Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War (Southern Texts Society)

One of America's greatest classical scholars, Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924) was also a Civil War journalist. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, and a self-described "southerner beyond dispute," he received his doctorate in Germany and returned to America an enthusiastic advocate of Greek scholarship. Like every male member of his immediate family (including his father). Gildersleeve enlisted after Fort Sumter, but he continued to teach at the University of Virginia during the winters. Frequenting Richmond during the war, this young intellectual and passionate partisan who found the war, with its attendant social and political issues, as stimulating as his beloved classics. In Soldier and Scholar, editor Ward Briggs has assembled a revealing collection of Gildersleeve's writings: autobiographical essays, sixty-three editorials he wrote for the Richmond Examiner during the war, and a series of his reflections upon the causes and effects of the Civil War thirty years later. This collection, which offers a view of Gildersleeve's intellectual beliefs and his passions, should interest Southern historians, classicists, and Civil War buffs.