Book excerpt: This is the history of the 13th Mississippi Volunteer Infantry Regiment, a premier Confederate unit of the American Civil War. The 13th was the original regiment of Gen. William Barksdale and a founding unit of his Barksdale's Mississippi Brigade. The brigade won lasting fame for its charge against the Union lines at Gettysburg on July 2,1863. This narrative by independent historian Dick Stanley is told through the extant diaries, letters and memoirs of the men who fought under the regiment's battle flag, 1861-1865.