ATTORNEY-GENERALS OF THE CIVIL WAR

While working on my last book, Prairie Defender: The Murder Trials of Abraham Lincoln, I noticed that a remarkable number of Lincoln’s colleagues at the bar became generals during the Civil War. I attributed this fact to my belief that trial lawyers and military leaders shared a constellation of skills equally adaptable to the courtroom and the battlefield—including but not limited to analytical ability, decisiveness, ability to adapt to a rapidly changing tactical environment, and the ability to communicate clearly and unequivocally. After finishing Prairie Defender, I investigated the number of lawyers who became generals on both sides of the conflict. Omitting military school graduates and counting only law students who died during the war and practicing attorneys who returned to practice after the war, I found 170 Union generals and 123 Confederate generals who were lawyers by trade and that lawyer-generals were outnumbered only by professional soldier-generals. My counting method left out a number of well-known lawyer-generals, William Tecumseh Sherman being one of those omitted.

I decided to write a book giving biographical sketches of all identified Civil War lawyer-generals, and to  supplement these biographical sketches with references to webpages containing additional information I collected on each of them. As I continued my research, I found many more Union and Confederate lawyer-generals who fit my criteria. It began to look like I might wind up writing a multi-volume biographical encyclopedia. The deeper I got into the project, the more involved it became, but I learned a lot of interesting facts about a lot of remarkable men.  

My initial inclination was to write twenty extended biographies--ten Union, ten Confederate--of the most interesting and representative of the lawyer-generals and then supplement those biographies with short sketches of the lives of the other lawyer-generals. I'm afraid, however, that I'll wind up with an impossibly long book doing it that way. Being at somewhat of a loss as to how to proceed, I have decided that I'm going to forge ahead and write a collection of 500 word biographical sketches of all the lawyer-generals I can identify and then decide precisely how to put them together into book form.

Almost every book I've ever written, I've learned all kinds of interesting things considerations of space forbade me including in the books, and I'm seeing the same thing happen again after writing only a handful of biographical sketches. This blog is going to be my solution for that problem. Interesting things that I won't have room for in the book, I'm going to put in this blog.

I've already decided what my next entry is going to be. I found a transcript of a speech by a Confederate soldier in which he describes what the "Rebel Yell" sounded like. It seems that one of the great mysteries of the Civil War is what the Rebel Yell sounded like. My next blog post will reveal one Confederate soldier's rendition of the Rebel Yell. Not only that, he also describes the "Yankee Yell." I didn't even know that there was a Yankee Yell. Stay tuned for my next blog post and all will be revealed.