Book Review: Boy General of the 11th Alabama: John C. C. Sanders and Company C in the Civil War

Boy General of the 11^th Alabama: John C. C. Sanders and Company C in the Civil War. By Donald W. Abel, Jr. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2023. Softcover, 351 pp. $49.95.

Reviewed by Riley Sullivan

Robert E. Lee’s famed Army of Northern Virginia has received much scholarly attention since the end of the Civil War. However, as a part of recent historiographical trends, many historians have shifted their focus from documenting the hierarchy of Lee’s army to crafting histories of its units. In Donald W. Abel Jr.’s Boy General of the 11^th Alabama: John C. C. Sanders and Company C in the Civil War, the retired financial industry executive recounts the service of Company C of the 11th Alabama Infantry, which fought in every major campaign of the Army of Northern Virginia. By following the company’s service through the war, Abel delivers a balanced narrative about a single company and its combat experience during America’s tumultuous internal conflict.

Energetically, like hundreds of thousands of other Southerners during the Civil War, the men of Company C joined the Confederate war effort to preserve their ways of life. For these men, everything was on the line. Coming from Alabama’s prosperous Greene County, the men of the “Confederate Guards” — as they came to be known — knew that much was at stake in this conflict. For Abel, a descendant of one of the Guards, there was no question that these men were fighting to preserve the institution of slavery. In the first chapter of the book, Abel relies heavily on census records and ancestry sites to construct evidential data to prove this point.

After the opening chapter, Abel constructs a chronological narrative that examines the service of the Confederate Guards from their inception in 1861 to the end of their war at Appomattox. While he utilizes the common regimental and company history trend of following the unit through its war experience, and places the Guards within the context of the larger campaigns, Abel also reveals “the parallel waning of the company unit within the decreasing outlook for the Army of Northern Virginia and the war itself.” (3) From the beginning of the conflict, casualties from disease and battlefield deaths thinned the ranks of the Confederate Guards. Despite the growing odds against them, these men continued to fight for a cause that they fully believed in and thought just.

Much of Abel’s narrative about the unit comes largely from the letters and diaries produced by its soldiers. However, a large portion of his primary source material comes from the personal correspondence of John C. C. Sanders, the Confederate Guards’ original captain, who eventually rose to the rank of brigadier general before his death at Petersburg in August 1864. Organized in such a manner, Abel’s account jumps from being a unit history to a mini-biography of Sanders to a larger study of the war in Virginia. While this structure may confuse some readers, Abel is able to balance these three different (though related) aspects by returning to the central narrative of the men of the Confederate Guards and their role in the conflict.

The closing chapters are perhaps the weakest part of Abel’s study. Like many unit histories, he does give a brief account of the unit’s soldiers after Appomattox. However, his discussion of the post-war era lacks depth and detail and does not mention the reunions and veteran organizations that the members of the Confederate Guards would certainly have attended and joined. While Abel does state that many of those who survived the war seemingly left little documentation about their post-war happenings, the inclusion of some of their experiences during Reconstruction and the effects of the trauma they endured during their service would have enhanced this part of the book. Abel does provide a cursory look into their post-war lives in his final chapter, “The Men of the Confederate Guards,” offering brief biographies of the soldiers, but readers are left wishing for a bit more.

Overall, the Boy General of the 11th Alabama accomplishes its main objective of telling how this unit, with everything at stake, experienced the turbulent four year conflict. Even as their ranks thinned from disease and battlefield casualties, they continued to fight to the bitter end. Abel’s study makes a solid contribution to the growing literature centered on the soldier experience during the Civil War.

Riley Sullivan is a Professor of History at San Jacinto College in Pasadena, Texas. He received his Master of Arts in History (2021) from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Currently, he is set to publish an article for the Tennessee Historical Quarterly for the Spring 2023 issue.