Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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“Reconstruction in Mississippi” by James Wilford Garner

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James Wilford Garner (1871-1938) was born and raised in Pike County, Mississippi, the same county where my paternal great-grandparents were born and raised (during the Reconstruction period, the state legislature split the county into two, with the southern half retaining the name and the north half being renamed Lincoln County). Garner graduated from the Mississippi Agricultural & Mechanical College in 1892 and went on to study at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. 

Garner would become a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Illinois, and he also did extensive teaching work in India. He co-authored a history of the United States with Henry Cabot Lodge, and he published a number of other works on government and political science.

The work he is best known for is his Ph.D. thesis, published in 1901 under the title of Reconstruction in Mississippi. It firmly established him as what was then called the Dunning School, named for Columbia professor William Archibald Dunning. The school of thought generally favored a conservative, more pro-Southern understanding of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. 

The thinking of the Dunning School was influential in universities through World War II, although it was not without its critics, notably historian and civil rights activist W.E. B. DuBois. However, DuBois did consider that, of all the writings associated with the Dunning School, Garner’s Reconstruction in Mississippi was the fairest.

Reading it today, 120 years after it was published, is to see it as a product of its time. Yet Garner did marshal a huge amount of data to support his thesis that Reconstruction, managed by Radical Republicans and backed by the U.S. Army, was largely a disaster for the state of Mississippi. 

The work begins with a summary of secession and the Civil War and the transition from war to reconstruction. It covers presidential reconstruction under Andrew Johnson, followed by congressional reconstruction. The period of congressional reconstruction was particularly marked by rampant theft and corruption in the state government, involving Northerners called carpetbaggers and Southerners know as scalawags who seemed determined to raid the state of as many resources as possible. Garner notes that many of the Union soldiers who had fought in Mississippi returned after the war to live there. (He also notes than roughly one fifth of private property in the state changed ownership during the period.) 

James Wilford Garner

It was a difficult time for many in the state. Not only was Mississippi economically devastated by the war, rail lines had to be rebuilt, the postal service reestablished, social order restored, and a civil government created that could function. Garner also devotes entire chapters to the creation and functioning of the Freedman’s Bureau, the disturbances associated with the Ku Klux Klan, and the creation (or re-creation) of the public school system, which was also plagued by corruption. 

Reconstruction in Mississippi has a definite pro-Southern tilt to its depiction of Reconstruction, but I understand why DuBois considered it relatively fair. Garner is evenhanded in his criticisms, and he does discuss the period broadly and rather inclusively. He doesn’t paint the period of slavery as some happy, pleasant time for all concerned. But it’s his extensive use of data, tables, and charts that is most impressive. 

Top illustration: A Drawing of a Freedman’s School in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1866.

“North Against South” by Lowell Johnson

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The first thing you should know about Ludwell Johnson’s North Against South: The American Iliad 1848-1877 is that it’s controversial. First published in 1978 under the title Division and Reunion, 1848-1877, the book argues that Reconstruction was an extension of the military warfare carried out by the North during the Civil War, that Jefferson Davis was a more able leader than Abraham Lincoln, and that Robert E. Lee was a better military leader than Ulysses S. Grant.

That’s just for starters. Johnson (1927-2017) also says that the writing of Civil War history after World War II has been filtered through the lens of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It’s not that this vast multitude of history works are wrong and should be rejected, but more that readers and students need to understand the lens through which the Civil War has been seen and understood.

Johnson marshals facts and data to make his case. He tells the story of what led up to the war, how the war began and its major military battles, the critical role played by the North’s economic and manufacturing advantages, and what he describes as the three post-war “peace settlements” – President Andrew Johnson’s reconstruction plan, the reconstruction plan of the Radical Republicans, and finally the abandonment of Reconstruction. 

What is perhaps most surprising in Johnson’s account is the sense of both sides being the aggressor. The North was not trying hard to avoid war while the South seemed hellbent to make one, nor were Northern armies waging a just and righteous crusade for human freedom. As the war faded in living memory, myths grew up on both sides. And the national trauma that we call the Civil War would continue to play a significant role in national politics.

Ludwell Johnson

Johnson was a professor of history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He focused his studies and teaching on the American Civil War. He was also the author of Red River Campaign: Politics and Cotton in the Civil War (1958). 

I don’t have the background in Civil War history to say whether Johnson was right or wrong. I would hazard an educated guess that this book likely angered many Civil War historians when it was published in 1978 (and republished in 2002). For me, the real value of North Against South is understanding that one shouldn’t simply accept the received wisdom, whatever the source, and that the past continues to matter more than we’d like to think.

Top photograph: A scene from the Battle of Gettysburg by Thure de Thulstrup via Wikimedia Commons.

Why We Celebrate Thanksgiving

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We celebrate Thanksgiving Day because of Henry VIII, the Gunpowder Plot, the 1619 landing of 38 English colonists in Virginia (without slaves), the Pilgrims, the end of the American Revolution, the beginning of the American Republic, the Civil War, and the need to stimulate the economy in the late 1930s. And it might have been called Evacuation Day. 

Thanksgiving as we know it today in the United States evolved over a period of some 400 years. The idea of thanksgiving observances goes back to the Protestant Reformation in England under Henry VIII, consolidating a rather large number of thanksgiving holidays during the Roman Catholic period. Special days of Thanksgiving would be called for military victories and for deliverance from such events as the Gunpowder Plot of 1606.

Washington’s Proclamation in 1789

The idea of Thanksgiving and feasting, but without a fixed date, had been around by the time of the American colonial period. The first known Thanksgiving celebration in America was not in 1621 with the Pilgrims but in 1619 in Virginia, when 38 English settlers arrived on the ship Margaret on Dec. 4 and immediately celebrated their landing with a day of thanksgiving, as required under the charter of the London Company which sponsored them. The landing day was to be observed in perpetuity. 

The Pilgrims (and the Puritans) brought their tradition of thanksgiving days with them from Europe. The Pilgrims celebrated their first day of thanksgiving in 1621, and it is this observance that’s considered the forerunner of what we know today.

Not everyone in the American colonies celebrated a day of thanksgiving. The observance varied by colony (and later by state); in New York, for example, thanksgiving day was known as Evacuation Day, an observance of the departure of British troops in 1783 after the end of the American Revolution. George Washington led his army down Manhattan Island to what is now Battery Park in a grand triumphal march. And it was Washington who, as the nation’s first Preisdent, proclaimed the first National Day of Thanksgiving on Nov. 26, 1789. By the end of the 18th century, the last Thursday in November had become the day went most states observed a Day of Thanksgiving.

Lincoln’s Proclamation in 1863

It was Abraham Lincoln who made it an official national day of observance. In November of 1863 (the same month as the Gettysburg Address), Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving to be observed by all states on the final Thursday of November. This was in recognition of both the bountiful harvests the Northern states had experienced and the military victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. 

Thanksgiving Day remained the last Thursday in November until 1939, when President Roosevelt proclaimed it to be the next-to-last Thursday of November. This was done to stimulate retail sales by extending the Christmas shopping season – an early recognition of the commercial importance of Black Friday as the day after Thanksgiving. Finally, in 1941, Congress and Roosevelt officially made the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving Day. And there it’s remained ever since.

But for all the reasons it was created and observed, what has been at its heart from the beginning is thankfulness to God for his provision and faithfulness. And that is, perhaps, the most important aspect of this holiday we call Thanksgiving.

Top photograph: Union soldiers celebrate the first national Thanksgiving Day in 1863.

Bruce Catton’s Civil War

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Bruce Catton (1899-1978) grew up in Petoskey, Michigan, listening to the stories of old Civil War veterans. As a boy, he was enraptured by these first-hand accounts, but his own experiences in World War I led him to believe that those Civil War veterans didn’t really understand modern warfare. His memoir of growing up, which included his interactions with Civil War veterans, was published in 1972 and entitled Waiting for the Morning Train: An American Boyhood.

At some point, he realized how wrong he was. He became a journalist and worked for such newspapers as the Boston American, Cleveland News, and Cleveland Plain Dealer. He never lost interest in the Civil War, and Catton continued studying and researching the period before, during, and after the war. He read extensively on the subject, and what he noticed was how historians talked about battles and generals, without paying much attention to the experiences of soldiers.

And it wasn’t for lack of sources. Hundreds if not thousands of memoirs had been published by Civil War veterans on both sides of the conflict. Regimental histories had been written. But these accounts weren’t the Civil War most Americans were familiar with.

Catton focused on the federal Army of the Potomac and wrote three books which focused heavily on the experiences of the soldiers. The first volume in what became a trilogy was Mr. Lincoln’s Army, published in 1951. The second volume was Glory Road (1952), and the third was A Stillness at Appomattox (1954). Sales weren’t exactly robust; the nation’s appetite for Civil War history seemed to have waned.

Young Bruce Catton

And then A Stillness at Appomattox won the Pulitzer Prize for history, followed by a National Book Award. The resulting publicity encouraged new readers and buyers. Here was a journalist (of all things) doing what historians had paid scant attention to – the experiences of the soldier. This wasn’t reading about Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Jefferson Davis; this was reading about the war fought by the boy next door, or your own son.

No one had written history like this before in America. Reading it gave people the impression they were firsthand witnesses, a result of its journalistic style. The series became popular and passed into publishing (and Civil War history) legend. Not only did it inspire Shelby Foote to write his multi-volume history of the Civil War, it also led to Ken Burns’ epic documentary for PBS. The series began airing in September of 1990 to 40 million television viewers. If you watched it (and I was one of those 40 million), you couldn’t forget David McCullough, the narrator, introducing the letters written by soldiers to their wives, sweethearts, and parents. Like Catton’s books, it made the Civil War profoundly personal. 

Bruce Catton

The Library of America, a national publishing treasure if ever there was one, has recently combined Catton’s three volumes into one, simply entitled Catton: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy. It’s edited by Gary Gallagher, the John L. Nau III Professor of History of the American Civil War Emeritus at the University of Virginia. Gallagher includes an exceptionally fine introduction to Catton and his writing. The volume also includes maps of the battles fought by the Army of the Potomac, drawn by Rafael Palacios. Its hefty content (more than 1,100 pages of texts, plus another 100 of notes, bibliography, and index) is packaged in a relatively compact yet easily readable volume. 

And it’s still a thrilling read, just like it was originally in the 1950s and through numerous editions, and just like the stories Catton heard when he was a boy in Petoskey, fascinated by the tales of Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, and so many more, all told by the now-grizzled old men who had fought them. 

Related:

Writer Patrick McMurfin has a delightful and rather thorough account of Catton, life fie, his work, and his books. 

When You Face Too Many Ways to Open a Novel

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How many openings can a novel have? Let me count the ways.

I’d never experienced the problem of too many ways to open a novel. Five novels, and five fairly straightforward beginnings, meant that I never struggled over how to open a story. Somehow, I always knew, and it wasn’t an issue.

Until now.

I began to write the draft like I always had. I had an idea, and image, in my mind, and that’s how I’d start the story. I wrote it. I read it over several times. It seemed to work. I started writing beyond the opening, and I bogged down. 

Something seemed slightly off, and I knew it was the opening. So, I reworked it. And reworked it. I revised it to the point where it was almost unrecognizable from the first version. It still didn’t work. I discarded it and started over. I tried something entirely different. At one point, I thought I had it, finally, only to realize I didn’t. I went back to the first and tried it again.

To continue reading, please see my post today at ACFW. 

Photograph by Ankhesenamun via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Poets of the Civil War,” edited by J.D. McClatchy

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If I asked you to give me the name of an American Civil War poet, you would likely say “Walt Whitman.” His poems, like “O Captain! My Captain!,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and “The Wound Dresser,” certainly catapult him to the top of the Civil War poets list.  

But if I were asked to name another Civil War poet, I’d be rather stumped. Until, that is, I laid eyes on Poets of the Civil War, edited by J.D. McClatchy, published in 2005 as part of the Library of America’s American Poets Project. And I was in for a major surprise. Whitman doesn’t stand there by himself.

The list of Civil War poets includes some of the best-known writers and poets of the 19th century. William Cullen Bryant. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. John Greenleaf Whittier. Herman Melville. James Russell Lowell. Bret Harte. Ambrose Bierce. Sidney Lanier. 

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