Kevin C. Donovan

Kevin C. Donovan, Esq., a retired lawyer originally from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, is the former head of the New Jersey Employment & Labor Law practice of a national law firm. Kevin graduated with a B.A. (magna cum laude) in History from St. Joseph’s University (Philadelphia) and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. Since assuming the status of a “recovering lawyer,” Kevin has focused on his passion for the Civil War, with an eye to topics reflecting the intersection of the War and the Law.

Kevin’s interest in the Civil War initially was cultivated by his father, who loved American History and hoped his son ultimately would become a history teacher. But the key spark came when, as a grade school student, Kevin found Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac Trilogy in his small Catholic school’s newly established library (placed in an old house). Hundreds of Civil War books/magazines read and literally dozens of trips to Gettysburg later, Kevin’s passion endures. The opportunity to work in the field of employment law, which Kevin came to realize has roots in Reconstruction Era legislation, further whetted his appetite for combining love of the Civil War with the Law. Kevin looks forward to honoring his father’s desire for his son to become, in at least some small measure, a teacher of history.

Kevin is active in the Roanoke (VA) Civil War Round Table, spearheading its marketing activities, and has spoken to multiple groups on the topic “The Court Martial of Fitz John Porter: Fair or Fixed?” He expects to set a long-distance speaking tour record by giving that same talk while spreading the good word about ECW to the American Civil War Round Table of the United Kingdom in June 2025, an idea originally prompted by Chris Mackowski’s podcast interview of that group’s leaders.

Kevin is a UVa, Penn State, Phillies and Eagles fan. Kevin and his Virginia-born spouse Martha Loving (nee Nase) now reside in Martha’s childhood house in Roanoke, VA with their two cats, Thurston Howell III and Ulysses S. Grant (successor to Mosby the cat). They have two children, John and Virginia, and four grand cats.

Publications

• “Secession Revisited: A New Legal Analysis,” North & South, Series II, Vol. 4, No. 5 (Publication Pending)
•   “A Last Reunion: General Carnot Posey Returns to His Alma Mater to Die.”   The Magazine  of Albemarle Charlottesville History (Publication Pending)
• “Forget Treason: Could Robert E. Lee Have Been Court-Martialed for Desertion?,” North & South, Series II, Vol. 4, No. 3 (May 2024)
• “A Better General Than Witness: Sherman’s Bennett Farm Surrender Testimony Before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War,” North & South, Series II, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Mar. 2024)
• “The ‘Butterfly Effect’: How the Eighteenth-Century Kidnapping of A Free Black Man Led to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act & the Civil War,” North & South, Series II, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Dec., 2023)
• “Beneath the Veneer,” an analysis of the Lieber Code, the first government-issued set of rules for the conduct of war, North & South, Series II, Vol. 3, No. 6 (Sept., 2023)
• “The General In Defeat,” discussing Robert E. Lee’s remarkable April 23, 1865 interview by the New York Herald,  America’s Civil War (Nov. 2021)
• “From Walnuts to Appomattox: The Opinions of the Confederate States Attorneys General,” North & South, Series II, Vol. 2, No. 3 (July 2021)
• “How the Civil War Continues to Affect the Law,” Litigation, The Journal of the Section of Litigation, Fall 2015 (American Bar Association)
• “The Court-Martial of Fitz-John Porter,” Columbiad: A Quarterly Journal of the War Between the States  (Vol. 2, No. 4 Winter 1999)