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Series Editor’s Foreword Of all of Robert E. Lee’s lieutenants, Richard Stoddard Ewell is usually put at the far end of the bench, sitting behind the Army of Northern Virginia’s “first string”: Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, James Longstreet, Jeb Stuart, and John B. Gordon. If only Michael Shaara had given Ewell a historical facelift similar to the one he gave Longstreet in his novel The Killer Angels. Instead, Shaara parroted the popular line that the newly minted Second Corps commander squandered the Confederacy’s best chance of victory at Gettysburg. Indecisiveness , vacillation, and a paralysis of the mind are again and again rolled out by Shaara and like-minded critics to explain why the Southern assault stalled at the base of Cemetery Hill on the evening of July 1. Such criticisms have a direct lineage to the Lost Cause exoneration of Lee at Gettysburg, even though Lee himself took full responsibility for the army’s defeat. Wartime sources affirm Lee’s claim of culpability while also revealing that Ewell was actually open to taking Cemetery Hill. Through another subordinate, Ewell suggested a joint assault with A. P. Hill, but the final push never materialized, largely because orders never came from above. Only Lee had the authority to coordinate his two army corps. He was on the field, standing at Seminary Ridge with a panoramic view of Gettysburg before him, watching disordered Federal troops flee toward a final defensive position. Why Lee did not bring unity to his command is one of the great imponderables of the battle, but rather than admit to the unknowability of the past, too many historians have turned Ewell into a scapegoat for Confederate defeat. Ewell was certainly no Napoleon in the rough, but he was an exceptional combat officer, especially at the divisional level, until his wounding at Groveton on August 28, 1862. His subsequent promotion to corps commander brought uneven results to be sure, but the shadow of Gettysburg has obscured fine performances at a number of fields, including the Wilderness and Fort Harrison . Unfortunately, the entirety of Ewell’s career is rarely considered, and facile generalizations persist to this day that Ewell could never shake his case of the Series Editor's Foreword xii “slows” after Gettysburg. Such simplistic thinking is turned upside down by Donald Pfanz in Richard S. Ewell: A Soldier’s Life (1998), a superb piece of scholarship and by far the finest biography we have of the general. He breaks from the official line that Ewell was simply a bizarre and emasculated soldier, utterly helpless before an overbearing wife, timid before ambitious subordinates, and a victim of delusional bouts who supposedly thought of himself as a bird! Pfanz brings much-needed balance to the general’s war record, and his assessment draws heavily from Ewell’s own correspondence, a body of papers the author has superbly edited for the Voices of the Civil War series. Stonewall Jackson and Ewell are the only corps commanders in Lee’s army to have had their letters published, and this edition includes much more of Ewell’s correspondence than did Percy Hamlin’s 1935 volume, The Making of a Soldier: Letters of General R. S. Ewell. As presented here, Ewell’s letters are remarkable for their breadth, covering his time at West Point, his prewar career in the U.S. Regular Army, his rise in the Army of Northern Virginia, and his life after Appomattox. His letters rarely chronicle daily life in humdrum fashion. Ewell was too cranky, too irreverent, too ironic, and too smart not to stand back and expose the absurdity of the human condition. Joining the Confederacy did not mute Ewell’s contrarian voice. Although he prospered as Stonewall’s subordinate, he felt estranged from his superior’s plans and was not afraid to tell the world that he felt as though he was fighting with blinders on. “Genl Jackson is off possibly ‘Somewhere,’” Ewell wrote Jeb Stuart on May 14, 1862, “and leaves me standing gaping at the gap while he is after the Yankees.” In politics, Ewell was also outspoken, believing that the Southern nation needed to marshal all of its resources, even if that meant tinkering with the system of human servitude. He was one of the first Southern officers to suggest that Confederate forces arm slaves, a position that apparently did not hurt his professional aspirations as it did with other officers. When defeat descended upon the Confederate nation and Ewell was a captured...

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