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I ¤rst heard of William Cowan McClellan while listening as a young boy to the stories my grandmother Carter told while on the front porch of her home in Pulaski, Tennessee. Nancy White Carter was not above stretching the truth a little bit about her favorite ancestor who was a veteran of Robert E. Lee’s army. According to her, William was seven feet tall and was captured on the Round Tops at Gettysburg, where he was putting his size to use as a signalman. She also mentioned that he had been sent to prison and had written letters home to his family. As William had no further history presented in his behalf,I always assumed that he had died in prison. Over the years I had remembered bits and pieces of the story that would come back to mind whenever someone brought up the subject of the family in the Civil War, but I never took the time to look into it further. Some years later, having developed an interest in the history of the early Virginia frontier and its explorers of the seventeenth century,I had attempted to ¤gure out the exact routes that many of these explorers had taken in crossing through the Virginia Colony.After running out of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources, I turned to letters and journals of Civil War soldiers who served in the area hoping they might shed some light on the problem. While the effort was not productive, it did revive my interest in the Civil War, and from a new perspective of the soldier and not the battle¤eld. I remembered my grandmother’s stories , and I wondered if the family still had the letters. About the same time, a visit to Gettysburg sent me scrambling to discover the regiment in which my ancestor had served. A few years later at a Carter family reunion my aunt Polly Harwell Carter handed me a large shoe box tied up with a piece of string. She thought I might be interested in the contents of the box. Inside were photocopies of the Civil War letters of my great-great-grandfather Acknowledgments and Dedication William Cowan McClellan. The letters had been saved by the McClellan family and were handed down from William’s wife, Susan, to his daughter,Charlie,and then to her daughter,NancyWhite Carter.Immediately I started browsing through the unorganized letters and quickly discovered that my ancestor had served in the 9th Alabama Regiment, was not captured at Gettysburg, was not in the signal corps, and had not spent the rest of the war in prison. Inside were copies of his letters dated after the battle of Gettysburg, including letters from Petersburg, Virginia , dated August 1864. This short investigation got me started on a long process of learning who this man really was, and who the McClellans were. I had the opportunity to see the original letters at the home of my uncle and aunt, Robert and Jean Carter of Tullahoma, Tennessee, who have safeguarded them after my grandmother Carter passed away. Their sons, Robert Carter and William McClellan Carter (named after his ancestor ) will carry on after them. Bob and Jean helped me search the Lincoln County, Tennessee, land records and the genealogical room at the Lincoln County Library, and they helped me ¤nd the Cane Creek section of the county where the McClellans used to live. In Athens, Alabama, Philip Reyer of the Limestone County Archives was very helpful in going through the McClellan family ¤les. Also in Athens, the staff at the George Smith Houston House and Library were a great help in locating information about the family. It was a delight to meet with Faye Acton Axford and Elva Bell McLin of Athens, from whom I learned more about Limestone County, Alabama. They were also very helpful in furnishing me with many leads on the McClellan family and providing copies of many original documents and letters. Having discovered that William spent the last months of the war in Point Lookout Prison in St.Mary’s County,Maryland,my wife and I set out to visit the prison site. The prison was located at the very tip of Point Lookout, where the Potomac River ®ows into the Chesapeake Bay. There is little left of the original prison, and the staff at the visitors’ center sent us a few miles back up Route 5 to Leonardtown to look through the micro¤lms of the St. Mary’s County...

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