Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War

One of America's greatest classical scholars, Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924) was also a Civil War journalist. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, and a self-described "southerner beyond dispute", he received his doctorate in Germany and returned to America an enthusiastic advocate of Greek scholarship. Like every male member of his immediate family (including his father), Gildersleeve enlisted after Fort Sumter, but he continued to teach at the University of Virginia during the winters. Frequenting Richmond during the war, this young intellectual and passionate partisan who found the war, with its attendant social and political issues, as stimulating as his beloved classics. In Soldier and Scholar, editor Ward Briggs has assembled a revealing collection of Gildersleeve's writings: autobiographical essays, sixty-three editorials he wrote for the Richmond Examiner during the war, and a series of his reflections upon the causes and effects of the Civil War thirty years later. Unlike published Civil War diaries, the editorials do not merely record daily occurrences and impressions; they analyze military, social, economic, and political events, setting them in a larger ethical and historical context. Infused with the rhetoric of Gildersleeve's classical training, these pieces are frequently vitriolic attacks not only on the evil and immoral Yankees, miscegenation, Jews, and critics of slavery, but also on Jefferson Davis, his hapless Confederate administration, and the struggling Southern armies.