Booknotes: Rebels in Repose

New Arrival:
• Rebels in Repose: Confederate Commanders After the War by Allie Stuart Povall (Arcadia Pub & The Hist Press, 2019).

From the description: "The irascible Jubal A. Early, Robert E. Lee's "bad old man," went to Canada after the war and remained an unreconstructed Rebel until his death. Lee became president of Washington College and urged reconciliation with the North. Braxton Bragg never found solid economic footing and remained mournful of slavery's demise until his own, when a heart attack took him in Galveston. The South's high command traveled dramatically divergent paths after the dissolution of the Confederacy. Their professional reputations were often rewritten accordingly, as the rise of the Lost Cause ideology codified the deification of Lee and the vilification of James Longstreet."

Allie Povall's Rebels in Repose: Confederate Commanders After the War "shares the stories of nineteen of these former generals, touching briefly on their antebellum and wartime experiences before richly detailing their attempts to salvage livelihoods from the wreckage of America's defining cataclysm." Generals P.G.T. Beauregard, Braxton Bragg, Jubal Early, Nathan Bedford Forrest, John Bell Hood, Joseph E. Johnston, James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee, and naval officer Raphael Semmes get their own standalone chapters. Research is primarily in published works, including standard biographies and biographical reference books; however, just glancing through notes and bibliography, there are some notable omissions in those areas (among them, the Forrest biography by Wills and Miller's Hood biography). Briefer treatments of ten others (generals Ewell, Gordon, Hampton, D.H. Hill, Fitzhugh Lee, S.D. Lee, Pickett, Kirby Smith, Wheeler, and Stand Watie) are collected in the final chapter.