ACW Campaign Map - 'Burning Tennessee' 1862

All railroads lead to Nashville... A small snippet of the map wot I drew

Blimey, looking at the date of my last post I feel like Lister getting out of stasis after 3 million years on Red Dwarf, "3 millions years?! I've still got that library book". Has it really been that long..? Hope everyone's been well. I've been rather busy of late with work, roller derby and life in general.

One of the big projects that myself, Ed and his brother Ollie have done recently is a 2mm ACW campaign across Middle and parts of Western Tennessee, with Chattanooga as the campaign objective. For more information, Ed has written an incredible post with a great overview of the campaign.

See, there's a book

Ed took command of the Union forces, Ollie the Confederate forces and I took on the role of Campaign umpire/administrator - but was also respective Chief of Staff for each of them. As they gave their orders to me in secret each day, it was rather difficult not to just blurt out what cunning move the other was trying to make. Similarly I had to forget that I had a God's eye view of everything and give advice. It was interesting to really see the different command styles develop as well, which Ed has reflected in the book (yes, book) about the campaign - head over to the Palladian Guard blog to see if he has any copies left if you'd like one

My first task though was to create a campaign map for the campaign to be played across. As I wanted it to be hi-res to potentially print at A1 or A0, no digital copies of real maps would do the trick. So I turned to my trusty digital art packages to start redrawing the damn thing by hand, using the 1862 Johnson and Ward map of Kentucky and Tennessee as a guide.

My hand-drawn (with mouse assistance) map of middle Tennessee, I know the damn place far too well now

There are possibly a couple of errors in town names (or missing ones) and whatnot, but otherwise this is all largely to scale. In the interest of time I didn't get round to fully making it look like a period style map, but it did the job.

This was also the basis of my digital umpire's map which tracked the movements of each division/brigade, their reconnaissance range, their supply lines, weather, and local support or hostility to each cause amongst other things.

Overall it was a great experience and hopefully the next map campaign that we run (probably 19th century but not ACW) shall be fully documented on our respective blogs.

I shall be back soon, there's already a couple of posts already lined up, and there's a few nice new projects on the horizon.