Synopsis
All unquestioned masterpiecc of the historian's art, and a towering landmark in the literature of the American Civil War. Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command is the most colorful and popular of all of Douglas Southall Freeman's works; it is generally considered the most penetrating study ever written of military personalities and tactics during the American Civil War. A sweeping narrative that presents a multiple biography against the flame-shot background of history, it is the story of the great figures of the Army of Northern Virginia who fought under Robert E. Lee as they came forward on the stage of war. In this first volume, Manassas to Malvern Hill, Dr. Freeman describes the rise and fall of General Beauregard, the growing friction between Jefferson Davis and Joseph E. Johnston, the emergence and failure of a number of military charlatans, and the first display of ability on the part of some new men at a time when the organization developed at Manassas collapsed at Seven Pines. The narrative illumines the rise of "Stonewall" Jackson and traces his progress in the Shenandoah Valley campaign and into Richmond amid the acclaim of the South, accompanies him through the failures during the Seven Days, and then leaves him, with the new army entirely organized, in the center of the stage of history. Manassas to Malvern Hill is the first volume of a three-volume work. In the second volume, the men whose reputations were made, or lost, on such fields as Manassas at the second battle of Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville dominate the narrative; volume three depicts the Gettysburg campaign and the thunder signaling the ruin of the Confederacy.
About the Author
Douglas Southall Freeman was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1886, the son of a Confederate soldier. After receiving a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University at the age of twenty-two, he embarked on a newspaper career. He was named the editor of the Richmond News Leader at the age of twenty-nine, a post he would hold for thirty-four years. In 1915, Freeman was commissioned by Scribner's to write a one-volume biography of Robert E. Lee; twenty years of work later, his four-volume R. E. Lee won the Pulitzer Prize. The three volumes of Lee's Lieutenants took him a relatively modest eight years to complete. He won another Pulitzer Prize for his six-volume biography of George Washington, which he finished only hours before his death in 1953.
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