Booknotes: The First Confederate Soldier

New Arrival:

• The First Confederate Soldier: George Washington Lee and Civil War Atlanta by Robert Scott Davis (McFarland, 2026).

Robert Scott Davis's The First Confederate Soldier: George Washington Lee and Civil War Atlanta has an intriguing title. Civil War 'firsts' are always a popular topic for research and debate, and the author justifies this particular distinction by claiming that unsuccessful Atlanta businessman George Washington Lee's independent Georgia militia company ("Lee's Volunteers") traveled to Montgomery, Alabama to attend the inauguration of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and was the first company to enlist its services with the Provisional Army of the Confederate States.

Lee remains an obscure figure, but, according to Davis, the officer "represents a great untold epic of the Civil War." Lee "raised numerous companies for the Southern army," and his fighting career "encompassed Atlanta, Pensacola, Savannah, and Richmond, reaching from the swampy Okefenokee to the Appalachian Mountains. Literally the first soldier of the Confederate army, he was one of the last men in gray, even leading Cherokee warriors in one campaign."

If Lee is remembered it is primarily for his service as provost marshal in Atlanta, where he engaged in "suppression of resistance to the Confederacy." In that capacity, Lee "fought arsonists, bootleggers, counterfeiters, crime syndicate members, deserters, draft evaders, espionage agents, failing Confederate entities, thieves, and war resisters." Those behind-the-lines actions placed Lee front and center in fighting both the covert war between North and South and the 'South versus the South' inner war that plagued much of the Confederate home front. "Lee served the new Southern nation faithfully despite near-fatal bouts of tuberculosis, assassination attempts, and--as ordered by General William Tecumseh Sherman--treatment as a war criminal." In the end, Davis's "account of Confederate Atlanta features an important yet neglected figure who oversaw it all in a dangerous world of devotion, loyalty, and treason."