In contrast to Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, the armies and events of the Civil War’s Trans-Mississippi Theater have received scant historical attention, to the detriment of our understanding not only of individuals and events west of the Mississippi River, but also to the east of it. In Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi, Volume 2, noted Civil War historians offer fresh scholarship on eight generals who made names for themselves in the region, providing intriguing insight into important wartime issues in the Trans-Mississippi and beyond.

Contrary to popular belief, the Trans-Mississippi did not serve as a dumping ground for generals who had failed in Virginia. Instead, the majority of generals who served in the region were homegrown and faced challenges unknown to their counterparts in the East—expansive territory, few men, and limited transportation for the meager supplies available. Superior Union numbers in the West, however, did not guarantee Union victory. As these essays show, southern generals often beat themselves because of personal failings or an inability to work together. Sterling Price and Ben McCulloch refused to cooperate, Henry Sibley combined alcoholism with cowardice, and the able French-born Prince de Polignac faced language barriers. The war ended before Joseph Brent, a visionary regarding tank warfare, could make his name as a brigadier, and “Prince John” Magruder’s achievements in Texas remain overshadowed by his earlier career in Virginia. The Cajun Alfred Mouton, a superior leader, died on a battlefield in his native Louisiana, while Mosby Parsons survived the war only to be murdered by Mexican cavalry. While some of these generals breathed life into the Confederacy, others hastened its downfall.

By chronicling the lives and careers of these eight generals, this welcome volume integrates the Trans-Mississippi more fully with the Western Theater and illuminates critical issues vital to understanding the South’s ultimate defeat.

Like its predecessors, the fourth and final volume of Confederate Generals in the Western Theater makes a generous contribution to the historiography of a poorly understood theater of war, presenting new interpretations of major figures while bringing to light both the triumphs and failures of lesser-known generals. Its cutting-edge scholarship offers further grounding for the editors’ contention that the South’s bid for independence was lost on its western battlefields and that the responsibility for those defeats lay more with the Confederate generals than with their opponents.

Among the ten chapters, this collection includes C. David Dalton on the death of Felix Zollicoffer at the Battle of Mill Springs in Kentucky; Roger Durham on Robert E. Lee’s leadership early in the war of the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida; Brian S. Wills on Abraham Buford’s behind-the-scenes contributions to Nathan Bedford Forrest’s famous exploits; the late Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. on the achievements and failings of Gideon J. Pillow; James M. Prichard on John Hunt Morgan and his “last Kentucky raid”; and Keith S. Bohannon on Edward C. Walthall, a Virginia lawyer who overcame his lack of prior military experience to become one of the ablest generals in any of the war’s theaters. Some essays offer full biographies of their subjects; others focus on a single campaign. Along with the previous volumes, this exemplary collection encourages an important rethinking of the course of the Civil War and its ultimate outcome.

A legendary professor at Louisiana State University, T. Harry Williams not only produced such acclaimed works as Lincoln and the Radicals, Lincoln and His Generals, and a biography of Huey Long that won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but he also mentored generations of students who became distinguished historians in their own right. In this collection, ten of those former students, along with one author greatly inspired by Williams’s example, offer incisive essays that honor both Williams and his career-long dedication to sound, imaginative scholarship and broad historical inquiry.
    The opening and closing essays, fittingly enough, deal with Williams himself: a biographical sketch by Frank J. Wetta and a piece by Roger Spiller that place Williams in larger historical perspective among writers on Civil War generalship. The bulk of the book focuses on Robert E. Lee and a number of the commanders who served under him, starting with Charles Roland’s seminal article “The Generalship of Robert E. Lee,” the only one in the collection that has been previously published. Among the essays that follow Roland’s are contributions by Brian Holden Reid on the ebb and flow of Lee’s reputation, George C. Rable on Stonewall Jackson’s deep religious commitment, A. Wilson Greene on P. G. T. Beauregard’s role in the Petersburg Campaign, and William L. Richter on James Longstreet as postwar pariah.
    Together these gifted historians raise a host of penetrating and original questions about how we are to understand America’s defining conflict in our own time—just as T. Harry Williams did in his. And by encompassing such varied subjects as military history, religion, and historiography, Lee and His Generals demonstrates once more what a fertile field Civil War scholarship remains.

Lawrence Lee Hewitt is professor of history emeritus at Southeastern Louisiana University. Most recently, he and Arthur W. Bergeron, now deceased, coedited three volumes of essays under the collective title Confederate Generals in the Western Theater.

Thomas E. Schott served for many years as a historian for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Special Operations Command. He is the author of Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography, which won both the Society of American Historians Award and the Jefferson Davis Award.

Louisianians in the Civil War brings to the forefront the suffering endured by Louisianians during and after the war—hardships more severe than those suffered by the majority of residents in the Confederacy. The wealthiest southern state before the Civil War, Louisiana was the poorest by 1880. Such economic devastation negatively affected most segments of the state’s population, and the fighting that contributed to this financial collapse further fragmented Louisiana’s culturally diverse citizenry. The essays in this book deal with the differing segments of Louisiana’s society and their interactions with one another.