Brig. Gen. Isaac Stevens, ex-Congressman from Washington, West Pointer, Mexican War veteran and Indian fighter whom Gen. McClellan appointed commanding officer of the Seventy-Ninth New York Cameron Highlanders after the death of their elected commander at First Manassas/Bull Run.

He’s seated here on the porch of a plantation house, perhaps one of the ones he ordered burned down, in South Carolina during the Seventy-Ninth’s campaign there in 1861-62. Stevens would later be killed at Chantilly, in Virginia, shot through the head at Second Manassas/Bull Run.

In the recollection of the novel’s Private Burton Laing—which comes from an actual regimental veteran’s memoir—Stevens fell wrapped in the folds of the Seventy-Ninth’s blue-n-white regimental flag.