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THE MACKALL JOURNAL AND ITS ANTECEDENTS Richard M. McMurry Historians studying the Confederate forces that operated in the Western theater of the American Civil War have always been faced with many problems from which their colleagues who deal with the more glamorous Virginia theater have been spared. The detailed movements of the Confederate forces, the information that the Southerners possessed about their opponents, and the day-to-day activities of the men who constituted the Confederacy's Western high command have often been but partly known. This lack of detailed knowledge is in sharp contrast to the history of many of the great battles in Virginia. For those engagements historians have traced the movements of many generals and of almost every regiment of both armies from the begining of the war to Appomattox. In Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861-1862, Thomas Lawrence Connelly catalogued the reasons why the Confederates who fought in the vast area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River have been relatively neglected by historians . These reasons are the "Lee tradition" in Southern literature; the scattered locations of the major Western battlefields and the relative isolation of many of them from the larger centers of population and tourism; the fact that "Southerners like a winner—and the Army of Tennessee rarely won"; the drabness of the commanders of the Western army, especially when contrasted with Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson , or Jeb Stuart of the Army of Northern Virginia; and the relative lack of source material for use in writing the history of the Western battles. This last reason is the crucial one. The comparatively unlettered Western Confederates simply did not leave behind a glittering collection of letters, diaries, and memoirs to match those of their comrades in Virginia. There was no Henry Kyd Douglas, G. Moxley Sorrel, George Cary Eggleston, or John Esten Cooke among the men of the Army of Tennessee. Also, as Connelly has noted, manuscript material relating to the history of the Western army is widely scattered.1 1 Connelly, Army of the Heartland (Baton Rouge, 1967), pp. viii-ix. Several of the author's colleagues on the faculty of Valdosta State College have read this paper prior to its publication. The paper owes much to their suggestions and criticisms. In addition, readers for Civil War History have made several very helpful com311 312CIVIL war HISTORY The dearth of material about the Western Confederates is even more serious when one studies the later campaigns of the war. The high casualties suffered by the Army of Tennessee in the Atlanta Campaign and in the ill-fated invasion of Tennessee thinned the writing as well as the fighting ranks. Many officers and men who could have left valuable accounts of their experiences fell at Resaca, Peachtree Creek, Franklin, Nashville, or in the other bloody engagements of 1864. Chaotic conditions in the Western states of the Confederacy disrupted mail routes and often drove families from their homes. Many letters, therefore , undoubtedly never reached their addresses. Thousands of other letters were captured by the Federals or destroyed when houses, trains, and government buildings were burned. Finally, the loss of large areas of the Western Confederacy to the Federals isolated thousands of Southern soldiers from their homefolk and made communication by mail difficult and at times impossible. All in all, the historian has relatively little material to use in working with the 1864-1865 history of the Western Confederates. To complicate matters further, it is now clear that one of the more important Confederate documents bearing on the last year of the war in the West is not the type of source that it was originally reported to be. Even more serious, is the possibility that this document was deliberately fabricated to enhance the reputation of one prominent Southerner and simultaneously to demonstrate that another former Confederate fully deserved the opprobrium that had been heaped upon him. When part three of Volume XXXVIII of the War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies was published by the Government Printing Office in 1891, it contained a document entitled "Journal of Operations of the Army of Tennessee, May 14June 4, 1864...

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