Duncan McRae was born around 1840 in South Carolina. He married Marion V. Heise on June 8, 1859. They lived in Kershaw District, South Carolina, and McRae worked as a laborer. He enlisted in the Confederate army in 1862 and mustered in as a private in Company E of the 2^nd South Carolina Infantry. The regiment took part in the Battle of Antietam, the Battle of Fredericksburg, the Battle of Chancellorsville, the Battle of Gettysburg, the Battle of Chickamauga, the Overland Campaign, the siege of Petersburg, and the Shenandoah Valley campaign.

 

McRae was wounded near Strasburg, Virginia, on October 13, 1864. As he later explained, he “was struck with a minnie Ball above the left groin passing through touching the spine.” Confederate officials sent him home to recover, and he settled in Columbia, South Carolina. He remained devoted to the Confederacy, insisting in September 1865 that a cousin had “died in a just cause nobley defending his Country.” Nonetheless, he confessed that the “war has been an awfull curse on many of us in this country as well as else where. I lost every thing I had [in the] world by Shermans Raid. The country for many miles around is a barren waste.” He died sometime after September 1865.

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