James Monroe Rice

A 27 year old farmer in Prentiss County, he enlisted as Private, Company E, 2nd Mississippi Infantry on 7 August 1861. He was sick in a hospital in Richmond, VA in April 1862 but returned to his Company and first saw combat at Seven Pines, VA on 30 May.

He was wounded in the chest, "shot through [the] left lung just above the heart", and captured in action at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862.

He was treated at US Army General Hospital (GH) #4 in Frederick, MD from 28 September to 28 October 1862 when he was transferred to GH #7. He was sent to Fort Delaware and transferred to Fortress Monroe, VA on 15 December 1862 for exchange. He was in the General Hospital in Petersburg by 18 December, furloughed for 40 days on 21 January 1863, and discharged for disability on 12 March (or April) 1863.

He returned to Mississippi and was captured or taken into custody by Federal troops at Corinth, MS on 6 October 1863. He apparently refused to be exchanged and was prepared to take an oath of allegiance, but was held in the prison at Alton, IL until 4 April 1864 when he was sent to Fort Delaware again. He was there from 6 April until he was finally released on 7 June 1865.

He had "contracted sore eyes as a prisoner" and had his right eye removed after the war. He was a farmer at Saltillo "west of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad" in Lee County, MS to at least 1880. In 1900 he was living with his son-in-law in Guntown, Lee County, and first applied for a pension from which he was receiving payments by 1902. In 1905 he was living in Baldwyn, Lee County.

Giving his residence as Prentiss County, he entered the Confederate Soldier's Home - The Jefferson Davis Bouvier Memorial Home - in Biloxi on 4 July 1906 at age 73 and died there on 23 October.

Maryland wound and hospital details from the Patient List.1 Thanks to Dr. Susannah J. Ural and her team at USM and their Beauvoir Veteran Project for providing a stack of information about Rice including US Census records, extracts of his Compiled Service Records, his 1900 and 1905 Pension applications - sources of the quotes above, and the register page noting his entry in Beauvoir.

His birthplace is seen variously as Alabama and South Carolina; his parents and older children were born in Alabama, so that seems most likely. He married Mary Ann (Serena) Strickland (1825-?) in 1855 in Itawamba County, MS, and they had at least 6 children. At the 1900 US Census he reported he had been married 45 years, but his wife was not enumerated in the same household. He wrote that he was unmarried in 1905.

10/1833 in AL

10/23/1906; Biloxi, MS; burial in Beauvoir Confederate Cemetery, Biloxi, MS