Colonel Grenfell's Wars: The Life of a Soldier of Fortune

by Stephen Z. Starr

Book Overview

In the predawn hours of March 7, 1868, four prisoners aided by a guard escaped from Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas and headed a small, open fishing boat into a violent storm in the Gulf of Mexico. The men were never seen again.

One of them, Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell, was a British soldier of fortune who had come to America in 1862 and earned himself a unique place in the Confederate Valhalla. In this biography Stephen Z. Starr...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807120340
• ISBN13: 9780807120347
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 360 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Superb Biography of John Hunt Morgan's Colorful and Able Assistant

This is a highly entertaining, yet very scholarly biography of Colonel George St. Ledger Grenfell-- a colorful British soldier of fortune and member of General Morgan's staff. Grenfell's life is exciting and very unusual. It was filled with danger, adventure, high excitement, and risk after risk. The author is widely reknowned for his superb history of the Union cavalry in the Civil War. Grenfell is one of those cavalier Confederate heroes that makes the Civil War so fascinating. He's a man that feels most at home in battle very much like Stonewall Jackson, Patrick Cleburne, or Jeb Stuart. Grenfell had the misfortune after he left Morgan's staff (under a cloud) to get involved in Confederate Secret Service plans which, after a lengthy show trial, got him imprisoned in the very harsh prison of the Dry Tortugas off the coast of Florida. He, as noted by Starr, fully understood that Morgan's flashy raids often involving thievery and petty crime on the part of the soldiers, were far less helpful to the Confederate war effort than popular southern journalists of the time had characterized. Grenfell properly understood that Morgan was the flashy facade and General Basil Duke was actually the brains of Morgan's cavalry. Being the adventurer and risk-taker that he was, Grenfell attempted to escape from the Dry Tortugas. He was never heard from again. Starr is an excellent writer and brings this otherwise mythic character of Grenfell very much to life. While a minor player in the drama that was the Civil War, his association with Morgan and with Duke makes the study of him a fascinating backdoor entre to the world of Morgan's Raiders. I recommend this biography to any fan of interesting characters. The book is well-documented and finely written. This is a very exciting biography and certainly illustrates that any historian who makes an exciting personage boring has utterly failed. Much in the same way that the death of John Adams in David McCullough's superb biography saddened me, the death/disappearance of Grenfell at the end of this biography was a sad moment for me. Part scoundrel, part scallowag, part world-traveling adventurer, and completely a complex multi-faceted character, George St. Ledger Grenfell rightfully deserves the attention given him in this excellent biography.