He impressed Lee by his actions at Malvern Hill and Chancellorsville, where his brigade led Stonewall Jackson’s flank attack, taking 50% casualties.

On the first day of Gettysburg, he dramatically routed a Union brigade, sending it running through the town, though his superiors did not authorize further pursuit.

Ramseur attended Davidson College, where he studied mathematics under Daniel Harvey Hill, another future Confederate general.

An intensely devout man, he believed slavery a divinely blessed institution, and by the time he entered West Point he bore great hatred for all Northerners.

[2] This was a remarkable accession to rank for someone who had missed so many battles, but Gen. Robert E. Lee had been very impressed by Ramseur's aggressive performance at Malvern Hill.

Stuart, in temporary command of the corps after Jackson was mortally wounded, ordered three cheers for the brigade's aggressive assault and recommended that Ramseur be promoted to major general; this would not come to pass for another year.

Rather than repeating their direct assaults, he swung around to the left, across the Mummasburg Road, and hit the defenders in the rear, routing them and driving them back through the town.

Ramseur returned home on leave to marry Ellen E. "Nellie" Richmond and they spent three months together in the Confederate army winter encampment.

Both Lee and corps commander Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell wrote in admiration of his gallant attack, which drove Burnside's troops back over a half mile.

At Spotsylvania Court House, his brigade counterattacked the II Corps of Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock after its assault on the Mule Shoe at the "Bloody Angle".

In a surprise attack a month later, Early routed two thirds of the Union army at the Battle of Cedar Creek on October 19, but his troops were hungry and exhausted and fell out of their ranks to pillage the Union camp; Ramseur managed to corral a few hundred soldiers out of his division and stood with them in the center of the line as Sheridan counterattacked.

He was a most gallant and energetic officer whom no disaster appalled, but his courage and energy seemed to gain new strength in the midst of confusion and disorder.

By chance, Henry A. Dupont, his friend from West Point, was present at Cedar Creek, and years later described his death bed scene.

[6] In MacKinlay Kantor's 1961 alternate history book If the South Had Won the Civil War, Ramseur appears as one of several prominent people who would have campaigned for the abolition of slavery in an independent Confederacy and eventually achieved it by 1885.