Remembering Thomas Lawrence Connelly, 1938-1991

Remembering Thomas Lawrence Connelly, 1938-1991 Emory M. Thomas The war will never be over. Let minié balls corrode, Confederate money crumble, and imitation battle flags rot. As long as there is a tear-jerking poem to be read, a droll statue to be unveiled, a cannon ball to be unearthed, a fast buck to be made—then there will always be a Confederacy. Grant, Sheridan, Sherman—they could whip Marse Robert Lee and Retreating Joe Johnston. But they will never whip that long gray line of genealogists, antique dealers, historians, promoters, and roundtable buffs—marching to the Gray Nirvana. That is the last paragraph of the first book Tom Connelly wrote, Will Success Spoil Jeff Davis? Then he was T. Lawrence (Larry) Connelly and a graduate student of Frank E. Vandiver at Rice University. I thought I knew him then. We played touch football and ate lunch at Sammy's with the rest of our graduate student chums. We alternated speaking in bibliography with gossiping about faculty members and each other. I knew that some Sundays Tom preached to small Church of Christ congregations in prairie communities outside of Houston. But to borrow a line about Robert E. Lee from Confederate diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, can anyone say that they know Tom Connelly? Tom took his Ph.D. from Rice in 1963 and taught at Presbyterian College, then at Mississippi State University. In 1969 Tom joined the Department of History at the University of South Carolina; this was his headquarters for the rest of his career and the rest of his life. When he died, he was Chairman of the Department and Caroline McKissick Dial Professor of History. Profoundly, sometimes painfully, shy, Tom rarely revealed much of himself in social settings. More than most historians, however, he opened himself when he wrote. For many years he wrote a weekly column for a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, and there readers could follow his life in small installments. Civil War History, Vol. XXXVII, No. 3, c 1991 by the Kent State University Press THOMAS LAWRENCE CONNELLY257 Larger themes appeared in his books. In the preface to Army of the Heartland, volume one of his two-volume (with Autumn ofGlory) history of the Army of Tennessee, Tom wrote about going often as a boy to Shy's Hill, the site of the near-annihilation of John Bell Hood's army on December 16, 1864. My ancestors left no swords, tintypes, medals, pension records—not even a letter. Perhaps they could not even write. But they were with Forrest, because my grandfather said so. Sometimes the entire archives of a soldier's record in the Army of Tennessee consists of a grandfather's tales. I remember how he leaned on the white-washed fence on his farm along Mingo Branch. . . . He spoke quietly of my three great-grandfathers. All were buck privates in Forrest's cavalry. One was a blacksmith for Forrest, and another deserted. A third had come to America from Cork at the age of fifteen. He joined the cavalry, but quit to drive steel on the railroad till he literally dropped on the tracks, dead with pneumonia at the age of twenty-four. His wife was only four feet ten inches tall, but managed to lock two of Buell's foragers in the springhouse where they almost died, and also outran a company of Wilson's raiders who wanted the black horse she was riding. Scores of personal experiences, a handful of tales related by an old man, and a shoe box of bullet fragments—such is one family's heritage in the Army of Tennessee. The axis of Tom's life was an imaginary line connecting Columbia, South Carolina, with Nashville, Tennessee. He loved the American south; especially did he love mountains and trout streams and country music. He sometimes went on the road with country singer and writer Tom T. Hall, and he fished with country song writer Bob McDiIl. He even wrote some country songs himself. I remember him saying words to the effect, "You cannot imagine how it feels to be driving along and hear your song on the radio. It's right up there...