Armistead Lindsay Long was a Civil War Confederate Brigadier General. He also was the author of the "Memoirs of Robert E. Lee."
Background
Armistead Lindsay Long was born on September 3, 1825, in Campbell County, Virginia, United States. His father, Colonel Armistead Long, was a son of Armistead Long of Loudoun County, Virginia, and Elizabeth, daughter of Colonel Burgess Ball; his mother was Calista Cralle of Campbell County.
Education
Armistead graduated seventeenth in a class of forty-four from the United States Military Academy in 1850.
Long was appointed brevet second lieutenant of artillery. After serving at Fort Moultrie and on the frontier, he was promoted first lieutenant in 1854 and stationed chiefly in Indian Territory, Kansas, and Nebraska until 1860. Shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, he was in garrison at Augusta Arsenal, Georgia, but in February 1861 was transferred to duty in the defenses of Washington, and on May 20, he was appointed aide-de-camp to General Edwin Vose Sumner.
On June 10, 1861, he resigned his commission and offered his services to the Confederacy. Following a short service in West Virginia, he was ordered, in the fall of 1861, to report to General Robert E. Lee in South Carolina. He arrived in Charleston on the eve of the great fire and that night he and Lee fled together from a burning hotel, each clasping a baby in his arms. Thus Long was introduced to an intimate companionship with his chief which continued throughout the war. Shortly afterward, when Lee became commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Long was appointed his military secretary with the rank of colonel and served in that capacity until September 1863. Lee had chosen Long, whom he loved and trusted, for the most responsible position upon his staff. In September 1863 Long was promoted brigadier-general of artillery and during the subsequent Virginia campaigns, he handled his guns with skill and vigor.
After the war, Armistead was appointed chief engineer of a Virginia canal company, but in 1870 he became totally blind as the result of exposure during his campaigns. While laboring under this disability, using a slate prepared for the blind, he wrote his "Memoirs of Robert E. Lee, His Military and Personal History" (1886). This volume contains the most intimate of the accounts of General Lee during the Civil War. Although the author was naturally influenced in his judgments by his close association with Lee, his book gives no evidence of narrow partisanship. The information obtained from personal recollections and from his careful wartime diary he substantiated by information and documents from other individuals who had been in Lee's confidence. Prior to its publication, he had contributed two articles, "Seacoast Defences of South Carolina and Georgia" and "General Early's Valley Campaign, " to the Southern Historical Society Papers. The latter article he revised in Volume XVII (1890) of the same Papers.