SAMUEL GARLAND
A lawyer of wide literary taste and cultural interests, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, and, at thirty, a man of recognized standing. With more of the look of a scholar than of a soldier, he does admirably in all the battles he shares and ahead of him appears to lie a career of great distinction. Perhaps he scarcely cares for fame, though he will do his full duty. He has lost both wife and child and finds himself the last of his line. He goes on a difficult mission down the ridge of South Mountain, where he lacks adequate support, and he does not come back.
ROBERT TOOMBS
This well-known Georgia politician, former United States senator, and first Confederate secretary of state, age fifty-one, is a furious, fascinating person who believes that the war will be brief but that participation in it will give him more prestige than can be had in civil life during the sectional quarrel. He is ambitious, insubordinate, and quarrelsome, the impersonation of the “political general.” A few of his friends hold loyally to him and share his belief that he is a great man. His hatred of President Davis develops apace. Toombs is no sooner out of a row with Harvey Hill than he is in another with Longstreet. Momentarily the thunderous Georgian is silenced, but soon, by an ironical twist, along the banks of the Anti-etam, he is presented with such an opportunity as he coveted. He does well enough but he somewhat overpraises himself. The promotion he feels he deserves but does not expect to get from Davis he fails to receive. He resigns with a roar and subsequently shouts in the shadows.
JOHN ROGERS COOKE
Army-born and Harvard-schooled, this twenty-nine-year-old son of General Philip St. George Cooke, U.S.A., is a brother-in-law of Jeb Stuart. When he resigned from the “old army” he was a first lieutenant. He becomes an excellent, careful colonel, and at Sharpsburg, almost before his panting men have caught their breath, he has the entire army talking of him. Promotion comes quickly and, after that, on Marye’s Heights, comes a ball that hits him in the forehead but, happily, does not kill him. The Wilderness brings him his fourth wound. Steadfast, he is still leading his North Carolina brigade on its last day.
MICAH JENKINS
After he was graduated from the South Carolina Military Academy, he was one of the organizers of the King’s Mountain Military School. As colonel he is bold and ambitious and, as the battles multiply starting with Seven Pines, he throws himself more furiously into them. He is full of promise—clear-eyed, with dark wavy hair and a firm, determined, but not unfriendly mouth. He becomes a brigadier before he is twenty-seven and is distinguished at Second Manassas, but he is wounded there and after his recovery he is on the unexciting line of the Blackwater. Longstreet appreciates him; fortune does not smile. Soon there arises a vindictive rivalry with Evander Law, another young South Carolinian. Jenkins’s return with Longstreet to battle ends in the Wilderness.
JOHN BROWN GORDON
Mining promoter and lawyer, age twenty-nine, he has risen from captain to colonel and soon has opportunity of leading Rodes’s brigade. With a fine head and penetrating eyes, Gordon is so thin and so straight that he resembles a ramrod. Although he has had no military experience before the war, he quickly learns the art of procuring the full obedience of his men and possesses an oratorical power which inspires his troops to undertake anything. His men adore him, but they wish he would not loose his eloquence on them just before they go into a battle—he makes them feel as if they can charge hell itself! He accumulates a notable collection of wounds, and after a succession of legislative mishaps, receives his deserved commission as brigadier general at the beginning of May 1864. Before the month is out Gordon has a division. By the late winter he is commanding Early’s corps, and is next to Longstreet in confidential discussions with the commanding general. A certain freshness, a boldness, a freedom, an originality in sound military design are Gordon’s. Character makes chivalry an instinct with John Gordon. No wonder an admiring soldier says of him, “He’s most the prettiest thing you ever did see on a field of fight. It’ud put fight into a whipped chicken just to look at him!”
ISAAC RIDGEWAY TRIMBLE
Railroad executive, engineer, and old-time West Pointer, Trimble, at fifty-nine, leaves ease in Maryland to share the fortunes of the South. At first he shows awkwardness in handling troops but he learns fast. He is a dark, handsome man with a flaming eye and deep ambition—perhaps disposed to be contentious and certainly a dandy in dress, but of the most conspicuous courage and a furious, insatiable fighter. A bad leg wound at Second Manassas, erysipelas, and osteomyelitis in turn assail but cannot subdue him. He fulfills his ambition and heads for the enemy’s country, where he had built and operated railroads and had quarreled over them. His part in the drama ends in front of Cemetery Ridge, where he falls, wounded, into enemy hands.
MAXCY GREGG
A savant and lawyer is Gregg, a rich South Carolina bachelor of wide literary and scientific interests, who has counted politics among his avocations. He had a commission, though he saw no active service, in the Mexican War, and he appears first with the army as a colonel and then a brigadier. In station, in influence, in bearing, and in entourage he is a considerable person, whose ability to adapt himself to command is of some interest to his friends. He is dignified, unfailingly courteous, forty-seven years of age, and slightly deaf. He is allotted a glorious day on Groveton Heights, and then he has a narrow escape at Sharpsburg. After that, at Fredericksburg, there is a wound, an affecting interview with Stonewall Jackson, and the long, long silence. The command loses a certain measure of gentility when he dies.
THOMAS REED ROOTES COBB
A brigade is entrusted to this hard-working colonel of thirty-nine, who is a younger brother of Howell Cobb. By his management of his men, Tom Cobb soon restores the family prestige, which had been impaired by Howell Cobb’s mishandling of his troops at Crampton’s Gap. As fine a fortune in the field as at the bar seems to await Tom Cobb, but at Fredericksburg, in his first battle as a general officer, he is killed.
JOHN PELHAM
A West Pointer of the class of 1861, he resigned on the secession of Alabama and prior to his graduation. He is twenty and commands as captain the Stuart Horse Artillery, which he organized. Of all the young artillerists, none is braver, more promising, or physically more magnificent. He is a tall, clear blond, who blushes red when he is praised. In camp he is quiet, and is without a touch of exhibitionism—a glorious boy in the estimation of both sexes. He goes on from splendor to splendor, makes peculiarly his own the title “gallant,” and on a March day in ’63, shouting “Forward!” and smiling at troopers in a charge, he falls from his horse with a fatal wound. Three girls in nearby towns put on mourning for him.
WILLIAM JOHNSON PEGRAM
Until secession he was a student of the University of Virginia, and was regarded merely as an intelligent, retiring boy of high character. At twenty he appears in this drama as a tireless captain of artillery whose tactics seem to be summed up in three orders: get close to the enemy, stay there, fire fast and accurately. He is a small young man, so near-sighted that he always wears spectacles, but he is of the type that battle develops. In less than a year he is a major in command of an artillery battalion that is marked, by the fact of his leadership, for hard fighting and for fame. He finds his sport in battle, and it seems incredible, after all his exposure to action, that he is still alive. After Gettysburg, with the Third Corps seldom fighting, he is not conspicuous for ten months. Later, the stench and stagnation of the Petersburg trenches are repulsive to him. When the caissons begin to roll and the teams tug at the traces, he is himself again. There is talk of making him a brigadier general of infantry, but Lee is unwilling to have Pegram leave the artillery though he esteems him as among the best of his soldiers. Pegram would have preferred that his end should be similar to that of his brother John, in the roar of action; but, as it befell, he dies lingeringly a few days from the end, at twenty-three and still a colonel of artillery.
THOMAS LAFAYETTE ROSSER
Like John Pelham, he is a West Point cadet of the class of 1861 who resigns before he is graduated. He procures a commission as first lieutenant and, before the Seven Days, rises to be a colonel of cavalry. Not yet twenty-five, he is six feet two inches tall, powerful, brown-eyed, and handsome. He fights hard and rises fast, and at the time of Gettysburg he has the prospect of a general’s commission. It is given him in September 1863. After it come heartbreaks and hard battles. He almost loses the good opinion of Jube Early because he wants his young wife to be near the front. A valorous exploit at Moorefield restores him in his commander’s eyes, but, for the attainment of larger fame, it is getting late in the life of the Confederacy. Cedar Creek and Tom’s Brook cancel Trevilian. It is bitter; it is bewildering; it does not break his spirit. Nothing, apparently, could do that to Tom Rosser.
GEORGE EDWARD PICKETT
Slow recuperation from the wound received at Gaines’ Mill is the fate of Longstreet’s younger brother in spirit. Longstreet looks after his interests and sees that, when the major generals are named in the reorganization of the autumn of 1862, Pickett is one of them. The next spring, when Pickett goes to Southside Virginia, he is thirty-eight years old but has the good fortune of being near the home of a vivacious young girl, not half his age, who thinks him the greatest of cavaliers. She sees nothing but romance in those long ringlets of his that his brother officers consider odd. When Longstreet tells him that the Virginia division is to share in the final charge on the Union position at Gettysburg, Pickett looks and acts as if great military fortune has come to him. By midafternoon that third of July 1863, when the charge has been repulsed, George Pickett’s tale is told. Neither he nor his division ever is the same again. For more than a year and a half he is a garrison general. Under the strain of a sudden responsibility, his health fails him. At Five Forks, where the enemy rolls up his flank force, whispers spread that he is attending a shad bake when he should have been with his men. In the death-spasm of the army he is relieved of command, but he is with his troops to the last hour. Fortune does not mock him without honor. “As valiant as Pickett’s charge” has become a supreme martial metaphor.
EDWARD PORTER ALEXANDER
By the spring of 1863, Porter Alexander has a part of the recognition his consistent service since First Manassas has deserved. He is approaching twenty-eight, is erect and thin, and has more the look of the scholar than of the soldier. Those who know the artillery officers say this Georgian is among the most scientific and resourceful of them all. He is the sort of man on whom a busy commander safely may rely—and they do so notably at Chancellorsville and at Gettysburg. His reward is chief of artillery for Longstreet’s corps.
ROBERT FREDERICK HOKE
A dependable line officer since Bethel, Hoke is twenty-five when, at Fredericksburg, in the absence of Trimble, he leads an excellent brigade with so much fury that men who did not know him begin to ask, Who is Hoke? His father had been a North Carolina politician of station who died when the boy was seven. Robert Hoke had not attended West Point but had received some professional training at the Kentucky Military Institute. Manifestly he has the true-born soldier’s sense of combat. In appearance he is handsome, tall, strong, with a long face and deep-set eyes. A wound received at Salem Church keeps him from sharing the honors and the anguish of Gettysburg. His chance comes the next year in his native state and it brings him promotion and acclaim. The rest may have been circumstance; it may have been a desire to preserve his new reputation. It is unpleasant but it is the fact: Subsequent to that success at Plymouth, if he is fighting beside another division, there nearly always is a failure of cooperation. Neither his state nor his command loses faith in him.
WILLIAM DORSEY PENDER
Seasoned and much scarred is this hard-hitting, realistic North Carolinian who becomes twenty-nine in the winter of 1862-63. More than ever he hates a war that keeps him from his family, but if he must fight he wants to be at the front in rank and in service. He is distinctly the partisan of Powell Hill in the controversy with Jackson, and he has bitter thoughts for those who dispute the pre-eminence of the Light Division. He is efficient in campaign and is responsible for the good behavior of what he regards as the best brigade of the best division. In battle he forgets all else in persistent, flaming combat. He retains the habit of getting wounded in almost every fight. As the army enters Pennsylvania, this new major general tries to relieve the concern of his young wife that the Lord will not bless the Southern cause if the Confederacy does more than defend its own territory. He knows, as a trained soldier, that a whole-hearted offensive often is the most prudent defensive. The campaign must be fought. So run his letters. Then, abruptly, they stop. He fights successfully another battle with all his stubborn energy, and is awaiting action at Gettysburg when he is wounded once again. This time he cannot laugh it off. They miss him on the third of July when part of his division is deployed wrongly.
STEPHEN DODSON RAMSEUR
Always Dodson to his intimates, Ramseur was graduated at West Point in 1860 and, at twenty-five, becomes colonel of a fine North Carolina regiment. Seven months later he is a brigadier general. He does not behave as if he can get enough of fighting. Although he bristles with a brigand’s beard, he is small, slight of frame, alert. His speech is direct and brisk, his dark prominent eyes do not flicker. He has all the ambitions and all the sensitiveness of a boy, but he handles a brigade as easily as he would have drilled a squad. In a desperate hour at Spotsylvania, when the front is almost severed by a shrewd thrust, he counterattacks with wild daring. A division is his reward, a veteran division, the day after he is twenty-seven. With these troops he shares in a spectacular campaign in the Valley under Jube Early and wins new honors, though he suffers one reversal that almost breaks his heart. Ramseur has the promise of something dearer than military distinction. One day, when a battle is in prospect, he hears that the crisis is past and that the baby is born. More than that he never learns.
CADMUS MARCELLUS WILCOX
No happy career in the army is Wilcox’s from August 1862 to May 1863. In his thirty-ninth year, he is older than most of the other professional soldiers who command brigades. At West Point he was in the class with T.J. Jackson, with David Jones, with George Pickett. In the next class was Powell Hill. All these now outrank him. He is restless, sore, and disposed to go to another Confederate army where he will have a chance. Then, at an unwanted post, while a battle that will bring fame to others is raging a few miles away, his great hour comes. He meets it in a manner to make Salem Church a model of what an observant commander of a detached brigade sometimes can accomplish. Advancement and the leadership of a stalwart division bring no further praise. Again denied transfer to another front, he meets hard duty with courage, though never with inspiration. More than once his division loses heavily, but negligence never is linked with defeat. If he gains no new prestige, he forfeits no good opinion for character and steadiness. Through the last black winter of the war his men give an honorable account of themselves.
HENRY HETH
Of Virginia stock long distinguished in war and in fortune, he is thirty-seven, a West Pointer, and a former captain in the “old army.” He has a high reputation, personally and professionally, and he is as devoted a soldier as he is an attractive individual. In western Virginia his small command once was seized with panic through no dereliction on his part. Now that he is a brigadier in the Army of Northern Virginia, he is called within two months to lead a famous division on a field of victory at Chancellorsville, and soon after is promoted major general. This seems good fortune, but it is to prove a continuance of the ill fortune experienced in western Virginia. As yet, nobody realizes that Harry Heth, as he is called by his friends, is doomed to be one of those good soldiers, unhappily numerous in military history, who consistently have bad luck. For a time it seems as if he has canceled his ill fortune. At Gettysburg his direction of his troops is sound, and a few folds of paper inside his hat save him from a fatal wound.
Two days later, though he is not in field command, he sees his weakened division wrecked. On the retreat he has to pay the price often exacted of the rear guard. Still again, that autumn, his troops are the victims of his corps commander’s impetuosity. Another time, in the Wilderness, when he wants to withdraw his men from an exposed position, Powell Hill says, “The men shall not be disturbed.” Rout follows. Heth’s seems to be the fate of living to exemplify the maxim that a soldier, to be good, must have good luck.
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