Hellbent: The life and Death of Confederate Cavalryman William Meade McMechen

By: Charles Culbertson

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 26 mins

Publisher's summary

When the afternoon train struck and killed a shambling old mental patient in Staunton, Virginia, on February 19, 1930, no one suspected that the frail and battered corpse had once been a hellbent-for-leather Confederate cavalryman. But he had been. William Meade McMechen had abandoned his pro-Union family and stormed out of western Virginia in 1861 to fight for the South in some of the Civil War’s most pitched battles, and when the war was lost, went West to carve out a career in the mining industry. The life and descent into mental illness of this forgotten Confederate cavalryman is chronicled in “Hellbent,” by historian Charles Culbertson. Included is information obtained from official Western State Hospital records, which were released only after months of repeated efforts by the author and McMechen’s remaining family. “Hellbent” is a valuable addition to the canon of information about the American Civil War, the Confederacy and one of its most colorful warriors.