Back to Chickamauga again: this time to take a look at the Confederate side. One of the gifted soldiers there was a withdrawn, somewhat cantankerous man named Daniel Harvey Hill, who commanded an army corps under Braxton Bragg and who, like most of Bragg’s other top commanders, emerged from the battle feeling that the Confederacy had missed a great opportunity because of the failings of the man at the top.

Hill was “one of the two Hills” in Confederate memory. He and the Virginian A. P. Hill wrote their names large, on the record of the Army of Northern Virginia and in hot battle action. Perhaps A. P. Hill was the more fortunate: he died in action just before the war ended and was enshrined in the special legend that attached itself to the generals of the lost cause who did not outlive the cause itself. D. H. Hill survived the war by nearly a quarter of a century, and during all of the postwar years he spoke his mind vigorously. Since he had pronounced opinions about the merit of things done by himself and by others, and since he was frank beyond the bounds of prudence, he pulled controversy about himself like a blanket. Lee himself took a distaste to him, while the war was on and afterward, and this undoubtedly hurt Hill more than Grant’s dislike hurt Rosecrans and Thomas. Hill has come down in memory as a capable soldier who just did not quite fit in anywhere.

He too needs another look, and a perceptive study of him is available in Hal Bridges’ Lee’s Maverick General . Reading this book, one is likely to feel that the Confederacy never really made the best use of this man’s capacities. He was undeniably very difficult, in a way Rosecrans and Thomas were not, which is to say that he had a thorny personality and spoke his acidulous mind at times when he should have kept quiet. All the same, it is hard to escape the feeling that as a soldier he was an extremely good man to have on one’s side. Not a man, probably, for the top command anywhere, but an extremely good subordinate for anyone who knew just how to use him.

Hill was frail, racked all his life by poor health, dyspeptic, morose, contentious. He won his reputation in the Army of Northern Virginia, and even in that army, whose untrained soldiers insisted that their generals must show an instinctive contempt for personal peril, he was famous as a man who did not know what fear was. He fought well whenever there was fighting to be done, but he argued about it afterward; he finally tried the patience of Lee beyond Lee’s endurance, and after 1862 Lee concluded that the Confederacy would be just as well served if Hill did the rest of his fighting in someone else’s army. Thereafter the man was on