There is a monument at Gettysburg that bears his name; another has his written words. His Official Report (OR) authenticates that Confederates other than Virginians and Carolinians crossed over the stone wall, and it also establishes that Heth's Division was lined up with-not in support of-Pickett's Division in that famous charge. Colonel Shepard went up Cemetery Ridge in charge of the Seventh Tennessee Infantry Regiment; he came down the hill in charge of Archer's Light Brigade. He crossed over the famed stone wall.
He may have been the first to hear General Robert E. Lee say, "It is all my fault." For a short time after Gettysburg, he was in charge of Heth's Division. He was in twenty battles during the Civil War. Six of these battles are listed as the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. But this book is about more than his Civil War exploits.
After the war, he was elected to the 1870 Tennessee Constitutional Convention and subsequently elected to the House of Representatives. He was a lawyer, school superintendent, and farmer. He became a Baptist minister.
This loving, charming, touching story could only have been written by his talented daughter, Alice Hughes Shepard Carver. Her story went unpublished for almost a century. Author Reta Moser has now authenticated it with additional facts, footnotes, photos, and articles.