Thomas E. Schott - Böcker

Winner Of The Jefferson Davis Award Rising from humble origins in the middle Georgia cotton belt, Alexander H. Stephens (1812-1883) became one of the South's leading politicians and lawyers. Thomas E. Schott has written the first scholarly biography that analyses the interplay between the public and private Stephens and between state and national politics during his contradictory career. Stephens was a celebrated Whig, turned Democrat, who served as congressman from 1843 to 1859 and an antisecessionist who became vice-president of the Confederacy. Ignored by the Davis administration once in office, he eventually opposed most of its wartime policies. Schott argues that Stephens' devotion to the southern cause was as genuine as his devotion to civil liberties and states' rights. After the war, he became an elder statesman for Georgia, serving nine more years as a congress-man and the last five months of his life as governor.

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.Lawrence Lee Hewitt is professor of history emeritus at Southeastern Louisiana University. He is the author of Port Hudson: Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi and coeditor of six anthologies dealing with America’s Civil War.Thomas E. Schott worked as a historian for the Department of Defense. He is the author of Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography, winner of the Jefferson Davis Award, and coeditor with Lawrence Hewitt of Lee and His Generals: Essays in Honor of T. Harry Williams.

Like its predecessors, the fourth and final volume of Confederate Generals in the Western Theater is an invaluable 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.

Far removed from the main centers of commerce and population, and thus remote from the priorities of Confederate political leaders in the East, the Trans-Mississippi Theater experienced a different sort of war during America’s great fratricidal conflict of 1861–1865. Not only was its distance from Richmond a distinguishing factor, but it was also a theater where the Union army and navy gained a foothold far sooner than elsewhere in the South, first in Missouri and then in Louisiana and the Mississippi River Valley. Confederate generals were tasked with ousting, not merely halting, an enemy closing from two directions; guerrilla warfare was more often the norm than the exception; and the shortage of men and materiel was a constant problem.The third volume of Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi offers eight new essays on generals engaged in the effort to secure a region whose unique challenges would have daunted the best of commanders. Included here are Joseph G. Dawson III on Earl Van Dorn’s efforts to bring order to the chaos of the Trans-Mississippi District and how his experiences affected his battlefield performance in 1862; Jeffery M. Prushankin on the administrative nightmares facing Edmund Kirby Smith when he assumed responsibility for the region in 1863; and Richard Holloway on the formidable army commander Richard Taylor and the all-but-forgotten effort to move Confederate troops east of the Mississippi in 1864. Essays on Hamilton Prioleau Bee, James Fleming Fagan, William Robertson Boggs, Tom Green, and Austin Wharton round out the collection.Like its predecessors, this new volume brings splendid research and a wealth of new insight and analysis to bear on an aspect of the Civil War whose historical significance has too long been overshadowed by the events farther east.