Unhonored Service: The Life of Lee’s Senior Cavalry Commander, Colonel Thomas Taylor Munford, CSA by Sheridan R. Barringer

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Reviewed by: Unhonored Service: The Life of Lee’s Senior Cavalry Commander, Colonel Thomas Taylor Munford, CSA by Sheridan R. Barringer George C. Rable Unhonored Service: The Life of Lee’s Senior Cavalry Commander, Colonel Thomas Taylor Munford, CSA. By Sheridan R. Barringer. (Burlington, N.C.: Fox Run Publishing, 2022. Pp. vi, 409. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-945602-22-1; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 978-1-945602-21-4.) Sheridan R. Barringer’s title well summarizes Colonel Thomas Taylor Munford’s assessment of his career in the Confederate army. An equally appropriate title might have been “Thwarted Ambition” because the consistent denial of Munford’s ambition to become a general is a major theme of this book. A graduate of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) who made memorable early contact with Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, Munford had hoped for a peaceable solution to the sectional crisis. When the Civil War began, however, he joined the Second Virginia Cavalry and became its colonel. Munford [End Page 365] deplored the practice of electing company officers and was prickly about his own status even as he looked after the creature comforts of the enlisted men. When various generals were ill or wounded, Munford served in temporary brigade and division commands. Barringer considers Munford a “competent cavalry commander, at every level from regiment to division” (p. 363). Nevertheless, that coveted promotion to general kept eluding Munford, a problem he attributed to personal prejudice and an ingrained preference for West Point–trained officers in the Confederate high command. Munford was recommended for promotion “many times,” and the more often he was passed over the more critical he became of superiors such as J. E. B. Stuart and Jubal A. Early (p. i). In letters Munford railed against the power-hungry commanders whose “envy, hatred and malice” blocked his advancement (p. 190). All of these issues reached a climax of sorts when Munford served with General Thomas L. Rosser in the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign. After the disastrous engagement at Tom’s Brook, mutual recrimination between Rosser and Munford quickly mushroomed into a lifelong feud. Munford deplored his fellow soldiers’ obsession with seeking out alcohol, and later he blamed the stunning defeat of Confederate forces at Five Forks in part on George E. Pickett’s drinking at the “infamous shad bake” (p. 289). Munford would always claim that he had finally been promoted to brigadier general at the very end of the war, but there is no evidence that either Jefferson Davis or the Confederate Congress ever acted on the matter. After Appomattox, Munford escaped to Lynchburg, Virginia, and claimed that his command had not been part of the Confederate surrender. Feeling both degraded and depressed by the war’s outcome, Munford proved to be a diehard Confederate. He sought to vindicate his own reputation for decades after the war. He never ran for political office, but he did engage in a variety of business activities and served as president of the board of visitors at VMI. All the while, Munford and Rosser kept blasting away at each other in articles and correspondence. After his wife’s death in 1910, Munford moved to an Alabama plantation, where he died in 1918. Munford left behind a mass of manuscripts that Barringer puts to good use. Besides this family correspondence, Rosser also produced a voluminous amount of material dealing with various Civil War controversies, including his own dealings with superior officers. Barringer’s biography is well researched, though at times Munford becomes lost in a maze of contextual detail. The author had no intention of engaging with the literature on the Army of Northern Virginia, but he should have drawn clearer assessments of Munford’s performance throughout the war chapters. Barringer does a good job of describing the campaigns in which Munford was involved, but some of the maps are poorly produced. The book offers interesting accounts of various conflicts in the Confederate high command and indirectly illuminates the difficulties of deploying cavalry effectively. In the crowded field of Confederate biography, Unhonored Service: The Life of Lee’s Senior Cavalry Commander, Colonel Thomas Taylor Munford, CSA is a workmanlike treatment of a capable but often contentious...