Yes Sir, I have had the Ledger article, but I was trying to point out Tom Ezell's statements about the color of Confederate Uniforms of that period rather than the Ledger Article.

Re: Mt Elba - Longview
By:Tom Ezell
Date: 11/19/2003, 3:27 pm
In Response To: Re: Mt Elba - Longview (Doyle Taylor)

I'm a little leery of the claims that all these fellows at Longview were wearing captured Union uniform parts, due in part to the few quartermaster clothing stocks that were overrun by the Confederates in question, as well as the lack of opportunity to obtain any sizable quantity of "battlefield pick-ups" within the time frame that clothing usually wore out in field service (60-120 days). If they were wearing Union gear, just where did they get it?

Confederate clothing depots in the Trans-Mississippi, particularly Houston and Little Rock, were issuing jackets made from English army cloth run through the blockade into the Gulf and Mexican ports. The English cloth is a dark blue-gray -- a lot more blue than gray -- and a shell jacket made from this material is damn difficult to distinguish from a Union infantry shell or mounted service jacket outside the effective range of a pocket knife. I have two of these jackets, and have made up a couple of others, and every time we show up in them for a reenactment or living history, we are universally mistaken for the Yankees.

Somebody asked up above just where were the pickets for the bivouac at Longview. The accounts I've seen of the fight all note that the pickets saw the Federal cavalry coming, but since they were wearing the same color jackets as the Rebels, they were assumed to have been on our side until it was too late...

Tom