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Fighting for General Lee: Confederate General Rufus Barringer and the North Carolina Cavalry Brigade
Contributor(s): Barringer, Sheridan (Author)
ISBN: 1611213851     ISBN-13: 9781611213850
Publisher: Savas Beatie
OUR PRICE:   $17.06  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: April 2026
This item may be ordered no more than 25 days prior to its publication date of April 1, 2026
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Military
- History | United States - Civil War Period (1850-1877)
- History | Military - United States
Dewey: B
Physical Information: 312 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Winner, 2016, The Douglas Southall Freeman Award

Rufus Barringer fought on horseback through most of the Civil War with General Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, and rose to lead the North Carolina Cavalry Brigade in some of the war's most difficult combats. Fighting for General Lee: Confederate General Rufus Barringer and the North Carolina Cavalry Brigade details his entire history for the first time.

Barringer raised a company early in the war and fought with the 1st North Carolina Cavalry from the Virginia peninsula through Second Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. He was severely wounded in the face at Brandy Station, during the opening hours of the Gettysburg Campaign. Because of his severe wound, he missed the remainder of the Gettysburg Campaign, returning to his regiment in mid-October, 1863. Within three months he was a lieutenant colonel, and by June 1864 a brigadier general in command of the North Carolina Brigade, which fought the rest of the war with Lee and was nearly destroyed during the retreat from Richmond in 1865. The captured Barringer met President Lincoln at City Point, endured prison, and after the war did everything he could to convince North Carolinians to accept Reconstruction and heal the wounds of war.

Fighting for General Lee by Sheridan R. Barringer draws upon a wide array of newspapers, diaries, letters, and previously unpublished family documents and photographs, as well as other firsthand accounts, to paint a broad, deep, and colorful portrait of an overlooked Southern cavalry commander. Despite its subject matter, the book is a balanced account that concludes Barringer was a dependable, hard-hitting warrior increasingly called upon to lead attacks against superior Union forces.

This remarkable new biography teaches us many things. It is easy today to paint all who wore Confederate gray with a broad brush because they fought on the side to preserve slavery. Here, however, was a man who wielded the sword and then promptly sheathed it to follow a bolder vision. Barringer proved to be a bold champion of the poor, the black, and the masses--a Southern gentleman and man decades ahead of his time that made a difference in the lives of North Carolinians.

Contributor Bio(s): Barringer, Sheridan: - Sheridan R. "Butch" Barringer lives with his wife Pam in Newport News, Virginia. He graduated from Virginia Tech and worked as a mechanical engineer and project manager for nearly four decades with NASA's Langley Research Center. Butch's interests include the Civil War, with an emphasis on the cavalry, physics, cosmology, and reading. Butch is the author of Fighting for General Lee: Confederate General Rufus Barringer and the North Carolina Cavalry Brigade (2016). He is currently working on a biography of Confederate Colonel Thomas T. Munford.