The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 87, July 1983 - April, 1984 Page: 222

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Europe, and programs like medicare, immigration reform, and model
cities. One might also hope that this book, as well as the trailblazing
work of Richard S. Kirkendall at the Truman Library, will lead other
presidential libraries toward similar endeavors.
Columbia University WILLIAM E. LEUCHTENBURG
The Thomas Jewett Goree Letters. Volume I: The Civil War Cor-
respondence. Edited by Langston James Goree V. (Bryan, Tex.:
Family History Foundation, 1981. Pp. 3.39. Foreword, introduc-
tion, illustrations, index. Not for sale. One hundred copies were
printed for distribution to libraries. A copy may be secured for
an individual's personal library by making a $1oo donation to the
Family History Foundation, P.O. Box 4464, Bryan 77805.)
Much intimate knowledge of General James Longstreet, Robert E.
Lee's "old war horse," was recorded in a most readable book, Recollec-
tions of a Confederate Staff Officer (1905), by a member of his staff,
G. Moxley Sorrel. The family letters of Captain Thomas Jewett Goree
of Texas, Longstreet's wartime aide, provide additional information
about a man friends referred to affectionately as "Pete." "In a fight
he is a man of very few words, and keeps at all time his own counsels,"
Goree wrote his mother on December 14, 1861:
He very often tells his officers as well as men, whenever they begin to talk
of our retreating or being defeated, that it is nonsensical to have any such
idea, for that in every battle, somebody is bound to run, and that if they
will only stand their ground long enough like men, the enemy will cer-
tainly run. He is very reserved and distant toward his men, and very strict,
but they all like him. (pp. 1 o0-111)
Included in this limited edition are all the Goree letters pertaining
to the Civil War from the collection in the John W. Thomason Rare
Books and Special Collections Room at Sam Houston State Univer-
sity. (Colonel Thomason, a career Marine officer, artist, and writer,
was Goree's grandson.) Letters spanning the years from 1853 through
1860 are included for background. There are postwar letters to Goree
from Longstreet, Sorrel, and General Edward Porter Alexander. An
additional 130 letters not germane to the war will be published in a
second volume.
Goree's letters include lengthy descriptions of the first battle of
Manassas, Seven Pines, and the Seven Days. Unfortunately, there are

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