Charles Anderson Raine or C.A. Raine (1834-1902) is my 3X great grandfather. Fortunately, he wrote an autobiography at the end of his life. Without it, most of the details of his story would be lost to history.
After a family tragedy, Charles left home as a young teenager to make his way, learning the job of a clerk which would help him later in life as a military administrator and businessman. He enlisted in a local company of volunteers in Halifax County, Virginia, at the onset of the U.S. Civil War, rising from corporal to Major. He saw combat across Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania as a part of the Army of Northern Virginia and was finally captured in 1864, spending the rest of the war as a P.O.W. in Delaware.
After the war, Charles married and became an entrepreneur with several failed businesses in retail and tobacco manufacturing; but, in 1879 he found his stride and became a successful tobacco manufacturer and leading citizen in Danville, Virginia. Illness, tuberculosis, forced him to take on partners in 1892 and step away completely in 1893. Without his steady hand, the business crashed in 1895 and he lost everything. At the point that he wrote the autobiography in 1897, he was suffering from a terminal illness and his family was in reduced circumstances.
He clung to his faith and his family, his greatest accomplishment. Charles died of his illness in 1902. Eleven of his 12 children survived into adulthood and he has many descendants across the country today.
C.A. Raine & Co. 