General
  Lee's
  Army

   By:
   Joseph T. Glatthaar

ABOUT THE BOOK

Anyone who has read the works of Joseph T. Glatthaar knows that he combines both scholarship and insight to make him a leader in the “new military history” field. His Partners in Command, in which he explored senior command relationships in the Civil War that worked and those that didn’t work, is a model management study. In Forged in Battle he presented the finest picture to date of how white officers and black soldiers combined their efforts to make a successful new arm of the Union army. And in March to the Sea and Beyond, he delved into the inner nature and experience of the soldiers who followed William T. Sherman on that epic 1864-1865 campaign across the Deep South. Glatthaar’s new work, General Lee’s Army can be seen as a follow-up to March to the Sea, for it is an exploration of the makeup and inner soul of the Army of Northern Virginia. As such, it is the first in-depth work on that army in more than half a century since Douglas Southall Freeman’s landmark Lee’s Lieutenants, and in fact it goes into areas that Freeman left untouched. Glatthaar explores motivations as much as anything. Why did the men who served Lee and his predecessors volunteer in the first place? What kept them in the army, and why did they fight, especially after 1863 when the war was turning against them? How did he and they achieve so much success against a superior numerical and materiel foe for so long? The author’s approach combines the latest in quantitative analysis, without sacrificing narrative style. Through research in the letters and diaries of a staggering 4,000 soldiers, as well as in their service records, census records, state and local court documents, and other sources, he developed a statistically representative “portrait” of Lee’s soldiers, and using that has addressed lingering questions about just who they were and why they fought, what kept them together through adversity and defeat, the effects the war had on them as soldiers and as men, and the spiritual and physical impact of the war. And through it all looms the figure of Lee, the man who was their inspiration as well as their commander. As Glatthaar shows in General Lee's Army, it is no accident that the Army of Northern Virginia achieved the impossible, and the reasons he finds lie in everyday men placed in extraordinary circumstances, and under the hand of a most extraordinary man in particular.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR


      Joseph T. Glatthaar , Joseph T. Glatthaar received a B.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University, an M.A. in history from Rice University, and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Military Academy, and the University of Houston. He is currently the Stephenson Distinguished Professor of History and chair of the Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His first book, The March to the Sea and Beyond was a pioneering attempt to reconstruct the lives and experience of common soldiers. It received three major national prizes: the Bell Irvin Wiley Award of the National Historical Society; the Fletcher Pratt Award; and the Jefferson Davis Award of the Museum of the Confederacy. His second book, Forged in Battle, examined race relations within the Union army. One major scholar declared that this book established Glatthaar “as the leading authority on black troops in the Civil war.” For the second time, Glatthaar received the Bell Irvin Wiley Award, as well as the American Society of Military History’s 1991 award for the best book in military history. His most recent book was Partners in Command, on the relationship among Civil War leaders. All three of his books have been Main Selections of the History Book Club. In 1991-92, he held the prestigious Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professorship at the Army Military History Institute at the U.S. Army War College. Professor Glatthaar has just completed a book on the Oneida Indians in the American Revolution, and he is currently writing a study of Robert E. Lee’s army.