A critical biography of the best known and least accurately understood Civil War general, including the legends perpetrated by his widow, LaSalle Corbell Pickett.

The leader of the most famous charge in American history, George E. Pickett, was destined for immortality, but the man behind the famous name has remained a mystery. This, the first full-length scholarly biography of the general, reveals the complex personality and explores the contradictory behavior of one of Robert E. Lee's most enigmatic subordinates. What emerges is a portrait of a gallant leader who risked his life on many fields but refused to accompany his troops into the jaws of death at Gettysburg; an incisive, quick-witted tactician who graduated at the foot of his West Point Class; and a chivalrous Virginian who in 1865 barely escaped trial as a war criminal.

"The letters composing this book begin in 1861, when the then Captain George Pickett resigned his commission in the United States Army & threw in his lot with the Southern cause. They continue through the war & at the end a few undated ones give glimpses of events & vicissitudes through later years...General Pickett commanded a division of the Confederate Army & his name stands out in the history of the Civil War because of the brilliant charge he made during the Battle of Gettysburg, which failed after his division was almost wiped out. After the battle General Pickett wrote to his wife that if his expected support had come, the South would have won the battle & the Confederate Army would have been in Washington within a few days...The half dozen letters dealing with the Battle of Gettysburg are the most interesting & important section of the volume. General & Mrs. Pickett were married during the war & his letters both during their courtship & after their marriage showed him to have been an ardent & devoted lover & husband, for nothing seems to have been deleted from even their most intimate passages."--New York Times Book Review.

If, as many have argued, the Civil War is the most crucial moment in our national life and Gettysburg its turning point, then the climax of the climax, the central moment of our history, must be Pickett's Charge. But as Carol Reardon notes, the Civil War saw many other daring assaults and stout defenses. Why, then, is it Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg--and not, for example, Richardson's Charge at Antietam or Humphreys's Assault at Fredericksburg--that looms so large in the popular imagination? As this innovative study reveals, by examining the events of 3 July 1863 through the selective and evocative lens of 'memory' we can learn much about why Pickett's Charge endures so strongly in the American imagination. Over the years, soldiers, journalists, veterans, politicians, orators, artists, poets, and educators, Northerners and Southerners alike, shaped, revised, and even sacrificed the 'history' of the charge to create 'memories' that met ever-shifting needs and deeply felt values. Reardon shows that the story told today of Pickett's Charge is really an amalgam of history and memory. The evolution of that mix, she concludes, tells us much about how we come to understand our nation's past.