The Army of Tennessee in War and Memory, 1861-1930
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2016 Experiencing Defeat, Remembering Victory: The Army of Tennessee in War and Memory, 1861-1930 Robert Lamar Glaze University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Cultural History Commons, Military History Commons, Other History Commons, Social History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Glaze, Robert Lamar, "Experiencing Defeat, Remembering Victory: The Army of Tennessee in War and Memory, 1861-1930. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2016. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/3860 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Robert Lamar Glaze entitled "Experiencing Defeat, Remembering Victory: The Army of Tennessee in War and Memory, 1861-1930." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in History. Stephen V. Ash, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Luke E. Harlow, Daniel Feller, Martin Griffin Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Experiencing Defeat, Remembering Victory The Army of Tennessee in War and Memory, 1861-1930 A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Robert Lamar Glaze August 2016 Copyright © 2016 by Robert L. Glaze All Rights Reserved ii Abstract This dissertation explores the meaning of the Civil War in the South by examining white Southerners’ perceptions of the Army of Tennessee from 1861 to 1930. While scholarship on the war’s memory is immense and growing, little of this literature examines the memory of the Confederacy's war effort in the western theater—the area of operations military historians now deem central to the war's outcome. This project rectifies that oversight by examining white Southerners’ memory of the Army of Tennessee in the post-war decades. Unlike Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy’s primary western field army suffered a near endless string of battlefield defeats and a revolving door of incapable, egotistical, and irascible commanders. Its wartime record is hardly complimentary to the Lost Cause which insisted on the martial, moral, and masculine superiority of Confederate officers and soldiers. An examination into the popular historical memory of the Army of Tennessee reveals two significant developments that change our understanding of how post-war white Southerners conceptualized the Confederate war-effort and processed the trauma of defeat. First, despite historians’ insistence that white Southerners focused their attention and memories on Lee and his army, the western theater occupies a more prominent place in the post-war Confederate mind than previously thought. Second, unlike that of the eastern army, the Army of Tennessee’s memory was constructed in a fragmented manner that allowed for the circumvention of its wartime record. For the army to maintain both prevalence in Confederate memory and synchronicity with the Lost Cause narrative of the war, it could not be remembered in the same holistic manner as “General Lee’s Army.” In focusing their memories on isolated moments, contingencies, units, or individuals—as opposed to the army as an inclusive institution—ex- Confederates succeeded in reconciling the army’s record with the Lost Cause. iii Table of Contents Introduction: The Fragmented Memory of the Army of Tennessee……………………………………………..1 Chapter One: Failure in the Heartland: The Wartime Operations of the Army of Tennessee...............................8 Chapter Two: “His death may have lost the South her independence”: Albert Sidney Johnston and Civil War Memory…………………………………………………………………………………………..38 Chapter Three: “On what models shall we mold the characters of our children?”: Remembering the Army of Tennessee’s High Command…………………………………………………………………….69 Chapter Four: “That gallant, human rampart”: Remembering the Army of Tennessee’s Common Soldiers…………………………………………………………………………………………105 Chapter Five: “The battle fields rendered illustrious by your victories”: Contingencies and Moments in the Army of Tennessee’s Memory………………………………………………………………….139 Chapter Six: “The indifferent notice of neglected stepchildren”: Forgetting the Army of Tennessee……….175 Conclusion: “That other Immortal Army”…………………………………………………………………...198 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………201 Vita.…………………………………………………………………………………………….221 iv Introduction: The Fragmented Memory of the Army of Tennessee On May 26, 1900, the Roger Hanson Camp of the United Confederate Veterans and the Virginia Hanson Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy convened in Winchester, Kentucky, to observe Confederate Memorial Day. The date, long recognized in many Southern states, was selected to commemorate the Army of Tennessee’s surrender to William T. Sherman at Durham Station, North Carolina, in 1865. Attorney L. H. Bush’s oration was similar to countless others given by former Rebels and their descendants in the thirty-five years since the capitulation of the Confederacy’s primary army of the western theater. Confederate soldiers had been brave and pious, Bush reminded the crowd. They had faced unflinchingly a numerically and materially superior enemy. They had fought not for the perpetuation or expansion of slavery but for the principle of states’ rights, and did so with the steadfast support of white Southern women. We have gathered this day, he went on, to “draw aside the curtain from some of the beautiful pictures which hang high on memory’s walls. The chiefest [sic] picture in our group of treasures is the picture of that spotless, that immortal Virginian, the hero of Appomattox, the ideal of our heart of hearts, for the very sound of the name of Robert Edward Lee fills every true Southern heart with an indescribable charm.” Lee was not the only Lost Cause idol Bush invoked; Stonewall Jackson, John Pelham, and Jeb Stuart were all cited as proof of Confederate martial superiority, valor, manhood, and Christianity. But Bush then reminded his audience of something memorialists and historians would later forget: “Virginia is not the only State that weeps for her children that are gone.”1 1 Confederate Veteran 8 (1900): 310-12. Hereafter Confederate Veteran will be cited as CV. 1 Bush was one of many white Southerners in the postwar decades with a memory of the Confederate war effort that encompassed more than Robert E. Lee, his army, and the Old Dominion. In 1866 a popular Southern periodical published a flattering profile of General Sterling Price, a Confederate cavalryman who had served primarily in the trans-Mississippi theater. Before chronicling Price’s Civil War career, the author asked his readers: “Who with the soul of a man, though he be the most unconditional advocate of the Union of the States, can fail to have his loftiest admiration kindled, in studying the life and characters of such men as Lee, Jackson, the Johns[t]ons, Beauregard, the Hills, Cleburne, Forrest, and Price?” In these men, veterans of every theater of the war, “we find Washingtonian dignity and virtue, piety, science, energy, valor, dash and love of country in most eminent relief.”2 On October 10, 1900, Virginia veteran Claudius Baker Denson spoke before the North Carolina Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Raleigh. Acknowledging the powerful role of women in shaping Confederate memory, he told the audience that should the hundreds of thousands of dead Rebel soldiers rise from their graves their first words would be: “Thank God for the Daughters of the Confederacy.” He then proceeded to the main topic of his speech, Jefferson Davis. The Confederate president should be commemorated for many things, argued Denson: not only his abilities as a soldier, statesmen, and orator, but also his Christian faith. One of Davis’s greatest achievements, he asserted, was his record as commander in chief. “It has been well said, ‘Men judge Napoleon by his marshals.’ Judge Jefferson Davis and his cause by his chosen chieftains.” The great chieftains of the Confederacy, in Denson’s opinion, were “Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston, . Stuart, Beauregard, . Forrest, . Polk, Pender, Longstreet, Hardee, Hampton, . Stephen D. Lee, 2 The Land We Love 1 (1866): 364. Hereafter The Land We Love will be cited as TLWL. 2 Hood, . Cleburne, . Gordon, . Pickett—where shall we pause in the role of the immortals?”3 Six years later, Army of Northern Virginia veteran James Britton Gannt gave a speech in New Orleans at the sixteenth annual reunion of the United Confederate Veterans. With a nationwide reconciliatory spirit gaining ascendency in the years following the Spanish American War, Gannt assured the men in his audience that their conduct in the Civil War had earned them the North’s