Known as one of the most aggressive Confederate officers in the Western Theater, Brigadier General Alfred Jefferson Vaughan Jr. is legendary for having had eight horses shot out from under him in battle—more than any other infantry commander, Union or Confederate. Yet despite the exceptional bravery demonstrated by his dubious feat, Vaughan remains a largely overlooked Civil War leader. In Confederate Combat Commander, Lawrence K. Peterson explores the life of this unheralded yet important rebel officer before, during, and after his military service. A graduate of Virginia Military Institute, Vaughan initially commanded the Thirteenth Tennessee Infantry Regiment, and later Vaughan’s Brigade. He served in the hard-fought battles of the western area of operations in such key confrontations as Shiloh, Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and the Atlanta Campaign. Tracing Vaughan’s progress through the war and describing his promotion to general after his commanding officer was mortally wounded, Peterson describes the rise and development of an exemplary military career, and a devoted fighting leader. Although Vaughan was beloved by his troops and roundly praised at the time—in fact, negative criticism of his orders, battlefield decisions, or personality cannot be found in official records, newspaper articles, or the diaries of his men—Vaughan nevertheless served in the much-maligned Army of Tennessee. This book thus assesses what responsibility—if any—Vaughan bore for Confederate failures in the West. While biographies of top-ranking Civil War generals are common, the stories of lower-level senior officers such as Vaughan are seldom told. This volume provides rare insight into the regimental and brigade-level activities of Civil War commanders and their units, drawing on a rich array of privately held family histories, including two written by the general himself. Lawrence K. Peterson, a retired airline pilot, worked as a National Park Service ranger and USAF officer. He is the great-great grandson of Brigadier General Alfred Jefferson Vaughan Jr.

Brigadier General John D. Imboden is an extremely important but often overlooked figure in the Civil War. Born in Virginia and trained as a lawyer, Imboden was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1850. Despite his limited military training, he secured a commission as a captain of artillery in a militia company. When Virginia seceded from the Union, Imboden came to play a prominent role in the fighting and rose to the rank of brigadier generals commanding the Shenandoah Valley District. Imboden, his four brothers, and his brother-in-law all served in the Confederate Army and were known as the "Six Brothers in Gray." Imboden claimed to have participated in "67 encounters with the enemy, battles, affairs, etc., in which the fighting was hard." He organized and led the Staunton Artillery in the capture of the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry and participated in the First Battle of Bull Run/Manassas, organizing a cavalry command that fought under Stonewall Jackson in his Shenandoah Valley Campaign. His raid with Brigadier General William Jones into West Virginia, supported by 5,500 troops and cavalry, cut the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad line and ravaged the Kanawha Valley petroleum fields. Imboden's cavalry screened the Army of Northern Virginia's left flank during the 1863 invasion of Pennsylvania. His protection of the wagon trains carrying wounded soldiers during the retreat from Gettysburg, culminating in a brilliant defensive battle at Williamsport on the Potomac, helped prevent Union troops from capturing important Confederate supplies. Imboden later led his men in hard fighting in the Shenandoah Valley in the battles of New Market, Piedmont, and Lynchburg. In late 1864, Imboden contracted typhoid fever. On his return to duty, he closed out his war service in command of Confederate prisons in Georgia, Alambama, and Mississippi. One of Imboden's hallmark characteristics was his concern for others, especially those in his charge, including Union prisoners of war at Andersonville. After the war, Imboden turned his interests to restoring the economic well-being of his native Virginia. He worked to promote the extension of rail lines and, to overcome a prolileration of different gauges, he invented a car lifter that was adopted by a number of lines. He traveled extensively to secure investments to develop the state's natural resources, founding the city of Damascus, which he hoped to make into a new iron and steel center.

As a leading Confederate general, Braxton Bragg (1817–1876) earned a reputation for incompetence, for wantonly shooting his own soldiers, and for losing battles. This public image established him not only as a scapegoat for the South's military failures but also as the chief whipping boy of the Confederacy. The strongly negative opinions of Bragg's contemporaries have continued to color assessments of the general's military career and character by generations of historians. Rather than take these assessments at face value, Earl J. Hess's biography offers a much more balanced account of Bragg, the man and the officer. While Hess analyzes Bragg's many campaigns and battles, he also emphasizes how his contemporaries viewed his successes and failures and how these reactions affected Bragg both personally and professionally. The testimony and opinions of other members of the Confederate army--including Bragg's superiors, his fellow generals, and his subordinates--reveal how the general became a symbol for the larger military failures that undid the Confederacy. By connecting the general's personal life to his military career, Hess positions Bragg as a figure saddled with unwarranted infamy and humanizes him as a flawed yet misunderstood figure in Civil War history.

This text offers a critical biography of Patrick Cleburne. It explores the sources of Cleburne's commitment to the Southern cause, his growth as a combat leader from Shiloh to Chickamauga and his emergence as one of the Confederacy's most effective field commanders.

This biography follows the military career of General James Monroe Williams, which spanned both the Civil War and the Indian Wars in the West.

master historian gives readers a fresh new picture of the Civil War as it really was. Buell examines three pairs of commanders from the North and South, who met each other in battle. Following each pair through the entire war, the author reveals the human dimensions of the drama and brings the battles to life. 38 b&w photos.

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans' gains in civil rights and other realms. Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.