Dr. Drew Bledsoe
Lee University Dr. Drew Bledsoe’s first book has been published by Louisiana State University Press. The book, “Citizen-Officers: The Union and Confederate Volunteer Junior Officer Corps in the American Civil War,” explores the role of the volunteer officer corps during the Civil War and will be included in LSU Press’ “Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War” series.
According to Dr. Bledsoe, volunteer officers faced unique leadership challenges when military necessity clashed with the antebellum democratic values of volunteer soldiers. Through an analysis of wartime writings, postwar reminiscences, company and regimental papers, census records, and demographic data, “Citizen-Officers” illuminates the lives and experiences of nearly 2,600 Union and Confederate company-grade junior officers from every theater of operations across four years of war. The book has already gained considerable critical praise from leading Civil War historians.
Dr. Bledsoe, an assistant professor of history at Lee, earned his doctoral and master’s degrees in American history at Rice University, and joined Lee’s Department of History, Political Science and Humanities in 2013. His research and teaching interests are in the American Civil War and Reconstruction, American military history and leadership traditions, the American Revolutionary era, and the early American republic. Additionally, he leads the Battle of Chickamauga seminar for Lee students.
Dr. Bledsoe is the author of several scholarly works on the Civil War and American military history and is active in many local and national historical organizations. He is the recipient of a number of awards, grants, and fellowships, and in 2015 was a Fellow at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In 2017, he will serve as a summer faculty member in the annual Civil War Institute Summer Conference at Gettysburg College.