William Watson (sergeant)

William Watson (born 1826) was an author and soldier in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. He is most noted for an autobiographical book Life in The Confederate Army that he wrote after the war chronicling his army life.

William Watson was born in 1826 in the Scottish village of Skelmorlie, some twenty-five miles west of Glasgow on the Firth of Clyde. His father, a landscape gardener named Henry Watson, had been born in England. He had come to Skelmorlie in 1820 to lay out the grounds of Ashcraig, the estate of Andrew D. Campbell.

Watson immigrated about 1845 to the Caribbean Islands, where he worked as a civil engineer and occasional captain of sailing vessels. Sometime about 1850 he moved to Louisiana and by 1860 was part owner of a sawmill and a coal and steamboat business in Baton Rouge. When the Civil War broke out, he enlisted in the Confederate Army as a sergeant in the 3rd Louisiana Infantry and served in a number of military campaigns with the regiment. Life in The Confederate Army was published first in England in 1887.