Richard Taylor — son of President Zachary Taylor and one of the Confederacy’s most capable generals — wrote one of the finest and most candid Confederate memoirs of the Civil War. Destruction and Reconstruction covers his service in the Shenandoah Valley under Stonewall Jackson, his command in Louisiana, and his final campaign in the last months of the war, written with the clarity and honesty of a man unwilling to indulge in Lost Cause mythology.
Taylor’s memoir is widely regarded as a literary achievement as well as a historical document, standing above most Confederate reminiscences for its unsentimental intelligence. Download this free EPUB for one of the great personal narratives of the American Civil War.