A Gunner in Lee’s Army: The Civil War Letters of Thomas Henry Carter ed. by Graham T. Dozier (review)

Though his reputation as one of Robert E. Lee’s great artillerists endures in the official war record, Thomas Henry Carter has long remained a neglected and obscure figure. Thanks to Graham T. Dozier, this is no longer the case. Dozier ascribes to Carter’s Civil War letters, spanning June 1861 to March 1865, an exceptional quality that makes them instructive on matters concerning the Army of Northern Virginia. In his foreword, Peter Carmichael contends that Carter wrote with a “fearless realism,” that he possessed a rare “ability to break with the ‘official’ voice of his country,” and that unlike other wartime correspondence, Carter’s took stock of the Confederate officer corps with “brutal honesty” (xi, xii). Unlike the memoirs of other artillerists such as E. Porter Alexander, written some time after the war, Dozier explains, Carter’s correspondence does not reflect prejudices that often come with “knowledge of the [war’s] outcome … the passage of time, or … decades of postwar reflection” (2). Dozier, managing publications editor at the Virginia Historical Society, claims that Carter’s letters offer “a unique glimpse of a profound experience from a well-educated and insightful perspective” (5).

Like many Virginians who served as officers in the Army of Northern Virginia, Thomas Henry Carter was a descendant of the Virginia aristocracy. This privilege enabled him to attend the Virginia Military Institute, where he excelled in French but struggled in tactics. Carter graduated in 1849 in the top third of his class and pursued medicine as a vocation, taking degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia. He courted and married Susan Elizabeth Roy in 1855. When politics of prudence failed and war began, Carter left the prosperous life of a gentleman farmer to defend the sovereignty of his native state. He formed a company of artillery and on June 1, 1861, received his commission as captain of the King William Artillery.

The reader learns early of Carter’s willingness to hold the Confederate government to account for its military leadership and of his distaste for Jefferson Davis most especially. He wrote in October 1861, not long removed from the Battle of First Manassas, “Nothing can exceed the stupidity of not advancing after the Bull Run. … Politicians will ruin us forever” (35). Military historians with scholarly interest in the Army of Northern Virginia will be glad for Carter’s candid reminiscences of prominent Confederate officers and for his scrupulous descriptions of military operations.

Carter possessed a keen military sense, but he also wrote insightfully on matters political. As a Virginian patrician Carter gauged closely the “conservative”—read: anti-Republican—vote in the North. Northern public opinion mattered to the sustainability of the war effort, thus to Carter’s own immediate prospects in the war, and to the ultimate survival of the Confederacy. Regarding the 1862 midterm elections, in which Republicans suffered a resounding defeat for their association with the Emancipation Proclamation, Carter wrote, “I am glad to see Penn, Ohio & Indiana have gone for the Democrats. The vote is doubtless in the main for war but it is the conservative element & will be the peace element when strong enough to show their hand” (150). Carter wrote extensively concerning his slaves at Pampatike (the family farm) and of army “servants” on the front; he is conspicuously silent, however, on the issue of emancipation itself.

Carter’s marriage was a success by any standard of measure. Of the 103 letters contained in this volume, 101 were addressed to Susan. The vibrant marriage that Thomas and Susan enjoyed struck this reviewer as a definitive feature of the collection. Theirs was an intimate marriage in matters of economic function, trust (Susan Carter labored to manage corn production and other affairs at Pampatike), and confidence: “I have never so fully as now understood the {v}oid in a...