The two greatest generals on the Northern side have written their own memoirs, and written them exceedingly well: _Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant_, 2 vols. (1885-86), and _Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman_, 2 vols. (1886). But the two greatest on the Southern side wrote nothing themselves; and no one else has written a really great life of that very great commander, Robert Lee. Fitzhugh Lee's enthusiastic sketch of his uncle, _General Lee_ (1894), is one of the several second-rate books on the subject. Colonel G. F. R. Henderson's _Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War_, 2 vols. (1898), is, on the other hand, among the best of war biographies. Henderson's strategical study of the Valley Campaign is a masterpiece. Two good works of very different kinds are: _A History of the Civil War in the United States_ (1905), by W. Birkbeck Wood and Major J. E. Edmonds, and _A History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850_, 8 vols. (1893-1919), by James Ford Rhodes. The first is military, the second political. Mr. Rhodes has also written a single volume _History of the Civil War_ (1917). _American Campaigns_ by Major M. F. Steele, issued under the supervision of the War Department (1909), deals chiefly with the military operations of the Civil War. The naval side of this, as of all other wars, has been far too much neglected. But that great historian of sea-power, Admiral Mahan, has told the best of the story in his _Admiral Farragut_ (1892). An interesting contemporary account of the war will be found in the five volumes of Appleton's _American Annual Cyclopœdia_ for the years from 1861 to 1865. B. J. Lossing's _Pictorial History of the Civil War_, 3 vols. (1866-69), and Harper's _Pictorial History of the Rebellion_, 2 vols. (1868), give graphic pictures of military life as seen by contemporaries. Personal reminiscences of the war, of varying merit, have multiplied rapidly in recent years. These are appraised for the unwary reader in the bibliographies already mentioned. Frank Wilkeson's _Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac_ (1887), George C. Eggleston's _A Rebel's Recollections_ (1905), and Mrs. Mary B. Chestnut's _Diary from Dixie_ (1905) are among the best of these personal recollections.