The leader of the most famous charge in American history, George E. Pickett was destined for immortality, but the man behind the famous name has remained a mystery. This, the first full-length scholarly biography of the general, reveals the complex personality and explores the contradictory behavior of one of Robert E. Lee's most enigmatic subordinates.

What emerges is a portrait of a gallant leader who risked his life on many fields but refused to accompany his troops into the jaws of death at Gettysburg; an incisive, quick-witted tactician who graduated at the foot of his West Point Class; and a chivalrous Virginian who in 1865 barely escaped trial as a war criminal.

This biography of one of the Civil War's most celebrated commanders, a general whose career both greatness and tragedy touched, is based largely on published and unpublished primary sources. The book provides a multi-faceted portrait of an officer whose life has long been obscured by error, stereotype, and myth.

As the first Pickett biography published since 1899, Leader of the Charge debunks a century of myth-making about him, exposes two postwar collections of letters reputedly written by Pickett as fiction concocted by his widow, and publishes for the first time numerous authentic Pickett letters.