Maguire's Masterstroke

Drummed out of the Virginia Military Institute in 1859 for cheating, drunkenness, and a regrettable incident involving Major Thomas Jackson's wife, Harry Maguire enters the Confederate cavalry the only way he knows how, through his father's name and against his own better judgment. What follows is not a soldier's tale. It is the confession of a thoroughgoing coward who, by an unbroken streak of accident, panic, and luck, becomes one of J.E.B. Stuart's most celebrated officers.

From Stuart's Ride Around McClellan to the smoke of Second Manassas, from Brandy Station and the meadow at the grand review to the broken third day at Gettysburg, Maguire stumbles from one accidental triumph to the next. His most famous maneuver, the one that gives this book its title, is in truth a panicked retreat that happens to deliver two companies of Federal infantry into the path of Longstreet's hidden corps. The reputation is permanent. The truth, buried in a Louisiana attic for a hundred and sixty years.

Then capture at Gettysburg, and a choice. The blue coat fits no better than the grey, and fifteen months on a Tennessee supply depot teach Harry that survival is its own kind of damnation. When the Confederacy collapses around him, he rides south for Mexico, because Mexico is far away, and distance is the one thing he has always valued above all others.

Discovered among family papers in St. Francisville and edited by historian René M. Thibodeaux of LSU, the Maguire memoirs offer the unvarnished record of a man who never wished to be brave and could not stop being mistaken for it. Equal parts war adventure, social comedy, and coward's confession, Maguire's Masterstroke is the first volume of a memoir that will carry its narrator through the courts of Maximilian's Mexico and well beyond.