Glynn Young

“The Summer of ’63: Vicksburg & Tullahoma,” edited by Chris Mackowski & Dan Welch

May 24, 2023 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

There are few more momentous years in American history than 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Battle of Gettysburg, ending Robert E Lee’s invasion of the North. The Fall of Vicksburg, which effectively cut the Confederacy in half. More than 30,000 books have been written on the Battle of Gettysburg alone.

And there are few more actively maintained and managed Civil War web sites than Emerging Civil War. With 28 contributors and seven editors (all of whom also contribute), the site is updated daily and often several times a day.

Chris Mackowski serves as editor-in-chief, and Dan Welch is one of the site’s contributors. Together, they have edited some 40 articles about the Civil War summer of 1863, focusing ontwo major campaigns – Vicksburg in Mississippi and Tullahoma in Tennessee. Usually works about that momentous summer address the Battle of Gettysburg; The Summer of ’63: Vicksburg & Tullahoma are about the other two campaigns whose outcomes had as much to do with the defeat of the Confederacy as did Gettysburg. In fact, one might argue that Vicksburg had at least as great an impact on the war as Gettysburg did, and perhaps more.

The articles cover a broad array of topics. Included are an overview of the stakes of Vicksburg; the turning point for Ulysses S. Grant; photographing Vicksburg; Grierson’s Raid through central Mississippi; how Admiral David Porter ran gunboats past the batteries at Vicksburg; the role of William Tecumseh Sherman; the related Vicksburg battles of Champion Hill and Jackson; how civilians fared during the siege of the Mississippi town; an overview of the Battle of Tullahoma and the related actions at Liberty Gap and Shelbyville; and more.

And the book isn’t only about battles and military strategies. We read about Old Abe, the Eighth Wisconsin’s war eagle; the shooting of a Maine deserter; Abraham, the slave “blown” to freedom; a letter-writing campaign to the veterans of Vicksburg; the life of an officer as revealed by his letters; and other human-interest stories.

The result is a collective story of armies, strategy, generals, and civilians who fought and experienced two of the most significant campaigns of the American Civil War.

A professor at St. Bonaventure University, Mackowski has received B.A., M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. degrees in communication, English, and creative writing. The author of some nine books, he’s written extensively on the Civil War for a number of publications. He also worked for the National Park Service and gave tours of the Civil War battlefields at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania.

Welch is an educator in a public school district in Ohio and serves as a seasonal park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park and associate editor of Gettysburg Magazine. He’s written two books in the Emerging Civil War Series and co-edited several volumes.

Mackowski and Welch have done an excellent job in gathering and curating a wealth of material, putting in its context, and helping us make sense of that tumultuous and important summer. The Summer of ’63 is a story told well.

Top illustration: Admiral David Porter’s gunboats run the Vicksburg blockade, lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1863.

Why Poetry Can Make You a Better Writer

May 17, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Like most of my generation, I read poetry in English classes in high school. It wasn’t until I was a high school senior that I read poetry that stuck in my head. And it was T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Four Quartets.” I read poetry in college as well, but my English literature professor gave brutal tests that put me off poetry for years.

My professional career eventually led me to corporate speechwriting. I enjoyed the work, the executives I wrote for liked what I did, and I had that sense of “this is what I was meant to do.” It was a good friend, one who wasn’t a speechwriter, who suggested that if I were really serious about it, then I needed to read poetry. He sent me three books – the collected poems of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Dylan Thomas. He told me to read them and others on a regular basis.

And I thought, seriously? No speechwriter I knew read poetry regularly. Most then and now would read books about current events, developments in science, politics, and a lot of speeches written by others. But poetry? Really?

To continue reading, please see my post today at the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

Photograph by Nick Fewings via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“No One Wants to Be the Last to Die” by Chris Calkins

May 10, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In April 1865, the confederate capital of Richmond fell after Robert E. Lee led the Army of Northern Virginia first south to Petersburg, and then westward to the Appomattox area in southwestern Virginia. His first goal was to reach supply trains, waiting with food and munitions. The Army of the Potomac, under Ulysses S. Grant, was moving even faster to capture the trains and cut off Lee’s escape.

If he couldn’t reach the trains, Lee hoped to join up with the army of General William Johnston, now in North Carolina and pursued by Union forces under William Tecumseh Sherman. A series of battles and skirmishes occurred. In No One Wants to Be the Last to Die: The Battles of Appomattox, April 8-9, 1865, historian Chris Calkins details those final days of Lee’s army, often hour by hour.

There’s likely no one more knowledgeable to tell the story. Calkins is considered the foremost authority on Appomattox and the Appomattox campaigns. Part of his career was spent with the National Park Service at Appomattox Court House. And what a story he tells.

It’s a top-down, bottoms-up account. Calkins draws from official reports, newspaper accounts, military records, memoirs (by combatants and non-combatants alike), letters written to and from soldiers on both sides, claims for reimbursement filed by store owners, itineraries, mileage tables, weather reports, and more. It’s a considerable amount of information to put into context and make sense of, and Calkins does exactly that. And he does it with an engaging, easy-to-read and easy-to-follow narrative.

The battles didn’t all go the Union’s way, but soldiers on both sides were realizing that this might be the final climactic moment for the Army of Northern Virginia.

Calkins recently retired as site manager for the Sailor’s Creek Battlefield State Park. In addition to his work at Appomattox, he also worked for the National Park Service at the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park and Petersburg National Battlefield. He’s published more than a dozen publications, authored numerous articles, and has spoken at many Civil War and preservation groups. A native of Detroit, he graduated from Longwood University.

Perhaps the most poignant account in No One Wants to Be the Last to Die is what happened when the men of Lee’s army hear that their general is surrendering. Some became angry and rode off to find Johnston’s army on their own or to head to the mountains to regroup. Some decided to simply leave for home. Some soldiers and officers wept privately; others wept openly.

It’s a fine, richly detailed story.

Top photograph: The McLean House in Appomattox, Virginia, where Rober E. Lee signed the terms of surrender offered by Ulysses S. Grant.

How I Learned About the Coronation

May 3, 2023 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

There I was, doing what I do best in gift shops connected to major tourist sites, in this case the Tower of London. It was 2013, and I was looking through the books for sale.

One caught my eye: Crown, Orb & Sceptre: The True Stories of English Coronations by David Hilliam. And the reason it caught my eye was that I’d begun to think about the third novel in my Dancing Priest series, my alternative history of the British royal family. And this would be the novel in which Michael Kent-Hughes would be crowned.

But I didn’t know much about the specifics of the ceremony, other than it took place in Westminster Abbey and every monarch since Edward I had been crowned there. I bought the book at the gift shop, and it accompanied me home to the States. It was another six months before I read it. It had become part of the research for Dancing King.

It’s full of facts about coronations as well as gossipy tidbits. Charles I, the one who lost his head, was all of four feet, seven inches tall. His coronation was marred by several mishaps, seen later as omens. The worst might have neem an earthquake occurring just as the ceremony ended.

Richard III was crowned barefoot. Oliver Cromwell melted down most of the crown jewels. When George I was crowned in 1714, he couldn’t speak a lick of English (he was German with a British royal connection). Two kings were never crowned; can you name them? (Answer below.) Elizabeth II was advised over and over again not to televise the coronation ceremony; she didn’t listen. Instead, she followed the advice of her husband, who urged her to televise.

For centuries, the coronation procession began at the Tower of London and ended at Westminster Abbey (with a couple of exceptions for plague years). That was eventually discontinued in the 17^th century. I fastened on that fact, and I had Michael Kent-Hughes decide to bring that procession back, linking his own reign to that of the originals – and to allow more people to see the procession (it’s a longer route than the Buckingham Palace to the Abbey stretch) and to give a nod to the business community (the route goes through the City of London) and the theater community (it passes near the West End).

But it was the coronation itself that was the most important information the book provided. When you see the old clips of Elizabeth II’s coronation, you’re struck by the pageantry, the spectacle, and all the visual details. This may have been why her advisors (including Winston Churchill) argued against television – a televised program can easily miss the point. Above all else, the coronation of the British monarch is a religious ceremony, filled with symbols throughout the rite.

King Edward’s throne with the Stone of Scone.

That’s where Crown, Orb & Sceptre really helped my research. It included the step-by-step ceremony for Elizabeth II’s coronation and explained what each part of the program and each of the symbols meant. The religious and specifically Christian elements fit perfectly with the faith of Michael Kent-Hughes in my story, and I followed the general outline laid out by the book.

Some years back, the prince of Wales who will be crowned Charles III this weekend said in an interview that he would like to be known as the “defender of the faiths,” as opposed to the traditional title of the monarch as “defender of the faith.” He was making a bow in the direction of the diversity of religions in Britain, but he was also unintentionally appointing himself as head of all of the faiths in the country, including Islam. More than a few people pointed that out, and the idea was forgotten.

Except in the case of Michael Kent-Hughes. In Dancing King, and before his coronation, he meets with a group of protestors, who (among other things) demand he demand that he recognize himself as “defender of the faiths.” He succinctly explains exactly what that would mean, much to the shock of the protestors.

If you happen to watch the coronation ceremony this Saturday, remember that each step, and each symbol, is filled with religious importance. Above all else, a British coronation is a religious ceremony.

And the answer to what two kings were never crowned? The boy king likely murdered with his younger brother in the Tower of London on orders of Richard III, and Edward VIII, who gave up his throne to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

Dancing King Stories: The Coronation at Westminster Abbey.

My review of Crown, Orb & Sceptre by David Hilliam.

Ritual, not pageantry: Understanding the coronation – Francis Young at The Critic Magazine.

Top photograph: Westminster Abbey, where every British monarch since Edward I has been crowned.

A Reflection on “Winesburg, Ohio”

April 26, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I’ve always been attracted to the works of the American Realist and Modernism periods. In fiction, that meant Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, and moving into Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, among others. In poetry, that meant Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teadsale, Vachel Lindsay, and T.S. Eliot, among quite a few others.

This attraction likely relates to my middle school and high school English teachers, almost all of whom graduated from college in the 1940s and 1950s. They would have defined the Realist and early Modernism writers as the ones they were most influenced by, and they tended to wax eloquent on these particular writers and poets in particular. As a high school junior, taking American literature, I read Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Cather’s My Antonia, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and The Waste Land, and Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. It was a challenging year for all my subjects, but what I read in English was wonderful.

What I don’t recall reading at all was anything by Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), not even a short story. And yet Anderson, during the period itself, was considered a major figure in literature. He had a significant influence on both Hemingway and Faulkner, and especially Hemingway, who would eventually write an “anti-Anderson” novel to prove he had broken free and become his own writer.

I recently read Winesburg, Ohio and reviewed it over at Faith, Fiction, Friends. I knew little about it, other than it was a collection of connected short stories that had established Anderson as a significant writer. This edition has an introduction by the writer and literary critic Irving Howe, and it was Howe who helped me understand what had happened to Anderson and even perhaps why he was little mentioned by my English teachers.

What happened was that, in 1941, the year Anderson died, critic Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) wrote an essay that became hugely influential. It was an essay about Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio, and it dismissed the work as something less than great. Howe wrote that the Trilling essay relegated Anderson to something less than the first rank of American writers. It’s not a surprise that my teachers, in college during the period when Trilling’s essay was making its waves, might possibly have discounted Anderson in general and Winesburg, Ohio in particular and instead focused on more lauded writers.

The collection was published in 1919. As I read it, I was surprised by how contemporary it sounded. It’s a clean, simple prose, very straightforward and matter of fact. It’s also almost entirely devoid of dialogue. Its ease of reading is deceptive; you have to read carefully and closely to understand all of what’s going on in the stories.

The characters are all what Anderson called “grotesques,” what Flannery O’Connor in a later generation might have labeled “misfits.” In fact, I wondered if O’Connor must have read Winesburg, Ohio, just like Anderson himself must have read Spoon River Anthology, published four years earlier than Anderson’s collection. I could see how Anderson had influenced Faulkner, and how Hemingway adopted and adapted at least some of Anderson’s bare bones writing style.

The fictional Winesburg is loosely based on the small town of Clyde, Ohio, southeast of Toledo. The stories are all set in the late 1890s, or around the turn of the century, about the time Anderson enlisted in the army and fought in the Spanish-American War. It’s a town still experiencing the lingering effects of the American Civil War and the burgeoning influence of the Industrial Revolution. Many of the stories are about farmers and their family members, storekeepers, bankers, the newspaper reporter, and other community pillars. While the characters are generally drawn in an unflattering portrait, you do come to known them and even like them, flaws and all.

To this day, Clyde proudly proclaims itself as the Winesburg of Anderson’s stories. The author put the small town on the literary map, and the town never forgot it. I suspect the town also didn’t think much of Trilling’s assessment of its most famous son.

Top photograph: Sherwood Anderson in 1898, about the time in which Winesburg, Ohio, is set.

“Bear in the Wilderness” by Donald Waldemer

April 19, 2023 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

One of the many features of the Missouri Civil War Museum is the gift shop, which has artifacts, souvenirs, refreshments, t-shirts and jackets, and books. Lots of books. Lots of new and used books all about the Civil War. (I wrote about the museum here.)

I found more than a few things of interest, but I didn’t overdo it. I walked away with an old copy of Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic book-length poem John Brown’s Body, the novel Shiloh by Shelby Foote, and a few others. One, as it turned out, had a strong St. Louis connection.

Donald Waldemer (1925-2021) was about totally St Louis as you can get. He was born here. He received two degrees from Washington University in St. Louis. He worked for Union Electric (now Ameren, the main electric utility) for 34 years. He and his wife raised a family in Brentwood, a close-in St. Louis suburb, and he’s buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Kirkwood, the suburb where I live.

Waldermer was also an avid student of the Civil War. He published Triumph at the James: The Checkmate of Gen. Robert E. Lee in 1998 and Bear in the Wilderness: The Battle of the Wilderness May 5,6,7 1864 in 2001. It was the book on the Battle of the Wilderness that I found at the Missouri Civil War Museum.

It’s not a battle we heard much about in school, yet, in its own way, it was just as important as Gettysburg or Vicksburg. It was the last battle for which Robert E. Lee went on the offensive. It was the first battle matching lee and Ulysses S. Grant as commanders. And it was the battle in which Grant determined how he was going to defeat the Confederacy – by wearing Lee’s army down, no matter what the cost to the Union side. And the cost here was terrible.

Seven years before Waldemer published his Wilderness book, Gordon Rhea had published The Battle of the Wilderness, which is still considered the definitive account of the battle. Waldemer took a different tack. He used the official letters, orders, and reports and knitted them together with brief contextual information, allowing the official reports to tell the story of the battle.

What results is something lopsided – it’s a story told almost entirely from the Union side. And it was for a very simple reason – there was little to no similar records on the Confederate side. Lee and his generals wrote very little down. It’ also something of a lopsided account because it is a top-down view. If you want to see what Abraham Lincoln, Grant, and Grant’s generals were thinking and planning, this is a solid account. You won’t get much of the perspective of the soldiers doing the actual fighting.

That doesn’t make Bear in the Wilderness unimportant. Waldemer had a gift for context, taking a wide array of texts of all kinds and assembling them in an order that makes sense and helps in understanding how the battle unfolded. If you want to know Grant’s thoughts, fears, strategies, and tactics, and how Lincoln responded with his own, this is an account that’s easy to follow.

Diary of a Confederate Tarheel Soldier by Louis Leon.

Hell Itself: The Battle of the Wilderness May 5-7, 1864 by Chris Mackowski.

Top photograph: A photograph of the Wilderness, showing the kind of terrain where much of the three-day battle was fought. Photo courtesy of Encyclopedia Virginia.

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