Rebels in Repose: Confederate Commanders After the War - Paperback

by Povall (Author)

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. 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. Allie Povall 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.

Author Biography

A native of Lexington, Mississippi, Allie Povall grew up there during the halcyon 1950s. After graduation from Ole Miss, Povall served as a naval officer during the Vietnam War and then earned a law degree from Ole Miss and an LLM from the Yale Law School. He practiced law in multiple locations representing BellSouth Corporation before his retirement in 1998. Povall is the author of three other books, one of which, The Time of Eddie Noel, was a finalist for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Best Nonfiction Award in 2010, as well as Forward Magazine's Best True Crime award, also in 2010. The Time of Eddie Noel will soon become a motion picture. Povall and his wife, Janet, live in Oxford, Mississippi. They are the parents of three grown children and the grandparents of four girls.