississippi Cavalry
By early 1864 Confederate authorities could no longer afford the luxury of separate state formations. Perrin’s Battalion was brought into Confederate service as the 11th Mississippi Cavalry Regiment, with Perrin promoted to colonel and Henry L. Muldrow of Starkville as lieutenant colonel.
The National Park Service’s Civil War Soldiers and Sailors database, which abstracts the Official Records and compiled service records, summarizes the transformation concisely. The 11th Mississippi Cavalry “was formed during the spring of 1864 using Perrin’s Battalion State Cavalry as its nucleus” and went on to serve in the Western Theater under commanders including Colonel Robert O. Perrin, Lieutenant Colonel H. L. Muldrow, and Major Abner C. Reid.
Angelfire’s long standing transcription of Rowland and Howell fills in the county geography behind that sentence. In its listing of companies composing the 11th Mississippi Cavalry it again identifies Company A as Perrin’s Company from Kemper and Neshoba Counties and Company F as Steele’s Company from Kemper County, a reminder that Perrin’s regiment rested on a very specific circle of communities around Scooba, DeKalb, and the east central hill country.
For the men in the ranks, those designations were not abstractions. In December 1864, a Kemper County widow named Sarah Ann Loftin appeared before local officials to apply for support. In her sworn statement, later abstracted by genealogists, she identified her late husband Henry W. Loftin as a private “of Captain Steele’s Co, Perrin’s Regt. of MS volunteers, commanded by Col. R. O. Perrin.” That pension file at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History gives us a small but vivid glimpse of how Perrin’s name traveled back home as shorthand for the regiment in which husbands and sons served.
“Robert O. Perrin’s Cavalry” in the field
The official record sketches the combat trail of Perrin’s regiment but rarely slows down to notice the individuals in it. CWRGM’s entry on “Confederate States of America. Army. Mississippi. Cavalry Regiment, 11th” and Rowland’s summaries place the regiment in S. D. Lee’s and Samuel Ferguson’s cavalry commands during the Meridian and Atlanta campaigns.
In February 1864, as Sherman’s troops advanced toward Meridian, Perrin wrote to Confederate President Jefferson Davis regarding his battalion’s status and duties. M. B. Connolly’s thesis on Reconstruction in Kemper County cites this letter from the Official Records as evidence of how local elites like Perrin tried to shape state troop policy and protect their communities’ interests even while serving the Confederate war effort.
Later, Union accounts remembered the regiment from the other side of the line. A history of the 5th Illinois Cavalry refers to “Robert O. Perrin’s Cavalry” among the Confederate mounted forces encountered in Mississippi campaigns, an indication that his name, and not only his unit number, was known to Federal officers. Other battle studies, such as work on the Nash Farm battlefield south of Atlanta, list the 11th Mississippi Cavalry under Perrin among the regiments present in late war actions.
The National Park Service notes that the regiment eventually served in Ferguson’s Brigade in the Army of Tennessee and then in other cavalry formations in the Western Theater. By the spring of 1865 fragments of the command were scattered across Mississippi and Alabama. Perrin himself was among those who traveled to Meridian to sign paroles as the Confederate military structure collapsed.
How did his men see him
Surviving letters and memoirs from Perrin’s troopers are thin on the ground, but a few collections and county histories give us hints. The Thornton Family Collection at Mississippi State University Libraries preserves a long fragment of a letter from S. R. Thornton of Company B, Perrin’s Battalion, written in 1863. The finding aid notes that this fragment “discusses attitudes toward Robert O. Perrin and other matters,” suggesting that officers were frequent topics of campfire conversation in east central Mississippi just as they were elsewhere.
Family and county histories from Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas also preserve glimpses of his regiment. Winston County historian J. J. Lewis, in a section on Company D of Perrin’s Regiment, describes it explicitly as “Perrin’s Regiment of Cavalry of which Robert O. Perrin, of Scooba, was Colonel and Henry L. Muldrow, of Starkville, was Lt. Colonel.” Texas genealogical sketches for men like Hugh McDuffie McAfee note service in Company B of the 11th (Perrin’s) Mississippi Cavalry, and Caddo Parish memoirs mention captains in Company G wounded at battles such as New Hope Church in 1864.
From these scattered notes we can infer that Perrin’s regiment meant different things to different people. To some it was the unit in which they saw their first combat. To others it was a social identity they carried west after the war. To a widow in Kemper County it was a line item in a pension application that might keep her children fed.
Parole at Meridian and a doctor’s last years
The final wartime appearance of Perrin in official records is the Meridian parole document dated 14 May 1865. The War Department form records his name, rank, and physical description and notes that he had been a “physician and farmer from Kemper County” who had commanded the 11th Mississippi Cavalry.
After the war he returned to medicine rather than politics. By 1868, biographical data compiled from census and local records place him in Eutaw, the seat of Greene County, Alabama. There he built a practice and took on public health responsibilities in a town and county wrestling with Reconstruction and the recurring threat of yellow fever.
On 26 September 1878 the Eutaw Whig and Observer printed a notice titled “Quarantine Rules and Regulations,” which named “Dr. R. O. Perrin” as president of the Greene County Board of Health and outlined emergency measures for travelers and river traffic. The outbreak that prompted those rules was part of the devastating yellow fever epidemic that swept the lower Mississippi Valley that year. Perrin’s tenure as president of the board of health lasted only about two weeks.
On 22 October 1878 the Montgomery Weekly Advertiser carried an item in its “Alabama News” column reporting the death of Dr. Robert O. Perrin at Eutaw on 8 October, describing him as a prominent local physician and giving the cause of death as heart disease. He was fifty four.
A mid twentieth century compilation of Greene County tombstone inscriptions, later echoed by online cemetery databases, records his grave in Mesopotamia Cemetery at Eutaw. The stone reads “PERRIN, Robert Oliver, b. 3 Nov 1823 d. 8 Oct 1878.” Between that quiet marker and the crumbling parole paper at Meridian stretches the arc of a life that linked the Border South, the Confederate high command, and small town medical practice.
Memory, myth, and the “Perrin’s Regiment” story
Like many Confederate officers whose fame was mainly local, Perrin’s postwar reputation has been shaped less by monument building than by genealogy and county history.
Modern unit summaries on sites like FamilySearch and OurFamilyTree list Perrin’s Battalion and the 11th Mississippi Cavalry among the Confederate units raised in Kemper County, noting Company A (Perrin’s Company) from Kemper and Neshoba and Company F (Steele’s) from Kemper. Angelfire and MSGenWeb pages compile rosters and county of origin data from Rowland, Howell, and archival records and present them as ready made tools for family researchers.
Historians of Mississippi’s home front have started to reconnect those spreadsheets to their social context. Timothy B. Smith’s work on the Civil War in Mississippi and Tracey L. Barnett’s study of the much criticized state militia underline how formations like Perrin’s Battalion sat at the intersection of conscription policy, class relations, and local defense. M. B. Connolly’s thesis on Reconstruction in Kemper County uses Perrin’s 1864 letter to Jefferson Davis to show local elites struggling for control over manpower and security, foreshadowing postwar conflicts that would unfold under Reconstruction governments and later under Redemption.
Seen through that lens, “Perrin’s Regiment” is not simply a list of companies or a romantic title on a pension file. It is one of the instruments by which white residents of Kemper County tried to protect a slaveholding social order that was already coming apart, then adjusted to a postwar world where former Confederates remained community leaders even as Black residents pushed for their own rights and protections.
Why a Kemper County cavalry colonel belongs in Appalachian history
Kemper County sits well west of the Blue Ridge, but the pathways that brought the Perrin family from Edgefield, South Carolina, through Alabama into Mississippi were the same upland migration routes that peopled much of greater Appalachia. Men like Robert O. Perrin carried with them a culture that blended small town professional life, backcountry farming, and a willingness to take up arms in defense of slavery and local autonomy.
For family historians and students who trace their ancestry to Scooba, DeKalb, or the surrounding communities, Perrin’s story offers a way to anchor vague references to “Perrin’s Regiment” or “Mississippi cavalry” in specific places, dates, and records. His census entries, service record, parole, and tombstone can be checked and scanned. His regiment’s musters sit in labeled boxes at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. His brief presidency of the Greene County Board of Health left a paper trail in an Alabama newspaper.
At the same time, his career reminds us that many of the doctors, farmers, and small town notables of the nineteenth century upland South were also Confederate officers and slaveholders or beneficiaries of slavery, and that their community leadership after 1865 rested on a lifetime of experience inside that system. Remembering Perrin clearly, with both his professional skill and his role in a pro slavery rebellion in view, helps us tell a more honest story about the backcountry South and its long entanglement with bondage and war.
Sources and further reading
U.S. Census, 1850 and 1860. Population schedules for Pickens County, Alabama, and Kemper County, Mississippi, list Robert O. Perrin as a physician and farmer, with household details that place him in Scooba by 1860. Wikimedia Commons+2MSGW+2
Kemper County slave statistics. M. B. Connolly’s research on Kemper County cites the 1860 census schedules, noting more than 5,600 enslaved people there on the eve of the war. ODU Digital Commons
Compiled Service Records, 11th Mississippi Cavalry. National Archives microfilm M269, including the file for “Perrin, Robert O., Colonel, 11th Mississippi Cavalry.” Wikipedia+1
Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Series 390. Confederate Regimental Files, including “11th Mississippi Cavalry Regiment (Perrin’s Cavalry Battalion)” and “Perrin’s Battalion Cavalry, Miss. State Troops” with muster rolls, correspondence, and veteran questionnaires. Finding Aids
Parole of Honor, Meridian, Mississippi, 14 May 1865. Original parole for Colonel R. O. Perrin, now in the U.S. National Archives; high resolution image available via Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons
Widow’s pension application, Sarah Ann Loftin, 6 December 1864. Kemper County widow’s statement naming her husband as a private in Captain Steele’s Company, Perrin’s Regiment of Mississippi volunteers. Abstracted in genealogical compilations but held in original at MDAH. Scribd
Thornton Family Collection, MSS. 282, Mississippi State University Libraries. Civil War era correspondence, including a significant fragment from S. R. Thornton of Company B, Perrin’s Battalion, discussing attitudes toward Colonel Perrin. Finding Aids
“Quarantine Rules and Regulations,” Eutaw Whig and Observer, 26 September 1878. Public health notice naming Dr. R. O. Perrin as president of the Greene County Board of Health. Wikipedia
“Alabama News,” Montgomery Weekly Advertiser, 22 October 1878. Brief obituary noting Perrin’s death at Eutaw from heart disease and describing him as a prominent physician. Wikipedia
Mesopotamia Cemetery, Eutaw, Greene County, Alabama. Tombstone for “PERRIN, Robert Oliver,”recording dates 3 November 1823 to 8 October 1878, transcribed in Greene County cemetery records and echoed in online databases. Find a Grave+1
Dunbar Rowland, Official and Statistical Register of the State of Mississippi and Military History of Mississippi, 1803–1898. Standard state level references summarizing Perrin’s Battalion, the 11th Mississippi Cavalry, and related state troops. Internet Archive+1
H. Grady Howell Jr., For Dixie Land, I’ll Take My Stand and related works. Modern reference that compiles company origin data and movement summaries for Mississippi Confederate units, including Perrin’s command. Angelfire+1
National Park Service, Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System. Unit summary for the 11th Mississippi Cavalry, confirming its formation from Perrin’s Battalion and listing Perrin, Muldrow, and Reid as field officers. National Park Service
Tracey L. Barnett, “Maligned ‘Milish’: Mississippi Militiamen in the Civil War” (M.A. thesis, University of Southern Mississippi, 2017) and related journal article. Analysis of Mississippi state troops that situates Perrin’s Battalion within the broader system of Confederate era militia and state forces. Facebook
Timothy B. Smith, Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front. Context for Mississippi’s wartime home front and state troop system, including discussion of cavalry formations like Perrin’s.
M. B. Connolly, “Reconstruction in Kemper County, Mississippi” (M.A. thesis, Old Dominion University, 1989). Detailed county study citing Perrin’s 1864 letter to President Jefferson Davis and using it to explore wartime politics and Reconstruction dynamics in Kemper. ODU Digital Commons
MSGenWeb and Kemper County military pages. Rosters and brief histories for the 2nd Cavalry, Company C, and 11th Mississippi Cavalry, Company A, noting Perrin’s role as original commander and the Scooba enlistment of “Perrin’s Company.” MSGW+1
“11th Mississippi Cavalry (Perrin’s),” Angelfire transcription. Widely used summary based on Rowland and Howell giving company origins, commanding officers, and a brief history of Perrin’s Battalion and the regiment. Angelfire
FamilySearch and other Kemper County genealogy guides. County level overviews listing Confederate regiments raised in Kemper, including Perrin’s Battalion and the 11th Mississippi Cavalry, with company origin notes useful for family research. FamilySearch+1
The Robert Coleman Family (Fairfield County Historical and Genealogical Society publication). Includes a sketch of a Coleman descendant in Company D, Perrin’s Regiment, explicitly identifying Perrin “of Scooba” as colonel and Muldrow as lieutenant colonel. Public Library+1
Various county and family histories from Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. Memoirs and biographical notes that mention service in “Perrin’s Regiment of Cavalry” and recall actions in the Meridian and Atlanta campaigns. Internet Archive+2Dokumen+2