Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: “Forward My Brave Boys!”
WORK NOTES: with M. Todd Cathey
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Nashville
STATE: TN
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.mupress.org/cw_contributorinfo.aspx?ContribID=3037&Name=Gary+W.+Waddey * http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/book-review-forward-my-brave-boys/ * http://cwba.blogspot.com/2016/02/cathey-waddey-forward-my-brave-boys.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Vanderbilt University, B.A., 1978.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and historian. Worked for Northwestern Mutual, 1978-2011; retired.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Gary W. Waddey worked for Northwestern Mutual for thirty-three years before retiring and coauthoring, with fellow historian M. Todd Cathey, of the Civil War-era regimental history “Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry C.S.A. 1861-1865. Waddey and Cathey are both descendants of members of the regiment, and they worked together to locate primary sources (published and unpublished) and to compose a story that covers both the regiment’s battle history and the stories of the men who served in it. In the almost four years of the regiment’s existence, the authors discovered, disease and casualties reduced the regiment’s strength by nearly two-thirds, from a grand total of 900 men and officers in 1861 to a low of 340 following the battle of Missionary Ridge in 1863. In addition, Waddey and Cathey highlight the stories of individual soldiers and their leader Brigadier General James Edward Rains, who was killed at the battle of Murfreesboro in 1862, before his thirtieth birthday. “This hefty but entertaining history,” declared Ralph Bowden on the Commercial Appeal website, “gives life to the men of the 11th Tennessee with tales not only of dedication and bravery in battle but also of camp life … as well as personal and family stories.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, February, 2017, John D. Fowler, review of “Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861-1865, p. 184.
ONLINE
Civil War Books and Authors, http://cwba.blogspot.com/ (February 8, 2016), review of “Forward My Brave Boys!”
Commercial Appeal, http://www.commercialappeal.com/ (December 10, 2016), Ralph Bowden, review of “Forward My Brave Boys!”
Open Letters Monthly, https://www.openlettersmonthly.com/ (December 20, 2015), Steve Donoghue, review of “Forward, My Brave Boys!”*
Gary W. Waddey
A lifelong resident of Nashville, Tennessee, Gary W. Waddey received a BA degree from Vanderbilt University in 1978. Shortly afterwards, he joined Northwestern Mutual where he served on numerous advisory committees and was a frequent speaker at regional and national meetings. Waddey remained with the company for 33 years until his retirement in 2011. He is a frequent contributor to local historical publications.
"Forward My Brave Boys!": A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861-1865
John D. Fowler
83.1 (Feb. 2017): p184.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
"Forward My Brave Boys!": A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861-1865. By M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2016. Pp. [xx], 503. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-544-0.)
Since the Civil War ended, countless regimental studies have been published. The earliest were often sentimental reminiscences written by the members of a particular regiment. Later regimental studies were written by the descendants of those in the regiment or by antiquarians from the communities that produced the regiments. Finally, in the late twentieth century, professional historians began to research and write the stories of regiments. Using a wide variety of primary sources, especially census records and compiled service records, these scholars have been able to draw accurate conclusions about the individual soldiers who made up Civil War armies. By using quantitative analysis, they could use their data to compare units across states and regions. While regimental histories have something to offer students of the Civil War, it is these modem studies that have the most to offer.
"Forward My Brave Boys!": A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861-1865 by M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey is a mixture of the old and the new. Cathey and Waddey are descendants of men from the regiment. Their work contains a wealth of primary resources and recounts the wartime story of the Eleventh Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, composed of men from five counties in Middle Tennessee. The unit had an interesting combat history, participating in the major campaigns and battles of the western theater. As it stands, "Forward My Brave Boys!" is a well-researched wartime account of the regiment. The authors have written a fine history for those who want to know what the Eleventh Tennessee did during the Civil War.
Yet the authors have produced a rather old-fashioned account in that it fails to place the regiment into any proper perspective. Absent is a meticulous search of the records that could have told us more about these men in the pre- and post-Civil War worlds. The men of the Eleventh Tennessee, like all Civil War soldiers, were products of their communities, and the Civil War was only one part, albeit perhaps the defining part, of their lives. Focusing merely on the war years turns these soldiers into one-dimensional individuals. By examining community records, census records, newspapers, letters, diaries, and pension records for the soldiers and their families, the authors could have made the men themselves and not just their wartime service the focus. Moreover, through an exploration of their medical histories, prisoner of war experiences, and desertion incidents, a clear picture of the "real war" would emerge. The statistics that could be generated would allow the men to be placed in their proper context and would allow comparison with the men of other regiments.
An examination of the records mentioned could also answer a number of questions useful to modern scholars. Did the men come from basically the same districts in their respective counties? How wealthy were the officers compared with the enlisted men? How old were the men on average? How large were their farms? What crops did they grow? How many came from urban areas? How did the men do economically after the war? How many were slaveholders? The answers to these questions and others would allow for patterns to be detected, and these patterns could be used to understand the world from which these men came.
Cathey and Waddey's work is well written and contains a wealth of primary sources, but not enough. Moreover, they did not extract enough information from the sources they did use. If one is interested in the wartime exploits of the Eleventh Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, this is an excellent book. Indeed, it is better than most regimental accounts. However, the work falls far short of the type of regimental history that modern scholars produce. The extra effort and extra sources required could have transformed this work into a truly useful and engaging account of how the war changed the lives of men in Civil War-era Middle Tennessee.
John D. Fowler
Dalton State College
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fowler, John D. "'Forward My Brave Boys!': A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861-1865." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 1, 2017, p. 184+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481354164&it=r&asid=a10a9facee372eeac9a3b181dfb41be6. Accessed 4 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481354164
Book Review: “Forward, My Brave Boys!”
By Steve Donoghue (December 20, 2015) No Comment
“Forward, My Brave Boys!” forward my brave boys
A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, CSA 1861-1865
by M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey
Mercer University Press, 2015
Publishing seasons are replete with books about the American Civil War; great battles are re-fought, generals are given full-dress biographies, social patterns and governments are analyzed for the deeper truths they might yield about how a democracy could tear itself into two pieces and still survive. Authors will spend hundreds of pages looking for wisdom in Abraham Lincoln, nobility in Robert E. Lee, humanity in William Tecumseh Sherman, military genius in Ulysses Grant, or pathos in Jefferson Davis, and clashes like Antietam, Chancellorsville, and of course Gettysburg will be re-trod square inch by square inch. For over a hundred years, American historians have been characterizing the war as an epic along Homeric lines of scale.
Right alongside such publisher-friendly wide-angle efforts, there have always been departmental diggers, researchers driven by local interest or family folklore to delve into one company, one regiment, trekking along misty bottom-land in search of a field-marker mentioned in one forlorn letter home, or haunting yard sales in hopes of finding one frayed and faded old print, perhaps the long-bearded face of an old man whose black-hole eyes say, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t forget about me entirely.”
These diggers have been compiling their regimental histories, chasing down artifacts, and swapping stories at meets for decades, and the works they produce sit on shelves in local historical societies and out-of-the-way heritage sites off State Route 29 or Interstate 40, seldom consulted, dusted by polite volunteers once every couple of months. The common conception is that there exists a large gap between the study of a single battalion and the study of the North v.s the South – the latter is the province of historians; the former is exclusively for wonks, buffs, and antiquarians.
The conception of this divide renders all the more curiously and immediately impressive the achievement of M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey, two card-carrying buffs of the first order, in their new book “Forward, My Brave Boys!”, a minutely-detailed history of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry from 1861 when it went to war until 1865 when its surviving officers and men stacked their guns in surrender. Both Cathey and Waddey are descendants of men who served in the 11th, and both have been researching the Civil War industriously for decades. By any reasonable expectation, their book should be five different kind of unreadable.
And yet, “Forward, My Brave Boys!” is, by some completely unexpected alchemy of memoirs and minutiae, the most fascinating and moving volume of Civil War history to appear in 2015. Somehow, by keeping its head down and going about its business, it manages to remind its readers of a war often lost in the operatic movements of grander histories – a war fought by very young men, most of whom didn’t have one single proper idea of what they were doing. When Cathey and Waddey relate the rocking-chair anecdotes their researches have uncovered (which they do whenever the story is a good one), those young men leap to life again – as in the story of an epic snowball fight between Tennessean and Georgian Divisions, or an 1861 incident near the Cumberland Gap:
One one occasion during this time, a Confederate soldier was out in the woods on picket duty. He was all alone and perhaps a little edgy thinking about the possibility of Federal troops being in the area. As the soldier watched through the woods for any sign of the enemy, he noticed something dark moving in the distance. The excited Rebel picket, with his mind racing, believed the object to be a masked battery. The Rebel picket steadied his nerves as best he could, took careful aim, fired a round, and skedaddled back to camp. After the frightened picket raised the alarm, an officer sent a reconnaissance patrol to investigate the whereabouts of the enemy. As the patrol arrived at the location of the incident, they discovered that the nervous picket had mistaken a bear for the masked battery. The bear was in the last agonies of death. Another soldier put the animal out of its misery, skinned it, and took the bear back to camp where it was eaten by the soldiers.
Since every single member of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry took up arms against the United States that had given them birth and succor their whole lives, every single member of the 11th Tennessee Voluntary Infantry was a traitor who deserved (as George Washington was fond of putting it about his own turncoats) to be hanged from the highest branch of the tallest tree, not paroled to go back to their farms and plow the earth so deep with rancor and racism that the crop is still coming in 150 years later. And yet, Cathey and Waddey’s book transforms and subverts such simple reductions with an ease that comes from being unintended. In their low-key handling, they turn these young men from names on a roster to recognizable characters – brothers, sons, friends.
james rainsNowhere is this more cuttingly poignant than in the case of James Edward Rains, brigadier general of the 11th, the bookish son of a Nashville reverend who vehemently opposed secession. James Edward Rains graduated second in his class at Yale in 1854, married a lively and well-endowered young woman, and in his mid-20s was already advancing in the legal profession (after having done a stint as a newspaper editor) when the war broke out. He no more favored the cause than his father did, but he volunteered, was unanimously voted up the chain of command by his comrades, and was leading those comrades at the Battle of Murfreesboro in 1862 when he was shot through the heart before he reached the age of 30. His reputed final sentence is the book’s title.
To understand James Edward Rains is to grapple with an entirely more complex Civil War than the Pulitzer-winning volumes tend to present. To watch this bright-eyed young thinker and his equally fresh-faced comrades fight and fumble their way from engagement to engagement as weird amalgams of overgrown boys and seasoned fighting men is to track the twisty paths duty can take through the human heart. Following those tracks into the evening dews and damps has always been the unsung task of local, small-bore histories; Cathey and Waddey (and the staff at Mercer University Press) are owed a sincere nod of thanks for nudging this world center-stage for a while.
Monday, February 8, 2016
Cathey & Waddey: "'FORWARD MY BRAVE BOYS!': A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry CSA, 1861-1865"
["Forward My Brave Boys!": A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry CSA, 1861-1865 by M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey (Mercer University Press, 2015). Cloth, 9 maps, photos, roster, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:337/583. ISBN:978-0-88146-544-0. $35]
"Forward My Brave Boys!": A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry CSA, 1861-1865 is a richly informative regimental history and roster study of a unit formed in early 1861. Its ranks filled with recruits from five Middle Tennessee counties (Humphreys, Dickson, Davidson, Robertson and Hickman), the regiment was initially led by Colonel James Edwards Rains (see cover at left), who was popular with the men and would put them in proper fighting shape even though their arms and equipment were badly deficient.
After drilling at Camp Cheatham, the 11th was ordered to rugged and hostile East Tennessee with General Felix Zollicoffer, where the regiment was initially scattered along the railroad to guard against sabotage, Union raids and local uprisings. The book's coverage of this period is quite thorough, as are those sections documenting the occupation of strategic Cumberland Gap and the series of tentative Confederate advances into SE Kentucky that followed it.
In Kentucky, the regiment dispersed enemy Home Guard camps (including the one at Barboursville) and fought at Wildcat Mountain near Rockcastle River. The 11th was not with Zollicoffer at Mill Springs but did fight at the Battle of Tazewell in Tennessee after being forced to abandon the Gap in the face of a coordinated Union offensive operation. Later, as part of Carter Stevenson's division besieging the Union garrison of Cumberland Gap, the regiment was left behind during the initial stages of the 1862 Kentucky Campaign. Though they missed the Battle of Perryville they wore themselves out marching over 400 rugged miles.
The 11th experienced its first major combat at Stones River in Middle Tennessee, where it advanced with the Confederate left on December 31 and suffered heavy casualties. It was there that the beloved Rains (now their brigade commander) was killed. Nine months later at Chickamauga, the regiment charged over Brock Field and it was deployed near the Carroll House atop Missionary Ridge during that disastrous defeat. Being within the "Dead Angle," the 11th was highly visible at Kennesaw Mountain. The Tennesseans also attacked the Army of the Cumberland at Peachtree Creek and suffered heavy casualties at Bald Hill during the Battle of Atlanta.
After the Jonesboro battle and the abandonment of Atlanta, the 11th was consolidated with the 29th Tennessee. Things would only get worse for the unit's rapidly dwindling numbers during the 1864 Tennessee Campaign as they would lose half their remaining strength in the carnage along the Columbia Pike at Franklin. After the crushing defeat at Nashville, the survivors of the regiment traveled by a circuitous route to North Carolina, where they were reunited with Joe Johnston and saw some final action at the tail end of the Bentonville battle.
In their research, authors Cathey and Waddey uncovered a fairly prodigious amount of primary source material (both published and unpublished) and their history of the 11th regiment's Civil War service is often a detailed one, especially in its coverage of the battlegrounds of Stones River, Kennesaw Mountain and Franklin where the regiment's heaviest fighting occurred along with their highest casualties. Throughout the book, firsthand accounts are effectively incorporated into the master narrative. The text does have the occasional editing problem and orientation can be a bit unforgiving for the novice reader but the more experienced western theater student will follow events with few problems. The book's early chapters dealing with the regiment's activities in the Kentucky-Tennessee borderland are especially enlightening given the literature's comparative neglect of the Civil War in the logistically challenging region immediately surrounding Cumberland Gap.
The volume's 160+ page roster is impressive. Not only is the amount of service record and biographical information extensive but the material is also annotated (a rarity among regimental studies). The book also contains two hefty photo galleries presenting many rarely seen images. Maps are high quality but modest in number and bunched together in the front rather than appropriately dispersed. A pair of appendices address the organizational history of the regiment and another documents casualties by battle. A POW list and a register of names present on the rolls at the final surrender are also included.
"Forward My Brave Boys!" is both a fine regimental history and an equally valuable collection of reference tools for those that might wish to conduct further research on the 11th Tennessee's officers and men.
'Forward My Brave Boys!' a surprisingly readable diary of a Confederate regiment
Ralph Bowden, Chapter16.org 11:08 a.m. CT Dec. 10, 2016
636165464624582110-Forward-My-Brave-Boys.300.jpg
(Photo: Courtesy Chapter16.org)
4 CONNECTTWEETLINKEDINCOMMENTEMAILMORE
“Forward My Brave Boys!” chronicles the origins, training and military experiences of the Confederacy’s 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry regiment from its formation in 1861 until the peace in 1865. M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey, lifelong researchers with roots in Middle Tennessee, have drawn on a huge collection of letters, diaries, speeches, orders and regimental records to provide an almost day-to-day account of the regiment.
This is grassroots history. The authors have accounted for almost everybody in the 10 companies that made up the regiment, at its peak 900 officers and enlisted men. Formed spontaneously by volunteers from five Middle Tennessee counties, the companies were democratically self-organizing — the men elected their officers — but for the most part submitted to standard military training and discipline. After the battles at Missionary Ridge, sickness, casualties, and a few desertions brought the regiment down to no more than 340 men.
The book stays with the regiment from their marches into Kentucky at the beginning of the war through the battles at Cumberland Gap, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, Franklin, Nashville, and other major engagements. Cathey and Waddey focus on the men and the details of their life in wartime: weapons, food, boredom, wounds, campsites, exhaustion, and privation, which was often extreme. “It was on these marches that we suffered untold misery,” one soldier wrote. Many of the men “were entirely barefooted marching on the gravel roads, which produced the most excruciating pains that we had during the war ... we had scarcely nothing to eat and for two or three days we suffered greatly for water.”
This hefty but entertaining history gives life to the men of the 11th Tennessee with tales not only of dedication and bravery in battle but also of camp life — forbidden whiskey, fistfights, card games — as well as personal and family stories outside of the war. “Forward My Brave Boys!” includes scenes from the battlefield, of course, but the big-picture battle narratives, the strategy and tactics employed during them, have been well told by others. This is not a book about the Civil War; it is the story of the soldiers of the 11th Tennessee and their experiences, mostly horrible, during the war.
For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.
“Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry CSA, 1861-1865'
By M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey, Mercer University Press, 503 pages, $35.
by Taboola
Sponsored Links
AD CONTENT