General John Gordon at Chancellorsville: Account of the Battle from His Memoirs

by John B. Gordon

18 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 17, 2015

About the author

John B. Gordon was a Confederate officer in the American Civil War. He was born in Upson County, Georgia, on his father's plantation, and attended the University of Georgia, proving himself a distinguished student. He passed the bar examination and practiced law until the outbreak of the war, at which point he was elected captain of a company of mountaineers. He quickly rose to brigadier general, and distinguished himself during a series of campaigns. Badly wounded at the Battle of Antietam, he spend months recovering and rejoined the war as a brigade commander under Jubal A. Early. Through the latter parts of the war, he began to rise to even more dramatic prominence, serving a crucial role as more and more of Lee's senior commanders were killed, injured, or became unreliable. After the end of the war, he was an extreme opponent of reconstruction and is generally acknowledged to have been the titular head of the Ku Klux Klan. Gordon served as the first Commander-in-Chief of the United Confederate Veterans and authored several memoirs, dying in Miami, Florida in 1904.