There are excellent accounts of Marshall County and North Alabama during the 1860s and 70s. Bessie Martin's Desertion of Alabama Troops from the Confederate Army: A Study in Sectionalism (AMS Press, 1966) explains how socio-economic class differences influenced attitudes. The most instructive book, by far is: Wayne Flynt's Poor but Proud:Alabama's Poor Whites (The University of Alabama Press, 1989) is superb in both detailed research and analysis. His chapter, "A Poor Man's Fight," is unsurpassed in that he pulls together facts relating to class differences, fluctuations in the weather, and political and sociological data to show that what went on during and after the war was far more complex than often assumed. Dr. Flynt is a distinguished professor of history at Auburn University and this book is a landmark in helping one understand the myriad forces to which the hill country whites of North Alabama had to respond during and after the Civil War. His extensive annotated bibliography is excellent, also. In my judgment, an objective analysis of conditions in North Alabama and, more specifically, Marshall County, indicates that indicates that natural calamities (e.g., severe droughts), a lack of social cohesiveness (e.g., atrocities committed by non-military partisans), the lack of additional productive farm lands, and other forces had at least as significant an impact on the people as did organized Union forces. Family traditions influenced by our natural tendency to attribute higher intentions to our ancestors have often ennobled what were actually more mundane reasons for our ancestors socio-economic status and their tendency to continue their migration westward. Attributing their state of poverty and their inclinations to be on-the-move solely to Union depredations may be easy; but, in reality, the reasons were far more complex and less flattering. I have no brief for the inhumane treatment of Southerners by Union troops. Neither to I have sympathy for the outrageous behavior of unprincipled marauding Southerners who committed equally abhorrent mayhem amongst their own neighbors. H.V. Barnard hbarnard@coin.org