re: Would one of you mind telling me where the Tiger mascot came from?

The truth is that they were scared shitless of the Louisiana Tigers. Some of my ancestors helped command this regiment at times, or tried too and the letters they wrote back of some of the funniest damn things you have ever heard.

Paraphrasing, "after spending two weeks breaking up repeated drunkeness, fighting and lawlessness etc, looking forward to more reasonable situation like charging union cannon positions outnummered 20 to one.

"We have convinced the troops that the yankees stole all the remaining rum, and have hidden it behind their lines thus ensuring us of a quick and complete victory, Howeverm once victory is secured, and the lack of veracity of our story is discovered I do fear for our safety."


From Harpers Weekly 1862 (Yankee view point)Complete lie btw.

ABOUT FINISHED.
GENERAL McCLELLAN telegraphs that the "Fourth Michigan have about finished the Louisiana Tigers." We fancy we shall have some more dispatches of this tenor.

These Southern bravoes, who call themselves "Tigers," and "Lions," and "Grave-diggers," and "Yankee-slayers;" who carry black flags, and refuse quarter to unarmed men; who dig up the corpses of our dead soldiers, and send their bones home to their lady loves as trophies—these creatures, who are a speaking illustration of the brutalizing effect of the institutions among which they have been reared, and whose savage instincts would appall the most ferocious native of Dahomey or Patagonia—these fellows can never withstand the onset of a Christian soldiery. They are capable. of assassinating a Union man, or of whipping a black woman to death; but when it comes to standing up in a fair fight against Northern men, in any thing like equal numbers, they run like hares. Brutality and manhood can no more coexist in the same individual than oil and water can mingle.

We are not sorry to hear that the "Louisiana Tigers" are "about finished." It is about time that some other of these Southern regiments, which have desolated the South and done their best to destroy the nation, were "about finished" too.