Professor, historian, and author Robert S. Davis, Jr. of Wallace State College will address the Chattanooga Civil War Round Table.
It will be at the regular monthly meeting on Tuesday, March 18. The meeting is at 7 p.m. and will be held in the Hospitality Room of the Sports & Activity Center on the campus of the McCallie School on Missionary Ridge (enter the McCallie Campus off Dodds Avenue opposite the end of Bailey Avenue; the Sports & Activity Center is the large building straight ahead of you as you enter).
Mr. Davis will speak on "The Spies, Scouts, and Guides of the Union Army of the Cumberland." The meeting is free and open to the public.
Spies, scouts, and guides. They were just one of the several assets the Union Army of the Cumberland developed that eventually made their operations in Southeast Tennessee, Northeast Alabama, and Northwest Georgia successful. They provided intelligence on local conditions, roads, Unionist, anti-Confederates, crops, and Confederate military dispositions. The information they developed was primarily useful in the planning phase and during the initial troop movements. Their information had less value for the actual engagements. Regardless of the latter, what they learned helped William Rosecrans, George Thomas, and eventually U. S. Grant and William Sherman act in a bold and confident way. There information is reflected in the detailed maps the topographic engineers of the Army of Cumberland were able to produce and repeatedly up-date. As we look at those maps today, we see their work without really knowing it. These spies, scouts, and guides were a mixed lot of men. Some were daring Union soldiers out and out, just disguised as someone else. Others were Unionist who had previously fled from the area and then returned to exploit an informal or formal network of Union sympathizers. They did their jobs with even local Unionist or anti-Confederates catching on. They are a part of the story of the Campaign for Chattanooga that is usually overlooked and under-appreciated.
Mr. Davis has frequently focused on the men who became the Army of the Cumberland's spies, scouts, and guides. His unsurpassed knowledge of North Georgia's history, genealogy, and records has brought some of these men to the surface. From local sources and from a collection of records in the National Archives that has been only infrequently used, he has shown the light on a number of the men. Their story and role will be focus of what should be a fascinating talk this month.
He is Director of the Family and Local History Program at Wallace State Junior College in Hanceville, Alabama. He is the author of more than 30 books and 500 articles. Two of his publications include Requiem for a Lost City: Sallie Clayton's Memoirs of Civil War Atlanta (1999) of which he is the editor, and Cotton, Fire, & Dreams: The Robert Findlay Iron Works and Heavy Industry in Macon, Georgia, 1839-1912.