The “Emerging Civil War Series” Series: Dreams of Victory
Here’s a sneak-peek at an ECWS book set for release in early 2022. It’s heading to the printer now!
Beauregard has long been a figure of some interest to me, but it was in writing The Battle of Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864, that I appreciated him more as a commander and a man. What others saw as overheated rhetoric, I saw as the kind of eccentric theatrics that have a home in New Orleans.
The removal of his statue and the arguments for and against him also drew me in. Most did not consider him as an individual, but rather a piece in a culture war.
Rather than praise or bury him, I wrote Dreams of Victory as a way to understand him, and to that end I considered him as a product of an elite Creole background, tempered by West Point training, and colored by his obsession with Napoleon. With that in mind most of his successes, failures, strengths, weaknesses, virtues and vices made sense.
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Dreams of Victory: P. G. T. Beauregard in the Civil War
by Sean Michael Chick
Savas Beatie, 2022
Look forward to your book on Beauregard! Been a while since I read Harry Williams book which is a bit dated now and frankly not easy reading. I appreciate your last 2 paragraphs as the appropriate way to better understand his place in history. And that would also apply to many other Confederate leaders (that have recently been subjected to vilification with a broad brush). I’ve always thought that his masterly defense of Charleston & Petersburg put him in the upper echelon of Confederate generals. I saw his portrait several years ago in National Portrait Gallery and thought it was one of the most impressive paintings there.
I think Beauregard deserves a modern treatment. He has gotten credit in many places for his actions in May-June of 1864, but a unified treatment would interesting.