The Confederacy's only national naval academy was anchored in Virginia's James River aboard the CSS Patrick Henry. While their Union counterparts at the U.S. Naval Academy studied at a safe distance from the war, the midshipmen of the Confederate States Naval Academy were sent on active duty to defend the South's waterways. Using original Confederate documents and many previously unpublished letters and diaries, James Lee Conrad has compiled a fresh and scholarly study of a neglected subject.

In making soldiers of them, said Confederate president Jefferson Davis regarding the mobilization of his nation's youths, we are grinding the seed corn. Yet the bloody millstones of war ground them nevertheless, and nowhere more noticeably than at the Confederacy's de facto West Points. The legend of the Southern cadets is one of untrained boys wastefully flung in the path of Yankee armies as the Confederacy came to a turbulent end. The reality is one of highly trained young men who rendered valuable service from the earliest days of the war and, when confronting the enemy on the battlefield,...