Fallen Leaders

Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives from the Historians at Emerging Civil War

Chris Mackowski

• Publisher: Savas Beatie
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781611216325
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

Fallen Leaders: Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives from the Historians at Emerging Civil War recounts the fall of some of the most famous, infamous, and underappreciated commanders from both the North and South. The Civil War took as many as 720,000 lives and maimed hundreds of thousands more. The fallen included outstanding leaders on both sides, from a U.S. president all the way down the ranks to beloved regimental commanders. Abraham Lincoln, Stonewall Jackson, and John Reynolds remain well-known and even legendary. Others, like Confederate cavalry commander Earl Van Dorn, remain locked in infamy. The deaths of army commanders Albert Sidney Johnston and James McPherson and regimental leader Col. Elmer Ellsworth (the first Union officer killed) left more questions than answers about unfulfilled potential and lost opportunities. Thousands more have faded into historical obscurity. Others "fell" not from death or wounds but because of their own missteps or misdeeds, their reputations ruined forever. Theirs are falls from grace. This collection of essays by a host of writers brings together the best scholarship from Emerging Civil War's blog, symposia, and podcast, all of which have been revised, updated, and footnoted. The collection also contains several original pieces written exclusively for Emerging Civil War's 10th Anniversary Series. Expect new angles on familiar stories about high-profile figures. Meet leaders whose stories you might not know but whose losses were felt as deeply personal tragedies by those around them. This collection sheds new light and insight on some of the most significant casualties of the conflict: the fallen leaders whose deaths, injuries, and disgraces changed the Civil War.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Photographing Fallen Leaders
• Remember Ellsworth!
• Barnard Bee: “His First and . . . Last Blow. . . Struck on the Bloody Plains of Manassas”
• “He Had Won the Fight for Missouri”: Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Lyon
• Ball’s Bluff: The Death of Edward Baker and the Fall of Charles Stone
• “The Turning Point of Our Fate”: The Death of Albert Sidney
• P. G. T. Beauregard’s Slow Fade Into Oblivion
• George N. Hollins’s Fall from Grace
• Tracking Down the Wounding Site of Joe Johnston
• Col. John McLane of the 83rd Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry
• Col. Isaac Seymour of the 6th Louisiana Infantry
• Fitz John Porter: A Seared Soul
• Gen. Phil Kearny: My Favorite Historical Person
• Gen. Max Weber at Antietam
• “A Tremendous Little Man”: Newton Schleich in the Civil War
• Stonewall Jackson’s Wounding: The Best Thing to Happen to Lee at Chancellorsville
• More Than Just Jackson: The Army of Northern Virginia’s Casualties in the Officer Corps at Chancellorsville
• James Keith Boswell: Another Officer Felled by Friendly Fire at Chancellorsville
• Gloomy Foreboding: Maine’s Hiram Berry Had a Dark Premonition About His Fate
• Lt. Justin E. Dimick: “Accomplished Artillery Officer, Truest Soldier”
• Capt. Sewell Gray: My Favorite Historical Person
• Amiel Whipple’s Armor of Dirt
• Earl Van Dorn’s Final Obscurity
• Adm. Andrew H. Foote—Another Farragut?
• Brave and Never to Be Forgotten: General John F. Reynolds
• Maj. Andrew Grover of the 76th New York Volunteer Infantry
• Richard Garnett: Fall, Rise . . . Then Fall to Rise No More
• Remembering Dick Garnett
• Sorrow Comes to All
• With Sedgwick at Spotsylvania
• Fearless of All Danger: Brig. Gen. Thomas Greely Stevenson
• Leonidas Polk
• “A Piece of Bone,” Bishop Polk, and the National Tribune
• Joshua Chamberlain Lost “the Gleam of White Light”
• Death of an Army Commander
• James McPherson
• Did Daniel Chaplin Commit Death-by-Sniper?
• Hiram Burnham: The Grizzly Sensed Death
• To Die Like Men
• A. P. Hill’s Death Wish?
• Reactions to Lincoln’s Death
• Mourning Keepsakes
• The Last to Fall: Brig. Gen. Robert Charles Tyler
• The Death of a Brigadier-General: Edward Canby and Civil War Memory
• What If . . . Henry Halleck Had Stayed in California?
• The Return of Stonewall?
• Killed in Action
• Seniormost Deaths
• Contributors’ Notes
• Postscript