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Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought far the South. By Helen P. Trimpi. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2010. 380 pages. $59.00 (hardback).
This interesting reference book, an alphabetically-arranged biographical register, resulted from the compiler's curiosity. An expert on Herman Melville, Helen P. Trimpi wondered how many Harvard College alumni had served the Confederacy during the Civil War, where and how they fought and, if the soldiers had not perished in the war, how they lived and what they accomplished in their postwar lives.
Digging deeply into the Harvard University Archives, the records of the Harvard Law School, the soldiers' combined service records at the National Archives, and other primary sources, she compiled as many as 600 potential Confederates with Harvard connections. Trimpi excluded from consideration about fifty men for various reasons, including that they had died before the war or because of advanced age. For example, Charles Carter Lee (born in 1798 and a member of Harvard College class of 1819), General Robert E. Lee's oldest brother, was too old to have served...