Partnership, the largest private repository of civil war archives in the world. [applause] imagine, that comes with a great cost and lots of work. This is a 3 million effort to andide storage, process catalog the collection, and in doubt this so it can be available to the largest possible audience. Were halfway there, and we welcome your help. Professor gallagher has received many awards, including the prize for the best book on the civil award for contributions to civil war studies, the lincoln prize, and the award for the best Nonfiction Book on the civil war. He was the founder and first president for the fou ndation of preserving civil war sites. Please join me in welcoming professor gallagher. Prof. Gallagher i am going to switch microphones. I am delighted to be here. It is always fun to speak in this room. Jamie wouldnt tell you how old he was when i was a mellon fellow here. I will reveal i had brown hair. It was a long time ago in deed. It was about that time i gave a lecture
American civil war at the university of virginia and a great friend to the Virginia Historical society. He has spoken here on several occasions and has done research here in the Rich Holdings of our civil war manuscripts. He was a member of the class in 1988. I wont tell you how old i was at that point. We were glad to have him then as today. He has also mined the collection of the Confederate Memorial Society at the museum of the confederacy for his essays. That question, that collection, as you may know, will be housed at the Virginia Historical society where it will be preserved, catalog, and digitized as part of a new Civil War Research center. This will be, through this partnership, the largest private repository of civil war archives in the world. [applause] as you might imagine, that comes with a great cost and lots of work. This is a 3 million effort to provide storage, process and catalog the collection, and in doubt this so it can be available to the largest possible audience
Put on the mantle piece so i was glad to get it. I thanked him for it and i was going to waco to do some research at baylor, wrapped it up in old dirty tshirts and put it carefully in my suitcase and went down to waco in the rental car the next day, spoke well and came back and went to the airport at dfw, checked the bag to go to washington because i was going up there to a smithsonian program. I spent a few days at my brothers doing research in the archives. Did that, the jar still wrapped up in its tshirt. Went back after i finished to the airport, checked the bag to go back to my home in americas where i was living then and changed planes in atlanta and they changed the bag to the little world war i plane that they used between atlanta and albany, georgia. Got down to albany, picked up my suitcase, put it in the car and drove back. I was convinced that bell jar was broken and there would be a million pieces of glass and i would have to throw out everything in the suitcase, but i got
Nevertheless, while other Union Commanders were failing, grant had climbed steadily up the military ladder with resounding victories, stretching from fort henry in 1862, through vicksburg to Missionary Ridge in 1863. He was clearly the norths man of the hour. When lincoln ordered an east early in 1864 to take command of all federal forces. The somewhere near 500,000 combat ready soldiers grant would have authority over the largest post any american officer had ever led. The new Lieutenant General wasted little time in making his strategic intentions known. In the past, grant asserted, union armies had quote, acted independently and without concept like a bulky team of mules, no two pulling to the. And this allowed confederates to shift men from one sector to the other to meet the most pressing danger. Union generals seemed content to maneuver. But that was not the road to victory, grant announced. The north had far superior numbers, and materiel. It was time to switch games. To stop pl
To maintain tight control and lipity explains defined foraging parties and centralized distribution systems, chaos could ensue, and the army could really descend into a sort of armed mob engaging in pillage and so forth. So whats interesting is that you would have expected lipity to use shermans march as his examples as hes making this complicated case. He doesnt. He actually goes back to napoleons russian campaign. In fact, though, he doesnt ignore the march when hes talking about how an army can descend into chaos. Thats where he uses napoleon. He actually defends shermans march and he claims at first that when seizing Household Goods the men carefully discriminated between and this is actually the language from shermans orders, discriminated between the rich who were generally hostile to us meaning the union, and the poor and industrious who were usually friendly or at least neutral, and he describes sherman as having this very organized system with rules and receipts, and he explai