Autobiography and Reminiscences of John W. Carroll

My great grandfather Carroll immigrated to this country from Ireland many years before the Revolutionary War. Landing in Maryland, the family drifted into North and South Carolina and finally some of them to Tennessee. He and several brothers were in the American army during the entire war, as were also some of his oldest sons. Grandfather Joseph Carroll was about eighty years of age at the close of the Revolutionary War, as he has related to me many times by way of entertainment with many other stirring scenes calculated to live in the tablets of the mind of a small but intensely interested boy. He emigrated to Middle Tennessee in his young manhood, bringing with him five thousand dollars, quite a little fortune for that day and time, where he engaged in farming. Let me say in regard to his character that he was one of those big-hearted, open-handed Irishmen, who loved a dram and occasionally took too much, and when in those happy moods became endorser for other men, which finally nearly exhausted all his means, leaving himself and family in straitened circumstances. (Boys, become surety for no man.) He soon after emigrated to West Tennessee, settling in Henderson County, then sparsely settled. Here he recuperated somewhat, his lost fortune, but never fully. About this time war was declared by the United States against Great Britain. He immediately volunteered and took part in the battle of New Orleans, Jan. 8th, 1815. It was of great interest to me when a lad to have him relate to me some of the many incidents of camp life and of how he and some comrades on the evening before the battle walked down the line of battle and found one poor fellow down praying and crying, scared almost to death, before there had been a shot fired, and of how they upbraided him for his cowardice; about the death of Gen. Pakenham, the British general, etc. These recitals fired my youthful heart with a burning patriotism and how I wished to wear a uniform; to hear strains of martial music and the roar of cannon; and see glorious war. I thought such things would never come in my day, but alas! they did. Let the sequel tell.