Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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“From Western Virginia with Jackson to Spotsylvania with Lee” by Peter Luebke

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St. Joseph Tucker Randolph was 17 when the Civil War began in April 1861. He did what most young Virginians did and immediately signed up with a newly formed regiment. For a time, he participated in drills and preparations, but he also had time to continue working in the bookstore operated by his father.

The Randolphs had a storied heritage, one of Virginia’s first families with the Lees, Carters, and Tuckers. By the time of the Civil War, however, they had fallen on harder times, operating stores and other middle-class endeavors. Perhaps it was the influence of his father’s bookstore, or his own solid education, but Tucker, as he was called in the family, began keeping a diary from April 9 through about 1863. He also wrote letters to his parents and other family letters, and he showed himself a fairly astute observer of military operations, battles, officers, and his fellow soldiers.

Tucker’s regiment was eventually assigned to Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s army, operating in western Virginia. At one point, Tucker was wounded, but what looked initially serious turned out to be flesh wound. After Gettysburg, his unit was transferred to Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and it’s here that his observational talents truly shone. 

He went through the Battle of the Wilderness, experiencing from the ground level Ulysses S. Grant’s military strategy of keep hitting at Lee’s army without respite. The Battle of the Wilderness was followed by Spotsylvania Courthouse, and Tucker’s account is still considered one of the best first-hand accounts of that battle.

Shortly after, however, at what is known as the Battle of Bethesda Church (a prelude to Cold Harbor), Tucker died in action. His death was confirmed, with no actual eyewitnesses (or ones who left any account), by his commanding officer, who wrote to Tucker’s parents that he had died during a desperate charge at the church. (The battle is also known as Totopotomoy Creek.)

Tukcer’s diary entries and letters have been published before, but a new edition has just been published, From Western Virginia with Jackson to Spotsylvania with Lee. Edited by Peter Luebke, it includes diary entries, letters, the letter announcing his death, and an account of Tucker’s military life written by another soldier and published in 1901.

The market for the Battle of Bethesda Church.

Luebke received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia. He has deep experience in the field of public history and he worked as a historian with history highway market program. He’s also written or co-edited numerous articles and books, including an edition of The Story of a Thousand by Albert Tourgee. For this work on Tucker Randolph, Luebke has arranged the chapters chronologically and provided helpful context for each. He’s also included an extensive notes section, bibliography, and an index. And the book is full of illustrations, especially of the people cited in Tucker’s narrative.

From Western Virginia with Jackson tells a story of a young man who, like many young men of his generation, fought a war against fellow Americans. Tucker Randolph didn’t survive that war, but he left behind an articulate and insightful account of his experiences.

Top illustration: a drawing of the Battle of Bethesda Church.

“The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It”

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It’s last of the four volumes of Civil War, told in the words of people who lived it. The Civil War: The Final Year covers the year from March of 1864 through June of 1865, and it’s every bit as somber and thought-provoking as its three predecessors.

The volume is edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Fred C. Frey Professor and History Department Chair at Louisiana State University. The Final Year covers some of the final major battles of the war, including Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Atlanta, and Petersburg, as well as Ulysses S. Grant taking control of the Union army and William Sherman’s march across Georgia to the sea. 

Using letters, diaries, memoirs, speeches, official orders and directives, newspaper reports, and much more, the book provides a broad telling of how civilians and soldiers on both sides lived that final year. You get the good and heroic, and you read the bad and the cowardly. You also see how newspapers on both sides, but especially those in the Union, helped fan the flames of hatred and desire for retribution.

You read the experiences of women and children in the path of Sherman’s army in Georgia, and how troops routinely ignored Sherman’s directive not to touch private homes (barns, stables, smokehouses, sheds, and henhouses were fair game). You read how a Louisiana woman deals with both Union troops and slaves who’ve freed themselves. You read letters full of hope and heartbreak. You see communications between generals and their subordinates. And you experience the presence of Abraham Lincoln, and what happens when the president is assassinated at Ford’s Theatre. 

Aaron Sheehan-Dean

You can also read what was already emerging as the postwar sentiment on both sides, from radical Republicans and unrepentant Southerners, including and sometimes especially the women. It’s the Civil War in all its glory and terror, and the Confederacy in its death throes.

At LSU, Sheehan-Dean teaches courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, history of the New South, nd a graduate readings seminar on 19th century America. He received his B.A. degree from Northwestern University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia. In addition to the numerous articles he’s written on the Civil War and related topics, he’s also edited or co-authored several books on the war, including Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia and Concise Atlas of the U.S. Civil War. 

The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It is a fitting conclusion to the entire series. It’s the history of an event, a time, and the people who lived it whose effects we are still experiencing and living with today.

Related:

The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It

The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It

The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It

Top photograph: the McClean House in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, where Lee and Grant met to discuss surrender terms. 

“The True Story of Andersonville Prison” by James Madison Page

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Andersonville is a name that conjures up a dark history. It was a prison camp for Union soldiers, placed in the Georgia countryside about 100 miles south of Atlanta. It was operated for slightly more than a ear, from 1864 to 1865. Some 45,000 Union soldiers were imprisoned there; 13,000 of them died. It’s now operated as a historical site by the U.S. National Park Service. 

For comparison, the prison at Elmira, New York operated by the Union at roughly the same time, housed 12,000 Confederate prisoners, of which almost 3,000 died. The Union prison at Alton, Illinois housed Confederate soldiers, Union soldiers, and civilians; of the 11,000 prisoners, some 1,534 are known to have died. (Alton was noted for outbreaks of smallpox and measles.)

Andersonville remains the Civil War prison with the worst, and largely well-deserved reputation. It’s also known for one other event – its commandant, the Swiss born Major Henry Wirz, was executed after the war for the crimes he allegedly committed at the prison. The immediate post-war period was a time of outrage and demands for retribution, and what had happened at Andersonville was exhibit No. 1.

In the years after the war, a number of its soldier-inmates wrote memoirs of their wartime experiences and especially Andersonville. James Madison Page, a Pennsylvania-born man who had moved to Michigan and enlisted with a regiment there, and he’d been captured after a battle in 1863. He and his fellow prisoners were moved around, but eventually they found themselves sent to Andersonville. Every move raised the hope of a prisoner exchange, which happened only very late in the war.

Major Henry Wirz

In 1908, Page published his own memoir, setting in motion a controversy that still exists after more than a century. In The True Story of Andersonville Prison: A Defense of Major Henry Wirz, Page said that many of the witnesses at Wirz’s trial had lied; that, contrary to testimony, Wirz had never shot prisoners; that Wirz had intervened many times on the prisoners’ behalf and to their benefit; and that the prisoners received the same food ration as the soldiers guarding the prison.

Page went further. He saw the true villain as being Edward Stanton, the U.S. Secretary of War. It was Stanton, Page maintained, who refused to allow prisoner exchanges, resulting in overcrowded soldier prisons. Stanton defended his decision at the time by saying the Confederates would get well-fed soldiers while the Union would get emaciated and sick men. Page also pointed to the Union blockade of Southern ports, which did hurt the Confederacy in many ways, including the blocking of food and medicine, but that also applied to the Confederacy’s prisoners.

At least some of what Page reported turned out to be true, especially about the conduct of Henry Wirz. The major was away from the camp recuperating from an old battle wound (received at the Battle of Seven Pines in 1862) during the entire month of August, 1864, which was the period alleged to be when he personally had shot prisoners. 

James Madison Page

During Wirz’s trial in 1865, Page had been called as a witness but was not called to testify; he claimed it was because the military tribunal didn’t want to hear anything that contradicted what they had already pre-determined.  

Reading The True Story of Andersonville Prison today is eye-opening. Page never denies the harsh conditions with regard to food and medical assistance. He reports the deaths of friends. But he draws a picture of Wirz that is markedly different from the “devil incarnate” depicted in Union newspapers. From Page’s perspective, it was a very bad situation made worse by Stanton’s refusal to exchange prisoners, guaranteeing overcrowded conditions.

Page’s account isn’t a whitewash of Andersonville; it was a horrible chapter in Civil War and American history, and Page doesn’t dispute that. But he does call attention to exaggerations, and he especially defends the conduct of the man who came to personify the prison and paid with his life for it.

Top photograph: A scene of Andersonville Prison.

“The Civil War: The Third Year Told by the People Who Lived It”

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The year 1863 was likely the critical one in the Civil War, largely because of two battles. Both were fought about the same time, in July. Gettysburg happened over three days, while Vicksburg had been considerably longer and far more complex, with Grierson’s Raid, the Battles of Jackson and Port Gobson, and the long siege that saw town citizens hiding in caves from the shelling and subsisting on whatever food sources might be available.

But the year saw far more than only two battles. The Emancipation Proclamation went into full effect; former slaves were forming into Union regiments; the Union instituted a conscription act, which resulted in days of draft riots in New York City; Knoxville was occupied by Union forces; the Confederates experienced a great victory at Chancellorsville; and more.

It is one thing to read the accounts of battles, new military weapons, the privations brought by blockades. It is quite another to read the personal accounts of the people who lived this era. That’s what this Library of America series on the Civil War does (four volumes in all), and the third volume, The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, is just as good as its two predecessors. 

Edited by Arizona State University professor Brooks Simpson, the work makes the war personal in a way that history books usually can’t. You read the letters of Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the 54th Massachusetts Regiment (the first all-Black regiment) and who died with so many of his men in the assault on Battery Wagner outside Charleston. You read the accounts left by Kate Stone, a young Louisiana woman as slaves and Union troops overran her family’s plantation. You read about inflation and food riots in Southern cities. You read the letters home written by soldiers who didn’t know whether or not they would survive the coming battle. 

And you read the correspondence between commanding generals and their presidents, and the letters that William Sherman and Ulysses Grant wrote home. One of the most moving letters was written by Grant to Sherman, explaining that Lincoln had put him in charge of the Union armies and what Grant owed to his commanding generals like Sherman. You learn that anti-war northern Democrats long agitated against Lincoln and the war, to the point where a former Ohio congressman was arrested for treason, tried, convicted, and then expelled to the South. 

Brooks Simpson

This was never just a story about battles.

Simpson (born 1957) is a history professor at Arizona State. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s written or co-written numerous books about the Civil War and related areas, including accounts of emancipation, Ulysses Grant, Lincoln, the collapse of the Confederacy, the eastern theater, Reconstruction, and an illustrated history of the war.

The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It makes the war personal and immediate. You experience the full scope of people’s responses and experiences – the fear, anger, horror, grief, and, sometimes, even hope.

Top photograph: Some of the caves that Vicksburg residents lived in during the siege by Union forces.

“Service with the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers” by Rufus Dawes

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Rufus Dawes (1838-1899) was a Union soldier and officer, a businessman, a congressman, n author, and the father of a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize and served as Vice President. He was descended from the man who warned of the coming of the British prior to Lexington and Concord.

He is also considered to have written one of the best, if not the best, memoirs of the Civil War, Service with the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers.  

Dawes distinguished himself as a member and officer of the famed Iron Brigade during the Battle of Gettysburg and other Civil War engagements. Comprised of regiments from Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan, its numbers and composition kept changing because of casualties. It was one of the most feared of all Union troops; it often stood its ground when other brigades were in full retreat.

He meticulously provided accounts of battles, engagements, and camp life to his family, his wife (they married during the war), and friends. Most of the letters were kept, and he had ready access to his own first-hand accounts when he finally wrote and published his memoir in 1890. He and the Iron Brigade were involved in some of the most famous battles of the war in the Eastern Theater. In addition to Gettysburg, Dawes wrote of Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, among others. And he was there at the Battle of the Wilderness and nearby Spotsylvania Courthouse, writing meticulous accounts of what happened.

Rufus Dawes during the war

His descriptions of the battles put the reader right in the thick of the battle. He describes each as would a trained and highly observant military journalist or historian. He explains what went right and what went wrong. He is always crediting his troops for bravery and courage; this is not a man who focused attention on himself (as so many officers and generals tended to do).

Dawes also describes his work as presiding judge during court-martials. He doesn’t explain why he served in this capacity, but it was obviously because of his trained eye, his military reputation, and his strong sense of fairness. His judgments reflected facts and evidence, not emotions or personal feelings.

Service with the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers is more than a memoir of the Civil War; it is a fascinating account of some of the most important battles of the Civil War, written by a man who was both a strong partisan but a fair and observant one.

Top photograph: a few members of the Iron Brigade. 

Research Can Teach You a Hard (if Useful) Lesson

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I learned a very hard lesson while writing a historical novel. I learned how hard it can be, and it’s hard for both the research you do and for the research you have to ignore. 

I’m writing a novel that takes place in two historical periods – the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, and 50 years later, during the run-up to World War I. The story was loosely based on a story handed down in the family about what had happened to my great-grandfather. The emphasis is on the word “loosely,” because the more I researched, the more I discovered that what was passed down as a family story had very little basis in fact.

Because I discovered this about 40,000 words into the manuscript, it stopped me cold. For weeks. I kept hoping I was wrong, but I learned my extended family had two oral traditions about my great-grandfather. And the version passed down to me was the wrong one, or perhaps I should say “more embellished.” It made a great story, but it was flat-out wrong.

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

Photograph: Some of the 1,700 Union cavalry troops who rode through Mississippi in 1863 during Grierson’s Raid.