Finding Captain Dickson: The Archivist as a Researcher

Item-level description is a luxury few archivists can afford to indulge in as processing has adopted the MPLP model and eliminating backlogs has become a clarion call. But there are instances when only research done by the archivist will allow the significance of a document to be recognized and no longer hidden in a collection. An account of an incident before the Civil War Battle of Chickamauga written by Mississippi soldier Captain Thomas Hyde Dickson is one example of why there is still a place for item-level description and how the role of archivist as researcher is critical to making collections more accessible. Article Processing manuscript collections calls upon a number of skills of the archivist, such as organization, description, cataloging and research. In this era of “more product, less process,” archivists are not encouraged to dig too deeply into collections to understand them better, or to spend time identifying items of potential importance. But, occasionally, a document catches our attention, perhaps serendipitously, or because its content makes it shine like a gold nugget in a prospector’s pan, encouraging the archivist to find out a little more in order to bring the subject or creator to life, or simply to explain its presence in the collection. One example is an account of an incident which occurred days before the Civil War Battle of Chickamauga in early September 1863 witnessed by Captain Thomas Dickson of the 9 Mississippi Infantry Regiment, which was discovered while working in Special Collections at Mississippi State University Libraries. Written in pencil with corrections in ink on nine crumbling sheets of paper, Dickson’s account was found in the papers of Brodie S. Crump, a columnist for the Delta Democrat-Times newspaper in Greenville from 1946 to 1980. Clearly Crump thought it important enough to save but there was no information on who Dickson was or how Crump obtained it. The piece is striking because it relates what happened to the regiment as Confederate General Braxton Bragg maneuvered his Army of Tennessee in northern Georgia after its withdrawal from Chattanooga as Union General William Rosecrans’ Army of the Cumberland moved east. Rosecrans divided his forces and one division crossed Lookout Mountain and was nearly trapped in McLemore’s Cove on September 11 by the brigade which included Dickson’s regiment. Unfortunately, Confederate caution and miscommunication among the commanders let the opportunity slip away and the exhausted Confederate forces in the cove crossed Pigeon Mountain that night to regroup at La Fayette. A week later the two sides would meet at Chickamauga. The following is a transcription of Dickson’s account and the first page of the document can be seen in Figure 2 below. 1 MSS.654. Brodie S. Crump family papers, Box 3, Folder 9. 2 The causes of the lost opportunity at McLemore’s Cove have been extensively debated by historians. See Woodworth, Steven E. (1999), No Band of Brothers: Problems in the Rebel High Command, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, chapter 6; Woodworth, Stephen E. (ed.) (2010), The Chickamauga Campaign, Carbondale, Il.: Southern Illinois University Press, chapters 2 & 3; Robertson, William G. (Spring 2007), “The Chickamauga Campaign: McLemore’s Cove: Rosecrans’ Gamble, Bragg’s Lost Opportunity”, Blue & Gray Magazine, 23:6, 6-26, 42-50; Cozzens, Peter (1992), This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga, Urbana, Il.: University of Illinois Press, 74-75; Martin, Samuel J. (2011), General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A., Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 475. The Primary Source, Vol. 34, Issue 1 1