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At a time when opinions were fervent and loyalties were divided in East Tennessee, John G. Earnest ultimately sided with the Confederate Army after reconciling for himself the conflicting arguments surrounding the Southern cause in the Civil War. In September 1862, after studying at Emory & Henry College in Virginia, he enlisted at age twenty with the 60th Tennessee Infantry, joining the men who organized the last volunteer units from East Tennessee. This addition to the Voices of the Civil War series tells his story. All Right Let Them Come is Earnest's diary; it offers rare observations into the life of an East Tennessee Confederate soldier and the events surrounding his involvement in the transfer to the western Confederate front and the siege of Vicksburg. The passages on the fighting at Chickasaw Bayou and at Big Black Bridge near Vicksburg cast light on the military defects of Earnest's unit. The generally poor performance of the East Tennessee Confederate troops has long been assumed to stem from the region's sharply divided loyalties to the Union and Confederacy and from the fact that these soldiers were moved great distances from the homelands they had volunteered to defend. Earnest's narrative suggests that the weaknesses in these troops may also have come from a lack of training and discipline. Earnest's diary provides an interesting and readable account of day-to-day life of a low-ranking officer. Material on the daily routines of camp life, on the limitations of the transportation system, which hindered the South's war efforts, and on travel across the western Confederacy address the lack of provisions, deficits in the Confederate soldiers' discipline and morale, and the South's difficulties in maintaining a cohesive, powerful fighting force in the Western Theater. |
