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Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana: Confederate General and New South Reformer. By Mary Gorton McBride, with Ann Mathison McLaurin. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Pp. 320. Cloth, $45.00.)
As Mary Gorton McBride demonstrates in this thoroughly researched biography, Confederate brigadier general Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana lived a particularly eventful life, even by the standards of Americans who experienced the Civil War. Born in Kentucky in 1832 of distinguished lineage, he was raised on his family's Louisiana sugar plantation. He studied at Yale, where he won the respect of both northern and southern classmates, and belonged to that school's accomplished Class of '53. He studied law in New Orleans but did not practice before the war. Gibson traveled to Europe in the mid-i850s and served briefly in the diplomatic corps. Returning home, he undertook an unrewarding attempt at planting and instead gravitated toward politics. Having earlier eschewed his father's Whiggish proclivities, he allied with the pro-secession faction of Louisiana's Democratic Party as the sectional crisis deepened. At the start...