Peter Cozzens - The Shipwreck of Their Hopes

The Shipwreck of Their Hopes brings to a close my trilogy on the decisive battles in the struggle for the Confederate heartland. I owe my continued gratitude to many people who offered their help in my earlier volumes, as well as to several others whom I have come to know while writing this book.

As always, the kindness of professional librarians and archivists has been of inestimable value in my research. The staffs of all the institutions that appear in my bibliography were most helpful.

Once again, I am deeply indebted to Carley Robison, the archivist of Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, for her gracious help in providing me with access to the Ray D. Smith Civil War Collection and with a mountain of photocopied pages gleaned from its books.

And again, I am indebted to Dr. Richard Sauers for making available relevant portions of his exhaustive index of the National Tribune.

My sincere thanks go to friend and author Jeff Wert, who unselfishly shared his thoughts with me on General Longstreet's role in the Chattanooga campaign.

I also am most grateful to Larry Stevens of Newark, Ohio, for his careful reading of my chapter on Ringgold Gap and for help in clarifying for me many of the troop movements of that confused fight.

Similarly, I am deeply indebted to John Huelskamp of Barrington, Illinois, for sharing both his deep knowledge of and primary source material pertaining to the fighting on Tunnel Hill.

Several individuals offered me the use of materials in their possession pertaining to the campaign. Tom Arliskas of Plainfield, Illinois, made available to me numerous articles from contemporary Illinois newspapers. Steve Calhoun of Richmond, Virginia, provided me with a copy of an important Federal battle report from his private collection. Karl Hansen, also of Richmond, brought to my attention several letters of Braxton Bragg. Tom Hartzell of Gobles, Michigan, shared with me with the outstanding, unpublished autobiography of his ancestor, John Calvin Hartzell; it is a work that truly merits publication. Charles Van Adder of Forked River, New Jersey, provided me with material from his extensive library. Paul Wagley of Olympia, Washington, graciously sent me passages on the battles from the rich, unpublished memoirs of his grandfather, Ephraim Wagley.

I am grateful to Richard L. Wentworth, director of the University of Illinois Press, for his kind support. To my manuscript editor, Carol Bolton Betts, my deepest gratitude for all her help with The Shipwreck of Their Hopes and my earlier books. My sincere thanks to Jim Bier of Champaign, Illinois, for the wonderful maps that have added so much to these works. On the maps and in my text, I have tried where possible to use nineteenth-century place names, not modern ones, to refer to sites on the battlefields.

I would like to close my acknowledgments with special words of thanks to three very dear friends, whose friendship and encouragement alone were of immeasurable value. First, to Keith Rocco, of Edinburg, Virginia, my thanks for another outstanding dust-jacket painting and more great illustrations. To Glenn LaFantasie of Warrenton, Virginia, my thanks for reviewing my chapters on Brown's Ferry and Wauhatchie. And to Adrienne Harmon-Hanrahan, my thanks for digging for difficult source material for me while I was far away in Lima, Peru, and for insightful comments on the manuscript.