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When a Book Won’t Let Go

August 10, 2022 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Two weeks after finishing it, and I’m still thinking about Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina by Ernest Dollar Jr. (See my review last week.)

When I read it, I expected to read about the final convulsive moments of the surrender of the Confederate armies and the immediate aftermath. And that’s the thumbnail description. But it’s about a lot more.

It’s the story of the civilians in north central North Carolina, roughly Raleigh to Greensboro, who found themselves in the path of two defeated armies and one victorious one.

It’s the story of the soldiers in those armies, who had to live with what we know today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One thing you don’t read in the general histories of the Civil War period in the rather startling increase in soldier suicides and commitments to insane asylums in the years and decades after the war.

It’s the story of some of the atrocities inflicted on the civilian and military population. In generally, Confederate soldiers were focused on finding food, shoes, and clothes, and they didn’t care where they found them. Confederate soldiers and civilians alike were often desperate for food, and together they were raiding government warehouses and supplies.

The Union soldiers had food. What they were looking for was loot and revenge. There were too many reports of pillaging and looting, and more than a few of rape. Women and often children were brutalized. Houses were burned. It wasn’t only soldiers who developed PTSD. Some of the federal soldiers were disciplined and a few executed for their crimes (especially after the armies surrendered; that meant the civilians were no longer members of a foreign and hostile country).

My great-grandfather was somewhere in that convulsion. Even at war’s end, he was (chronologically) a boy. Too young to take up arms officially, he had enlisted and became a messenger boy for the Confederate army.

What I don’t know is what did he do to stay alive. Did he participate in the looting of government warehouses? Did he steal from civilians? Those questions will never be answered. What we do know is that he had to walk home to southern Mississippi – hundreds of miles across a landscape destroyed in many places and in complete social upheaval everywhere.

When he finally reached home, he learned his family had fled to Texas. So, his trek continued across Louisiana and into east Texas, where he found them. He also discovered that he was the sole surviving son, the youngest child in the family. When his father died four years later, my great-grandfather became the head of the family, which included a widowed sister, two widowed sisters-in-law, and a number of nieces and nephews. And his only family, too – he had married in 1867, and he and his wife had a little boy. He had to take care of that extended family through the rigors of Reconstruction.

My great-grandfather was made of some stern stuff, and that book, Hearts Torn Asunder, helped me understand just how stern it was.

Top photo: My great-grandfather, Samuel Franklin Young, and my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery Young.

“Hearts Torn Asunder” by Ernest Dollar Jr.

August 3, 2022 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

It’s April 1865, the last month of the Civil War. Richmond has fallen. The Confederate cabinet is fleeing. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. Lee’s soldiers are paroled and dispersed, most heading south (and on foot) into North Carolina and toward home in the rest of the former Confederacy. William Tecumseh Sherman’s army is chasing that of Confederate Gen. Joseph Johnston, and the chase is ending near Raleigh and Greensboro. As Johnston meets with Sherman to discuss surrender terms, he learns that President Lincoln has been assassinated in Washington.

The final convulsion of the war and the Confederacy is happening in central and north central North Carolina. And it its path are the people who live there, in cities and towns, and on farms, people who see both armies strip the countryside bare of food and provisions. One army’s soldiers experience sorrow and despair, while those of the other feel jubilation. Soldiers of both, after four long years of war, are experiencing what today we recognize as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. It isn’t called that then; it isn’t even recognized.

But citizens and soldiers are experiencing its effects – and the effects of hunger. The hunger was at times so great that soldiers and civilians alike began attacking warehouses and trainloads of provisions meant for the Confederate army.

Horrors and atrocities happened on both sides. Rage, fed by deaths and maiming of friends and fellows and fueled by alcohol, could make otherwise kind men do terrible things. Civilians – men, women, and children, free and slave – bore the brunt of that rage. And it was rage coming from both Union and Confederate soldiers.

The story of that month and that place is told, and told well, by Ernest A. Dollar, Jr. in Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina. It’s a somber, sometimes shocking story that shows a side of war we rarely see in the movies or are taught about in school. But it happened, and it happens. And it doesn’t simply change people; it also changes cultures and societies. The effects of what happened in North Carolina in April 1865 were felt for generations.

Dollar graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with B.A. degree in history and a B.F.A. degree in design, and an M.A. degree in history from North Carolina State University. He’s worked at historic sites in both North Carolina and South Carolina. He’s currently the Executive Director of the City of Raleigh Museum, and he and his family currently live in Raleigh.

Hearts Torn Asunder makes for hard reading. But it’s a story that needs to be told.

Top image: Engraving of the meeting of Gen. Joseph Johnston and Gen. William T. Sherman at the Bennett Homeplace, April 1865.

The Passing of a Friend

July 27, 2022 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

My mother, who died in 2014, graduated from John McDonough High School in New Orleans in 1940. At the time, it was an all-girls public high school. She remained close to many of the girls who graduated with her, and she never missed a high school reunion for the next 60+ years. And then the reunions stopped. The time came when the number of the 1940 graduates still living had dwindled to less than five. My mother said that they decided that reunions had become too depressing, too much of a reminder of what, and who, was gone.

I thought of my mother when I read a Facebook post last week. It almost seemed nonsensical. A friend posted a short item of the passing of a mutual friend, Paul Stolwyck. It was a shock. I didn’t know he’d been ill. Over the next few hours, I learned what had happened. He died from a brain aneurysm. No warning, no sign, just a collapse.

I met Paul when we attended First Evangelical Free Church in St. Louis, back in the early 1990s. He was an assistant pastor and enormously gifted in preaching. He’s gone to DeSmet Catholic High School in St. Louis, the same high school my oldest son graduated from.

Paul knew everyone, and everyone knew Paul. He was outgoing, among the first to spot a new face in the room. He liked people. He could find common interests faster than almost anyone I’d ever known. He was fun. He’d challenged you. He’d say provocative things, like “Ninety percent of missions is simply showing up.”

He had a heart for missions, and he and his family eventually left our church and became missionaries in Hungary, based in Budapest. They were part of the denomination’s Central European Mission.

It was Paul who had the idea for what was, at the time, one of the most unusual short-term missions teams ever proposed: a communications missions team. The Central European Mission needed help in communicating what they were about, what their missionaries were doing, and what need and opportunities they had. Paul knew enough about the people at our church that he suggested a team of three people. A guy to manage the trip, a guy to do the filming, and a writer.

I was the writer.

It was a new idea for a short-term team, and a lot of people at the church were cool to the idea. One person, however, championed us, and she occupied a key position in church missions. We got the green light. The plan had been to go in late September of 2001, but 9/11intervened. The trip was rescheduled for May of 2002.

The itinerary was packed. We’d arrive on a Saturday, attend church and tour Budapest on Sunday, and then leave Monday morning for Prague and then Dresden. We’d return via Prague and Brno and spend a day with the staff and other missionaries in the office in Budapest. With travel and filming / interviews, we were looking at 14-16 hours a day.

Paul met us at the airport in Budapest, and we stayed with Paul, his wife Carol, and their children, and Paul took us on the city tour on Sunday. And it was Paul who told us that “it had been decided” to change our itinerary, and we would also have to travel to Erfurt, Germany, because of a pastor ministering there following the deaths of 13 people in a school shooting. It was an unexpected side-trip that ended up changing my life.

Paul and his family eventually returned to the United States and settled in Greensboro, North Carolina, still deeply involved in missions. But we stayed in touch. Facebook helped. Paul would occasionally send an email. He asked permission to use some of my poems in sermons. He talked about my novels. He did one of the things he could do so well, and that was to encourage. I can see him now, his glasses propped on his head, talking earnestly about a Bible passage or a theological point, or just about anything.

And that laugh he had. It could be sudden and loud, startling you the first time you heard it and catching the attention of anyone within 30 feet. But it was endearing at the same time. It was the laugh of a man who loved life.

And now he’s gone, in the blink of an eye. I want to say it’s way too soon, and it is, by my earthly standards. I feel diminished by his death. But I feel enriched by knowing him and calling him a friend.

And I’m confident I will hear that laugh again one day.

Top photograph by Warren Wong via Unsplash. Used with permission.

When You Find Yourself in Someone Else’s Memoir

July 20, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

University of Iowa School of Journalism office int he 1920s.

I started reading the memoir Ghost of the Hardy Boys because I loved the Hardy Boys mystery books as a kid and because I knew a little of the story of how they came to be. Leslie McFarlane (1902-1977) didn’t write all of the 60 books in the series published under the name of Franklin W. Dixon, but he wrote the first third of them. McFarlane was responsible for the 22 books between The Tower Treasure in 1927 and The Phantom Freighter in 1947.

I read all 22, roughly between 1960 and 1963. I loved them. They even inspired me to write, or start to write, my own mystery. The handwritten manuscript, forever lost, was about 25 pages of a group of kids finding a secret passage from a grandfather down into a cave. I was 10 years old. Yeah, I could see the books had some old-fashioned words, like roadster and coupe for types of automobiles. But I didn’t care, even though I looked up the words in the dictionary. (If you’re interested, a coupe was a two-door car, the name borrowed from a type of horse-drawn carriage. A roadster is what we would call a convertible today.)

McFarlane published his memoir in 1975; this edition was republished this year in a format that resembles the Hardy Boys books themselves. And he tells the story of writing the book series in a highly readable and often funny way. He never thought of these books as “great literature,” but, like the Stratmeyer Syndicate’s other series, The Bobbsey Twinsand Nancy Drew, they constituted childhood reading for tens of millions of youngsters. Like me.

McFarlane’s memoir isn’t only about The Hardy Boys. He’s telling his own story, how he became a newspaperman in northern Ontario in the early 1920s and how he eventually landed in Massachusetts, at the Springfield Republican. And it was this description of (relatively) small-town journalism in 1920s that took me by surprise.

With very small changes, he could have been telling the story of small-town journalism in the 1970s. I know, because I was there for a year, my first job out of college. From 1973 to 1974, I worked as a copy editor at the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise. I found myself in McFarlane’s memoir so easily that I had to ask why. I mean, half a century separated his experience at the Republican and my experience at the Enterprise. How could they be so similar?

I think there are at least three reasons.

First, new computer technology only just started to seep into journalism in 1973, and then it was only in the backshop, where typesetters would retype the stories on computers for printing “cold type” and then pasting the stories onto pages. Reporters and editors still typed on typewriters, and layout designers still did their work by hand. No computer sat on any reporter’s or editor’s desk, simply because they didn’t exist.

Second, just like McFarlane’s experience, our primary sources of news were reporter-written or from the Associated Press or similar wire service. The newsroom had a television set, but we only watched it when there was some huge national story that was breaking. We weren’t competing against local TV stations. And social media was three decades into the future.

The stereotype of the reporter in the movies wasn’t far off from the reality.

Third, the people McFarlane worked with and for – his fellow reporters and editors – were eerily similar to the people I worked with. Like McFarlane’s experience, the older reporters and the middle and senior editors had not gone to journalism school (or even college) but either happened into journalism or somehow grown up in the business. And they were individual characters. They yelled a lot. They didn’t mind telling us how dumb we were – in front of our colleagues. Their heads held all kinds of esoteric knowledge and “background” information. And most of them were native Texans, which carried a whole additional set of eccentricities.

I don’t think I had a boring day at work the entire time I was there. Not to mention the fact that the Watergate scandal was unfolding, and I even wrote the huge front-page headline “Agnew Resigns.”

But to read Ghost of the Hardy Boys, a memoir by a favorite childhood writer, and to find myself and my own experiences, was a startling thing. I don’t think these newsrooms exist anymore. Everything is professionalized; reporters have degrees from journalism schools or similar backgrounds, not to mention advanced degrees in many cases. Despite the proliferation of individual bias into news stories today, journalism seems far less personal than it was 50 years ago.

Something’s missing in journalism today. But I’m glad to have been reminded by the writer of the Hardy Boys stories that he and I shared something important in common.

“The Battle of the Wilderness” by Gordon Rhea

July 13, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Gordon Rhea is an attorney and Civil War historian. He’s written several highly regarded books about the war, including The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7–12, 1864 (1997), To the North Anna River: Grant and Lee, May 13–25, 1864 (2000), Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26–June 3, 1864 (2002), Carrying the Flag: The Story of Private Charles Whilden, the Confederacy’s Unlikely Hero (2004), and On to Petersburg: Grant and Lee, June 4–14, 1864 (2017).

His books have received a number of awards and recognitions, and he’s served as a lecturer at the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command and as a commentator for CNN. I discovered his The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5–6, 1864, published in 1994 by LSU Press, when another writer of another Civil War book spoke of the Rhea work in almost reverential tones. I discovered the book was still in print, available in paperback and on Amazon Kindle. The hardcover is also available in used editions.

And what a story Rhea tells.

The Battle of the Wilderness was the first major confrontation between Ulysses S. Grant, newly appointed by Abraham Lincoln to lead the Northern armies, and Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia. It was an effort by Grant to break through the stalemate around Richmond and capture the Confederate capital. Fought over roads, some open fields, and the dense woods known as the Wilderness, the battle pitted the wills of two opposing commanders, both of whom were determined to prevail at almost any cost.

The battle would end in stalemate, with both sides gaining and losing something. The number of casualties places the battle in one of the top five in the Civil War. The Union had between 17,000 and 18,000 dead, wounded, and missing or captured. The Confederacy had between 11,000 and 12,000. But the overall losses were greater in ultimate impact for the Lee’s army, because these were losses that could not be replaced. And both sides experienced the loss of key generals.

Rhea tells the story almost like a novel. It’s an enthralling, riveting read, with the action so immediate that the reader feels a direct part of it. The first day went mostly to Lee’s army; the second day began with a Union breakthrough, but it was soon turned back with the forces of General James Longstreet arriving at the last possible minute and almost too late. Lee would also lose General J.E.B. Stuart, who died of his wounds a few day after the battle ended.

Drawing upon official records, diaries, letters, and news reports, Rhea tells the story not only from the generals’ perspective but also from that of the men fighting on the ground, often face-to-face in woods burning from the artillery fire. And it’s a comprehensive story, made all the more remarkable with how complex this battle actually was. Rhea sorts it out and helps the reader understand exactly what happened. He also includes numerous maps and illustrations to aid understanding.

I’ve read quite a few books about the Civil War, and The Battle of the Wilderness ranks as one of the very best.

Top illustration: Map of the Battle of the Wilderness, made in 1895 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The Music of the Civil War

July 6, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

If there are any songs the modern ear would associate with the Civil War, it would be one of three: “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe, “Dixie,” and Ashokan Farewell. The first two were actually composed and sung during the Civil War. “Ashokan Farewell,” however, was composed in 1982 by Jay Ungar and his wife Molly Mason. Its plaintive music sounds like it should have been a Civil War song, but it was actually used as the soundtrack for the 1990 PBS television miniseries The Civil War by Ken Burns.

I spent some time looking at the music and songs of the Civil War, and quickly learned that “plaintive” music was not on the agenda of either the Union or the Confederacy. Instead, the music was military marches, rousing fight songs, and music to remind the soldiers (on both sides) what they were fighting for. “Plaintive” only arrived long afterward, as people began to understand what the war had actually cost.

Both sides maintained regimental bands.

Songs really sung or music played during the Civil War include “Southern Soldier,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862), “Battle Cry of Freedom” (1862) “St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning,” “Goober Peas,” “Old 1812,” “Gary Owen,” “Kingdom Coming,” “Dixie,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Song of the Confederate Irish Brigade,” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” (1861), also known as “We Are a Band of Brothers.”

“Dixie” had been written and first performed in 1859, but it was adapted into a military quickstep for the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy. It was Davis who said it should be the Confederacy’s official anthem. A number of alternative (and more militaristic) versions were written during the war.

In addition to “Dixie,” many of the popular songs were updated versions of older military and war music. And it’s not surprising to see the number of Irish tunes sung by both sides, given the presence of Irish immigrants in the armies. Many of the songs were originally sung in the 18^th century; “St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning” was composed in the late 1700s and its composer is believed to have been not an Irishman but a Scot.

“Battle Hymn of the Republic” has an interesting history. It began its life as a religious camp meeting hymn, “Oh, brother, will you meet us on Canaan’s happy shore.” Then it evolved into “John Brown’s Body,” the song about the famous (or infamous) abolitionist who staged the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. In 1861, Julia Ward Howe wrote a poem for The Atlantic Monthly, for which she was paid $5. The magazine gave it the title of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It was set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” and the rest is history.

Music on the Confederate side followed the progress of the war. Initially, with a string of Southern victories, songs were written to celebrate each battle. After the Confederate defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg, no more specific battle songs were composed. Instead, songs like “Goober Peas” (also known as peanuts) appeared, with lyrics about the dietary privations of both military and civilian life in the South. Music to support the war was reproduced and distributed widely by both Northern and Southern music publishers. But after 1863, music distribution in the South was increasingly hampered by a shortage of paper.

The only new field music composed during the war was “Taps,” by Union general Dan Butterfield, who wrote it after the Seven Days Battles.

A number of familiar hymns were composed and sung during the war. These include “He Leadeth Me” (1862), “My Jesus, I Love Thee” (1864), “Shall We Gather at the River” (1864), “Day by Day” (865), and many more.

Top illustration: The federal 8th Regiment Band during the Civil War.

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