[2] He joined the Ninth Mississippi Volunteer Regiment of the Confederate States Army as a private in March 1862.

[1] On March 15, 1862, the seventeen year old Rogers and his brother William enlisted as privates in the Semmes Rifles, which became Company H of the Ninth Mississippi Volunteer (Infantry) Regiment.

Rogers was wounded twice and was commissioned a first lieutenant at the age of nineteen, for gallantry at the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee.

At the war's end in May 1865, Rogers walked nearly a thousand miles from North Carolina to his home in Mississippi.

[4] Rogers was elected as a Democrat from Arkansas's 3rd congressional district and Arkansas's 4th congressional district to the United States House of Representatives of the 48th United States Congress and to the three succeeding Congresses, serving from March 4, 1883, to March 3, 1891.