Administrative Information

Access Restrictions

Collection is open to research.

Use Restrictions

See the University of Virginia Library’s use policy.

Preferred Citation

Marcus J. Wright's General Officers of the Confederate Army, Accession 10841, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library

Acquisition Information

This collection was purchased by the Library on June 5, 1989.

Funding Note

Funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities

Biographical Sketch

Marcus Wright was born in 1831 in Tennessee and later became a court clerk in Memphis and colonel of the 154th Tennessee Militia. Following the outbreak of the Civil War he joined the Confederacy and was appointed military governor of Columbus, Kentucky, in 1862 and fought at the battles of Shiloh and Perryville while a member of General Benjamin Franklin Cheatham's (1820-1886) staff. Wright was promoted to brigadier general in December, 1862, and participated in the 1864 Atlanta Campaign.

In 1878 Wright was appointed as an agent to assist in the collecting of Confederate records for inclusion in the most important single source of Civil War documents, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies , Series I-IV, 128 volumes (Washington: 1881-1901); at that time the work was being published under the auspices of the "Publication Office, War Records 1861-'65" in the U. S. War Department. Wright sought to remedy the distrust Southerners felt toward the Federal government and to persuade them to donate or loan their war-related documents for the project (he and other ex-Confederates were also appointed to insure impartiality for the Confederacy). He also contributed several writings on the war including General Officers of the Confederate Army (New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1911). General Wright died on December 22, 1922, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Scope and Content Information

Scope and Content

This remarkable collection of five items, 1872-1901, pertains to General Marcus J. Wright (1831-1922), author of the pioneering study, General Officers of the Confederate Army . Three letters and two bound volumes, one of which is Wright's annotated manuscript of his book, are present; each is described separately in this guide.

The Bound Volumes and Letters

The collection includes a bound carbon copy, ca. 1911, of Wright's manuscript of General Officers of The Confederate Army . The manuscript bears numerous annotations, corrections, and revisions in his handwriting as well as his personal bookplate on the inside front cover. Three loose letters were filed in this volume. A March 14, 1872 letter, former Confederate General Braxton Bragg (1817-1876), writing from Mobile, Alabama , was in response to a previous letter (not present) from Wright. Bragg discusses his appointment as brigadier general [March 10, 1861], his assignment to Pensacola, Florida , while a major general of Louisiana 's state forces, his appointment as a major general in the Confederate Army on September 12, 1861, and to the rank of general, April 12, 1862. He concludes with the comment: "The record when complete will be of great interest and should be in the hands of every Southern child."

The second letter is dated August 3, 1880, and was written by Wright in Washington, D. C., to George Washington Custis Lee (1832-1913), the eldest son of the Confederate general-in-chief Robert E. Lee . As an "Agent for War Department" he seeks Lee's assistance in obtaining papers of his father in the possession of Colonel Charles Marshall (1830-1902) of Baltimore, for inclusion in The War of The Rebellion . (Marshall had been R. E. Lee's military secretary and aide-de-camp.) In the third letter, G. W. C. Lee , writing from Lexington, Virginia, on August 24, 1880, apprises Marshall of the request. Lee claims to have informed Wright that Marshall was in the process of preparing a study of the Army of Northern Virginia and of how inconvenient it would be for him (Marshall) to have the papers copied while he was still in the process of consulting them for his own historical research.

The final item is Ezra J. Warner 's personal copy of General Officers Of The Confederate Army ; his bookplate is on the inside front cover. Warner was the author of Generals In Gray (1959), the study which superseded Wright's book. Warner's copy is heavily annotated in his handwriting (pencil and ink) with corrections, paste-ins, and a separate six-page typed index of General Officers . This index indicates the presence or absence of the individual generals in the Dictionary of American Biography .