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September 24, 2024

Contact: Keith Jones, Editor in Chief

Williams C. Wickham Bio by Sheridan R. Barringer

Robert E. Lee’s Reluctant Warrior: The Life of Cavalry Commander and Railroad Businessman, Brigadier General Williams Carter Wickham

by Sheridan R. Barringer

Fox Run Publishing, 272 pages, 6 x 9 in, September 2024

Paperback, 9781945602269, $24.95; Hardcover, 9781945602252, $32.95

Williams Carter Wickham fought bravely for the south as a Confederate cavalry officer, finishing the war as a brigadier general. He also steadfastly opposed secession, believing that it was illegal. From a prominent Virginia family, he was a natural leader in the field and, late in the war, Confederate Congress. He rose from the rank of captain and after the war broke with his fellow generals by joining the Republican Party, urging compliance with Reconstruction. He became an organizer of railroad improvements and expansion, becoming leader of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and served in the Virginia State Senate. This release is the first full length biography of this important and enigmatic Virginia military, political, and business leader. Sheridan R. Barringer retired from NASA where he worked as a mechanical engineer and project manager at Langley Research Center for 37 years. He graduated from Virginia Tech in mechanical engineering in 1965. He is the author of Fighting for General Lee: General Rufus Barringer and The North Carolina Cavalry Brigade about his ancestor for which he won the Douglas Southall Freeman Best Southern History Book Award in 2016. He has also authored biographies of two other prominent Virginians: Major General Thomas L. Rosser and Colonel Thomas T. Munford. He and his wife Pam have two grown children and reside in the Tidewater region of Virginia.