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Winner of the Fletcher Pratt Award and the Jefferson Davis Award A
companion volume to Army of the Heartland Near the end of 1862 the
Army of Tennessee began a long and frustrating struggle against
overwhelming obstacles and ultimate defeat. Federal strength was
growing, and after the Confederate surrender at Vicksburg, the
total Union effort became concentrated against the Army of
Tennessee. In the face of these external military problems, the
army was also plagued with internal conflict, continuing command
discord, and political intrigue. In Autumn of Glory, the final
volume of Thomas Lawrence Connelly's definitive history of one of
the Confederacy's two major military forces, Connelly analyzes the
factors underlying the army's failure during the last two years of
the Civil War. The army's military operations- including such major
battles and campaigns as Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Lookout
Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw Mountain, Peachtree Creek,
Atlanta, Ezra Church, Jonesboro, and Bentonville- are viewed in
perspective with its growing internal problems and the personality
peculiarities of its commanders. In late 1863 a well-organized
movement within the army against General Bragg failed. After his
departure, a semblance of the anti-Bragg organization still
remained, and subsequently the army's leadership became embroiled
in national Confederate politics. Connelly traces these growing
problems of command discord and political intrigue and examines
their disastrous effects upon the army's political fortunes.
Connelly's first volume, Army of the Heartland, explores the
military significance of the ""heartland"" of the Confederacy and
covers the army's operations from 1861 to late 1862. With the
completion of these two volumes, the author has narrowed the
historiographical gap between Lee's Army of Virginia and the
Confederacy's ""other army.
A companion volume to Autumn of Glory. Most of the Civil War was
fought on Southern soil. The responsibility for defending the
Confederacy rested with two great military forces. One of these
armies defended the ""heartland"" of the Confederacy- a vital area
which embraced the state of Tennessee and large portions of
Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Kentucky. This is the story of
that army- the first detailed study to be based upon research in
manuscript collections and the first to explore the military
significance of the heartland. The Army of Tennessee faced problems
and obstacles far more staggering than any encountered by the other
great Confederate force. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Lee's
army was charged with the defense of an area considerably smaller
in size. And while Lee's line of defense extended only about 125
miles, the front defended by the Army of Tennessee stretched for
some 400 miles. Yet the Army of the Heartland has heretofore been
given relatively slight attention by historians. With this volume
Thomas Lawrence Connelly, a native Tennessean, has brought
Confederate military history more nearly into balance. Throughout
the war the Army of Tennessee was plagued by ineffective
leadership. There were personality conflicts between commanding
generals and corps commanders and breakdowns in communications with
the Confederate government at Richmond. Lacking the leadership of a
Lee, the Army of Tennessee failed to attain a real esprit at the
corps level. Instead, the common soldiers, sensing the quarrelsome
nature of their leaders, developed at regimental and brigade levels
their own peculiar brand of morale which sustained them through
continuous defeats. Connelly analyzes the influence and impact of
each successive commander of the Army. His conclusions regarding
Confederate command and leadership are not the conventional ones.
More than a century after Appomattox, the Civil War and the idea of
the "Lost Cause" remain at the center of the southern mind. God and
General Longstreet traces the persistence and the transformation of
the Lost Cause from the first generation of former Confederates to
more recent times, when the Lost Cause has continued to endure in
the commitment of southerners to their regional culture. Southern
writers from the Confederate period through the southern renascence
and into the 1970s fostered the Lost Cause, creating an image of
the South that was at once romantic and tragic. By examining the
work of these writers, Thomas Connelly and Barbara Bellows explain
why the nation embraced this image and outline the evolution of the
Lost Cause mentality from its origins in the South's surrender to
its role in a century-long national expression of defeat that
extended from 1865 through the Vietnam War. As Connelly and Bellows
demonstrate, the Lost Cause was a realization of mortality in an
American world striving for perfection, an admission of failure
juxtaposed against a national faith in success.
Robert E. Lee was both a military genius and a spiritual leader,
considered by many, southerners and nonsoutherners alike, to have
been a near saint. In The Marble Man a leading Civil War military
historian examines the hold of Lee on the American mind and traces
the campaign in historiography that elevated him to national hero
status.
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