Gettysburg Requiem: The Life and Lost Causes of Confederate Colonel William C. Oates

ISBN-13: 9780195331318 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 448 str.

Glenn W. Lafantasie

Opis

William C. Oates is best remembered as the Confederate officer defeated at Gettysburg's Little Round Top, losing a golden opportunity to turn the Union's flank and win the battle--and perhaps the war. Now, Glenn W. LaFantasie--bestselling author of Twilight at Little Round Top--has written a gripping biography of Oates.
Oates was no moonlight-and-magnolias Southerner, as LaFantasie shows. Raised in the hard-scrabble Wiregrass Country of Alabama, he ran away from home as a teenager, roamed through Louisiana and Texas--where he took up card sharking--and finally returned to Alabama, to pull himself up by his bootstraps and become a respected attorney. During the war, he rose to the rank of colonel, served under Stonewall Jackson and Lee, was wounded six times and lost an arm. Returning home, he launched a successful political career, becoming a seven-term congressman and ultimately governor. LaFantasie shows how, for Oates, the war never really ended--he remained devoted to the Lost Cause, and spent the rest of his life waging the political battles of Reconstruction.
Here then is a richly evocative story of Southern life before, during, and after the Civil War, based on first-time and exclusive access of family papers and never-before-seen archives.

Recenzje

"LaFantasie's book is a brilliant example of how diligent research and skillful writing can turn a soldier known mainly for his role on one historic day into a fully rounded character, as movingly depicted as in a Tolstoy novel. William Oates's life, before, during and after the battle of Gettysburg, illustrates his times better than that of grander figures whose public virtues and sins overshadow their inner complexity. But never until now has anyone as talented as LaFantasie taken the pains to do it right." —Ernest B. Furgurson, author of Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War and Chancellorsville 1863

O autorze

Glenn W. LaFantasie is the Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History and the Director of the Center for the Civil War in the West at Western Kentucky University. He is the bestselling author of Twilight at Little Round Top. He has also written for several magazines and newspapers, including American History, North & South, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, The New York Times Book Review, America's Civil War, Civil War Times Illustrated, and The Providence Journal.