A Soldier's General: The Civil War Letters of Major General Lafayette McLaws

A Soldier's General gathers ninety-five letters written by McLaws to his family between 1858 and 1865, making these valuable resources available to a wide audience for the first time. The letters, painstakingly transcribed from McLaws's notoriously poor handwriting, contain a wealth of opinion and information about life and morale in the Confederate army, Civil War-era politics, the Southern press, and the impact of war on the Confederate home front. Among the fascinating threads the letters trace is the story of McLaws's fractured relationship with childhood friend Longstreet, who had McLaws relieved of command in 1863.

John Oeffinger's extensive introduction sketches McLaws's life from his beginnings in Augusta, Georgia, through his early experiences in the U.S. Army, his marriage, his Civil War exploits, and his postwar years.

John Oeffinger has given us a wonderful introduction to a military leader whose name most Americans have never heard. Lafayette McLaws' pensmanship is the primary reason these letters have taken so long to make their way into print. Examples of his writing atest to Oeffinger's task in bringing the letters to readers, at long last.

McLaws was a military man on the losing side of a war fought over slavery, but we see here an individual who lived by a sense of duty and citizenship, who openly expressed his love and concern for family and the education of his children. There are many touching thoughts written into words and expressed by a man often absent from family life by the call of his profession.

If this book had been written by a military leader of our own time, it would be a best seller.