Two autograph letters signed by Don Carlos Buell (1818–1898), to General Henry Martyn Cist (1839–1902). Airdrie, Kentucky. Eight pages total, 8vo.

Buell, a close friend of General George B. McClellan, had served before the Civil War as adjutant general of the Department of the Pacific. During the war, he rose to command the Army of the Ohio, but was relieved after failing to mount an aggressive pursuit of Confederate General Braxton Bragg following the Battle of Perryville. Cist served as assistant adjutant general on the staff of Major General William S. Rosecrans, who succeeded Buell in command of that army. After the war, Buell settled at Airdrie, Kentucky, along the Green River, where he became president of the Green River Iron Company.

In the first letter, dated 30 January 1868, Buell replies to a letter from Cist inviting him to the offices of the Army of the Cumberland to discuss the formation of a veterans’ society. That effort had only recently begun: at the end of 1867, a committee appointed by Generals George H. Thomas, William Whipple, and Richard W. Johnson had started organizing what would become the Society of the Army of the Cumberland.

Buell and Cist continued their correspondence for many years. In the second letter, dated 20 December 1891, Buell turns to retrospective military matters, including the resignation of General Albert Sidney Johnston to join the Confederacy in 1861 and Buell’s own arrival in California, which he states occurred only after General Sumner assumed command. At the outbreak of the Civil War, then-Lieutenant Colonel Buell was serving on the West Coast as assistant adjutant general of the Department of the Pacific. The “Sumner” mentioned in the letter appears to refer to General Edwin V. Sumner, who was likewise active in California immediately before the war.

Cist was the author of The Army of the Cumberland, first published in 1882. The recollections preserved here, touching on their wartime service and the sequence of significant military events, may have been furnished for use in that work or its later editions, or they may simply represent the reflections of two former comrades looking back on a consequential chapter of their lives.

[Civil War, Union, Confederate]  [Manuscripts, Documents, Letters, Ephemera, Signatures, Autographs]