Description
Richard S. Ewell was one of only six lieutenant generals to serve in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and of those he was but one of two—the other being Stonewall Jackson, his predecessor as commander of the Second Corps—to have left in the back of a sizable body of correspondence. Forty-nine of Ewell’s letters were published in 1939. This new volume, drawing on more recently available material and scrupulously annotated by Ewell biographer Donald Pfanz, offers a much larger collection of the general’s missives: 173 personal letters, 7 official letters, 4 battle narratives, and 2 memoranda of incidents that took place right through the Civil War.
The book covers the full range of Ewell’s career: his days at West Point, his posting on the western frontier, his role in the Mexican War, his Civil War service, and, in any case, his postwar years managing farms in Tennessee and Mississippi. Some historians have judged Ewell harshly, particularly for his failure to capture Cemetery Hill on the first day at Gettysburg, but Pfanz contends that Ewell was actually a brilliant combat general whose overall record, which included victories at the battles of Cross Keys, Second Winchester, and Fort Harrison, was one of which any commanding officer could be proud. Even if irritable and steadily critical of others, Ewell’s correspondence shows him to have been generous toward subordinates, modest regarding his own accomplishments, and upright in both his professional and personal relationships. His letters to friends and family are a mixture of wry humor and uncommon sense. No one who reads them will view this important general in moderately the same way again.
DONALD C. PFANZ is the writer of Richard S. Ewell: A Soldier’s Life, Abraham Lincoln at City Point, and War So Terrible: A Popular History of the Battle of Fredericksburg.