According to Les Jensen it is also possible that some of those blue gray jackets came out of Charleston; Richmond perhaps not having enough clothing to “fill the order”.

In my view, he wasn’t at all judicious with the hundreds of lives he expended in the ditch in front of the northwest bastion at Fort Sanders. But, then, I’m not writing a biography of him as you say on your blog that you are.

Perhaps you can discover why he had no spy at Knoxville, as he famously did at Gettysburg, to tell him that the fort’s ditch was not narrow or shallow, but a trap that his soldiers wouldn’t be able to get out of, either to advance or retreat.

I can understand why he wasn’t able to tell that from looking at it, since it was at a higher elevation than he could find to view it. But there were plenty of Southern sympathizers in the town and area who might have either known about it or could find out for him and he certainly had time enough to recruit one, but apparently did not.

I do not believe that Longstreet was overly cautious as Wert does. He did want to have the best odds possible when spending his troops lives. Longstreet understood that the South could not afford to through away its resources and therefore was committed to conserving them, unlike some of his colleagues. That is not cautious, it is judicious.

Googling around now, I find that the 2002 edition of the West Point military history series lists Tucker’s book in its bibliography with the notation: “Although largely undocumented, this is still an excellent source.” So tell me what your source is for your version of the issuance of the jackets. If Tucker is wrong, I’ll make a correction here on the blog for readers of the novel.