Please understand that all Confederate records are incomplete and in some cases altogether lacking. Many papers have been destroyed or lost, while others I strongly suspect were never completed or forwarded. The latter appears to be the case for many Trans-Mississippi commands, cut off as they were from the War Department in Richmond and the rest of the Confederacy.

It's something of a wonder that any Confederate records are available today. Pondering this a bit, I am reminded of the age-old question of why God allows this disaster or that catastrophe or some other terrible event. The real question should be, why does God allow any of us to enjoy any of the benefits of life?

Consider the situation when the war ended. During the months and years immediately following the war, who would want to retain and preserve all these papers? Under the law, potentially incriminating evidence could be found here. Moreover, who would want to keep the papers and minutiae of a failed government and its defeated military commands? During Reconstruction and all the hard years which followed, who had the resources to store and care for these records?

Or consider this -- if the British had defeated the American rebels in the 1770s, what kind of American military records (except for the loyalists) would we expect to exist today?

This is a story worth telling.