Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Glynn Young

The Biography of a Civil War Regiment

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In my historical novel Brookhaven, the elderly Sam McClure recalls his experience with the Iron Brigade in the Civil War. It was of short duration, only about three weeks, but he attached himself to the brigade’s soldiers after the Battle of Gettysburg. He was following his orders; he was all of 13 years old, but he was working as a spy for a Confederate group called Colby’s Rangers.

Sam admits he never really learned anything of importance; what he did was to run errands and keep the soldiers entertained with recitations of poetry by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The brigade suffered a high casualty rate during the war; it was known for its fearlessness. Sam meets up with a bare handful of survivors at the Gettysburg Reunion of 1913, but he never reveals his identity. He listens as the veterans eventually discuss “the boy who recited Mr. Longfellow’s poems.” 

He tells his listeners that he’s always felt bad for misleading the men; the reporter Elizabeth Putnam gives him another insight, that he provided a respite to the men from the horrors of war. Her words move Sam to such an extent that he spends time alone in the woods.

Historian James Marten has written a somewhat unusual history of a key part of the Iron Brigade. The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment is not an history of all of the battles the regiment fought in. The battles are included, of course, because they played such an important role in the lives of regiment’s men. But Marten uses the word “biography” very deliberately; he’s not telling the story of the regiment’s history so much as he’s telling the story of men who comprised the regiment. As he writes, the book is a story of “how men made war and what the war made of those men.”

Marten’s subject: the 2,000 men who served in the regiment at one point or another. The men wore distinctive black hats; in fact, they because known as the “Black Hat Brigade” as well as the “Iron Brigade” for their seemingly utter fearlessness. And the regiment was changing fairly constantly; the often horrendous losses suffered required a constant infusion of recruits. And his study goes well beyond the war years of 1861-1865, because while the fighting may have stopped, the impact went on for decades. One could argue that we still feel the impact of the American Civil War.

He addresses four areas: the men’s military history as well as their lives as veterans; what they survived as veterans; how the generation of Civil War men “invented the very idea of war,” and the kind of “constructed community” that the Sixth Wisconsin became. It’s a fascinating way to tell a well-known story.

James Marten

Marten in a professor emeritus of history at Marquette University. His academic work has focused in two areas: the Civil War and the histories of children and youth. His more than 20 books includes The Children’s Civil War, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America, America’s Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace, and Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America. He is a past president f the Society of Civil War Historians and the Society for the History of Children and Youth. 

The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War is an extraordinarily well-research account of a famous Civil War regiment, not only through the war years but in the long decades that followed. And it explains why war isn’t only what happens on the battlefield.

Top photograph: Men of the Sixth Wisconsin in their famous black hats.

He’s Got Me Rereading My Own Books

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Pastor Bill Grandi has three posts last week on his rereading of my Dancing Priest series. On Tuesday, Bill discussed the difficulty of reading the fourth book in the series, Dancing Prophet, because of what it was about. It was a difficult book to write, and it became somewhat prophetic, including when the Archbishop of Canterbury resigned for helping to cover up a scandal in the Church of England.

On Wednesday, Bill discussed a conversation between Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes in Dancing Prophet, in which Sarah observes how hard it is to be one of the workers sent in “to clean out the pipes.” And on Thursday, Bill writes about a scene in the fifth and last in the series, Dancing Prince, in which Michael’s two sons, Henry and Thomas (or Hank and Tommy, as they’re known by the other characters), are discussing “calling,” or being called by God as described in I Samuel 16:1-13, the rejection of Saul and the anointing of David.  Coincidentally, the pastor at my church used that passage as the text for his sermon this morning. 

Bill’s post led me to start rereading my own books. I’ve already finished the first two, Dancing Priest and A Light Shining. (Amazon has the Dancing Priest pages messed up; the Kindle version is here; the cheaper paperback price is here, but it’s still more than it’s supposed to be.)

Originally, I had planned on doing only those two books. They were written as one (huge) manuscript of about 150,000 words. But the publisher and I had a conversation about what might happened after Michael and Sarah returned to Britain, and it was in that conversation that I described what could be the plot lines for several more books, including what would become Dancing Prophet and its difficult subject. Two weeks later, the publisher sent me a short news clip; the difficult subject had become a horrific reality. That reality continues 13 years later, with the resignation last year of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

After rereading A Light Shining, it is my prayer that its subject – religious violence that nearly tears Britain apart – never becomes reality. 

A Reader Continues to Reread the “Dancing Priest” Stories

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Pastor Bill Grandi is continuing to reread the Dancing Priest stories. And he’s continuing to pull lessons. He’s finished reading the third book in the series, Dancing King, and he posted twice this week about what he’s reading.

On April 14, Bill discussed the question of “Why?”. People and organizations can tell you what they do, he writes, but they have difficulty explaining why they do what they do. He cites the example of Michael Kent-Hughes’ brother Henry, who becomes a Christian largely because his Mchael accepts him for having intrinsic value – that his worth came not from money, or power or position, but from being created as a child of God. Henry had never experienced that before.

On April 15, Bill cites a conversation between Michael and Jay Lanham, the young man Michael’s interviewing to be his director of communications. Jay tells Michael that what struck him about his sermons was that Michael didn’t communicate at people as an audience, but instead he talked with them as people. Again, this reflects Michael’s belief that people have intrinsic value, that they worth talking with.

I’ve often read and hear people speak of “communication to the masses.” If there’s an expression I can’t stand, that’s it. It’s elitist, since the speaker or writer never considers themselves to be a member of the “the masses.” It’s Marxist. And it’s ultimately dehumanizing, objectifying individual people as some large bloc of humanity that has to be communicated at, with talking points at the ready. 

Read Bill’s posts. And follow his blog, Living in the Shadow. He always has something worthwhile to talk with you about.

Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride”: Creaing a National Legend 

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It’s a tossup as to whether the most famous or best-known poem in America is Clement Moore”s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (aka “Twas the Night Before Christmas”), first published in 1823, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” (1860). My money is on “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Whole generations of schoolchildren, myself included, grew up reciting the lines that begin “Listen my children, and you shall hear…” 

Both poems are no longer taught in most of America’s public schools, but I know from my grandsons’ experience that they are taught (with great gusto) in many private schools, especially those offering a classical education. “Paul Revere’s Ride” commemorates one of the significant of the beginning of the American Revolution, a horseback ride at night to warn the cities of Lexington and Concord that British troops were coming.

That ride occurred 250 years ago tomorrow.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Artwork: the illustration accompanying the poem in the January 1861 edition of The Atlantic Magazine.

“Defending Dixie’s Land” by Isaac Bishop

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I grew up with relatives who were still fighting the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression, as my grandmother described it). I knew about the Lost Cause, usually referred to simply as “The Cause.” I had watched Gone with the Wind countless times with my mother, and I knew it not as a movie based on a novel but as history. It wasn’t until I was a junior in high school that my American history teaching challenged our class to explore received history and find out what really happened in the Civil War.

It was an eye-opening exercise. And yet I knew that while my relatives and my received wisdom were largely and mostly wrong, my understanding wasn’t entirely wrong. For example, the abolition movement in America was empowered by a powerful propaganda war, which often exaggerated reality to score points in public opinion (as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, himself a part of that propaganda war, would come to realize and regret). Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin without having set foot on a slave-owning plantation, yet Northern readers accepted it as fact. And the idea of secession by individual states were first advanced and popularized, not by the southern states, but by the New England states, which wanted high tariffs to protect their own manufacturing interests and were willing to entertain leaving the Union to achieve their goals. 

Still, it was something of a surprise to read Defending Dixie’s Land: What Every American Should Know About the South and the Civil War (2023) by Isaac Bishop, a pen name for writer Jeb Smith. He’s born and raised in Vermont, no less (a Yankee!). 

Bishop’s journey into the Civil War, began with his studies on the American Revolution and the country’s founders. He realized that most of what he was learning was about the founders from the Northern colonies, with very little being said about the founders from the South and what they believed. From there he studied what he terms “the most terrible sin in our history” – slavery. His previous understanding began to unravel. And the more he looked, the more unraveled it became.

Wherever possible, he looked at original source documents – writings of the protagonists, accounts by former slaves, and the people on both sides who were living through a tumultuous political conflict that became a devastating military conflict.

In Defending Dixie’s Land, Bishop lays out his defense of the South by examining several broad areas: slavery, secession of the cotton states, secession of the Upper South, the Union as created by the founders (all of them), African-American support for the South during the Civil War, America’s agricultural past, treatment of minorities by both North and South, slavery around the world, and finally the fundamental antagonism between North and South. The North, he argues, accepted modernity and the radical beliefs of the French Revolution, while South is “perhaps best understood as a Protestant version of medieval Europe.” 

Isaac Bishop / Jeb Smith

Yes, my mouth hung open in surprise as I read the book, especially when he writes about the individual he views as the chief villain in the play – Abraham Lincoln. Even if I might disagree with him on many things, I was still left with a sense of Bishop may not be entirely right, and he may not be even largely right, but it’s difficult to ignore or discount many of the arguments he makes.

Bishop, a penname for author Jeb Smith, has published two other books: Missing Monarchy: Correcting Misconceptions About the Middle Ages, Medieval Kingship, Democracy, and Liberty; and The Road Goes Ever On and On: A New Perspective on J. R. R. Tolkien and Middle-earth. He’s written more than 100 articles for such publications as History is Now, The Postal Magazine, the Libertarian Institute, History Medieval, Rutland Herald, Vermont Daily Chronicle, Medieval Magazine, Medieval Archives, the Libertarian Christian Institute, and Fellowship & Fairydust Magazine. He lives in Vermont.

Top illustration: an 1852 publicity poster for Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Rereading the “Dancing Priest” Series

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Someone once asked me if I reread my own books after they’re published. And the answer is yes. Part of the reason is research and “story-checking.” When I was writing the Dancing Priest series, I had to reread the early books to make sure I was keeping story line, characters, and settings consistent and accurate. 

But I must confess that, sometimes, I reread the books simply for pleasure. Occasionally, I get so wrapped up in the stories that I forget I wrote them. I suppose that’s a good thing. Yes, I have favorite scenes in every book that I like to reread, but I do reread the books in their entirety, about once a year.

I’ve had readers tell me that they reread the Dancing Priest series, too. Last week, Bill Grandi, a pastor in Indiana, started writing about it at his blog Living in the Shadow. This is part of what he had to say about the first book, Dancing Priest; he captured the very heart of the story in just a few words:

“Glynn has weaved together a wonderful story that even a non-religious person would enjoy. Even though Michael is a fictional character, one begins to admire this young man and his passion for life. Grounded without being preachy, Dancing Priest is a wonderful story of faith, hope, caring for others, putting other’s interests before your own, and being sensitive to those around us.”

And here’s what Bill wrote about the second one, A Light Shining, after summarizing a conversation between the Anglican priest Michael Kent and a 15-year-old boy on the steps of Michael’s church in San Francisco:

“…Each one of us matters to God. He sent Jesus to die so that we could be forgiven. While a story written by Mr. Young, the conversation is heard all over the planet. Every person has value and merit. Each one matters. We are all sinners, for sure, but we still matter to God.”

It might be time to reread my books (again). Thank you, Bill Grandi.