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Confederate General William “Extra Billy” Smith: From Virginia’s Statehouse to Gettysburg Scapegoat

 Scott L. Mingus, Sr., Savas Beatie, 2013, $29.95

Few figures from the war era are as complex and intriguing as William “Extra Billy” Smith. A national celebrity in antebellum America, he remains relatively unknown in terms of overall scholarship. Scott Mingus’ biography fills an important niche.

Smith is the only Virginian from that era to serve in the state General Assembly, as governor, in the U.S. Congress and as a Confederate general. Famous from early adult life for the “extra” charges he levied on the federal government for his contracted mail and stage coach runs, Smith was also a consummate politician, sometimes courting Whigs, sometimes calling himself a Democrat, later a Free-Soiler— but always fiercely independent and opinionated. Smith never met an election campaign he didn’t like (though he lost a few, including for the U.S. Senate). During the war, Smith at age 65 in 1863 was the oldest Rebel general in the field. After making a controversial decision at Gettysburg that diverted precious attention to a phantom Union movement on July 1, he returned home to become Virginia’s wartime governor, having already served during peacetime.

An objective review shows Smith was not ineffective as a leader of men in the field. Mingus reports on Smith as general in the same way he portrays him as politician and businessman, laying out what contemporaries said and letting readers decide for themselves. This is particularly important because the only previous book-length treatment of Smith was penned by his brother-in-law, John W. Bell, who wrote Memoirs of Governor William Smith of Virginia in 1889 following Smith’s death in 1887. Bell’s account bears all the marks of a sympathetic biography. Mingus’ occasional overreliance on it is understandable given the dearth of other work on the topic. But Mingus must work hard throughout to maintain an objectivity that many of the authors he cites openly eschewed; the scholarship bar is necessarily high following Bell’s account.

The book’s overwhelming appeal is Smith’s personality, which permeates every page. This is perhaps the biographer’s ultimate triumph, when the subject overshadows the teller and the story takes on a life of its own. It’s hard to escape the magnetic charm, the vim and the showmanship of Extra Billy, even 126 years later.

 

Originally published in the January 2014 issue of America’s Civil War. To subscribe, click here.