The Forgotten Corps Commander Lieutenant General Richard H. Anderson and the Tactical Genius of the Army of Northern Virginia

He fought in nearly every major battle of Lee’s army. He rose to command a corps. And almost no one remembers his name.Richard Heron Anderson never wrote the reports. He never claimed the credit. At Williamsburg, Seven Pines, Gaines’s Mill, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, he was in the thick of the fight while others collected the praise, and he let them. His own soldiers called him 'Fighting Dick.' History, for the most part, forgot him.This is the story of the quiet South Carolinian whom Robert E. Lee trusted with a division, then a corps, in the war’s darkest year. It follows him from the red-clay hills of Stateburg and the cadet barracks of West Point, through the climb of Popocatépetl with a young Ulysses S. Grant, to the trenches of Petersburg and the ruin of Sailor’s Creek. It shows a general who dug in at Chancellorsville before Lee gave the order, who was slandered by Braxton Bragg, who bore the blame for a battle he did not plan, and who came home to a plantation he could not save.Drawing on official records, private letters, and the memories of the men who served beside him, The Forgotten Corps Commander makes the case that Anderson was one of the finest tacticians in the Confederate army, and asks why such a man vanished from the story. The answer says as much about how war is remembered as about the man himself.For readers of Civil War history, military biography, and the lost lives behind the great campaigns.