The Chickamauga Campaign

Series statement

civil war campaigns in the heartland The area west of the Appalachian Mountains, known in Civil War parlance as “the West,” has always stood in the shadow of the more famous events on the other side of the mountains, the eastern theater, where even today hundreds of thousands visit the storied Virginia battlefields. Nevertheless, a growing number of Civil War historians believe that the outcome of the war was actually decided in the region east of the Mississippi River and west of the watershed between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Modern historians began to rediscover the decisive western theater in the 1960s through the work of the late Thomas Lawrence Connelly, particularly his 1969 book Army of the Heartland, in which he analyzed the early years of the Confederacy’s largest army in the West. Many able scholars have subsequently contributed to a growing historiography of the war in the West. Despite recent attention to the western theater, less is understood about the truly decisive campaigns of the war than is the case with the dramatic but ultimately indecisive clashes on the east coast. Several years ago, three of my graduate students pointed out that the western theater possessed no series of detailed multiauthor campaign studies comparable to the excellent and highly acclaimed series Gary W. Gallagher has edited on the campaigns of the eastern theater. Charles D. Grear, Jason M. Frawley, and David Slay joined together in suggesting that I ought to take the lead in filling the gap. The result is this series, its title a nod of appreciation to Professor Connelly. The series’ goals are to shed more light on the western campaigns and to spark new scholarship on the western theater. :RRGZRUWK,QGH[LQGG $0 ...