Lee’s Tigers Revisited

Louisiana State University Press has released Lee’s Tigers Revisited: The Louisiana Infantry in the Army of Northern Virginia, a greatly expanded edition of 1987's Lee’s Tigers, the first book (and doctoral dissertation) of Dr. Terry L. Jones, professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe and author of Country Roads magazine’s “Pastimes” column. The original work was a History Book Club selection and won the General L. Kemper Williams Prize, an award that recognizes the best book published on Louisiana History each year.

Lee’s Tigers Revisited studies the approximately twelve thousand Louisiana infantrymen who fought in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Sometimes derided as the “wharf rats from New Orleans” and the “lowest scrapings of the Mississippi,” the Louisiana Tigers earned a reputation for being drunken and riotous in camp but courageous and dependable on the battlefield. Louisiana’s soldiers, some of whom wore colorful French Zouave uniforms, reflected the state’s multicultural society, with some regiments consisting of French-speaking Creoles and others dominated by European immigrants. Among other contributions, the Tigers resisted the initial Union onslaught at First Manassas, temporarily broke the Union line at Gettysburg, and led Lee’s attempted breakout of Petersburg at Fort Stedman. Casualties were so heavy that fewer than four hundred Louisiana Tigers were still on duty when Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

Jones says that the revised work is nearly 50% longer than the previous version. After the original helped make his name in Civil War history circles, Jones continued researching and uncovering more sources about the Tigers—and then came the internet. Though Jones enjoyed the travel to distant archives that had been necessary for his dissertation, he now had access to much more material from digitized sources. The new sources helped Jones confirm that the LSU Tigers were named for this brigade, helped him fill in the gaps left after the fall of Vicksburg meant that letters sent from Virginia could no longer reach the western Confederacy, and gave him more information about the atrocities of which the brigade was accused: playing soccer with the severed heads of Union casualties (probably not true) and refusing to take prisoners (possibly true). 

Casualties among the ferocious Tigers were so heavy that fewer than four hundred Louisiana Tigers were still on duty when Lee surrendered at Appomattox, but like many Louisianans before and since, their outsize reputations and big personalities ensured that they punched above their weight in national memory. Jones' book will be a great for any history buff looking to spend some hours in the company of swaggering Louisiana originals.

Hardcover. $39.95. 544 pages. Learn more about the book, and pick up a copy, at lsupress.org.