Douglas Southall Freeman was born in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1886, the son of a Confederate soldier. After receiving a Ph.D. in history from John Hopkins University at the age of twenty-two he embarked upon a newspaper career. He was named editor of the Richmond News Leader at the age of twenty-nine, a post he would hold for thirty-four years. In 1915, Freeman was commissioned to write a one-volume biography of Robert E. Lee; twenty years later, his fourvolume R.E. Lee won the Pulitzer prize. The three volumes of Lees Lieutenants took him a relatively modest eight years to write. He won another Pulitzer Prize for his six-volume biography of George Washington, which he finished only hours before his death in 1953.

When Douglas Southall Freeman's original three-volume version of Lee's Lieutenants appeared in the 1940s, it marked a high point in Civil War history, and the books were lauded not only for their scholarship but for their elegant writing. This monument of Civil War literature has been skillfully abridged by one of the most noted present-day Civil War historians, Stephen W. Sears. The new one-volume abridgement retains the core material of the original and makes Freeman's fine writing available in a much more accessible format. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.