Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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“The Stolen Train” by Robert Ashley

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It didn’t change the course of world history, or even the Civil War. It didn’t even end in success. But the Andrews Raid, sometimes called the Great Locomotive Chase, was certainly notable in its daring and how it almost succeeded.

In 1862, with the blessing of Union military commanders, recruited 20 soldiers. Their mission: capture a Confederate locomotive called The General not far from Atlanta and take it all the way to safety behind Union lines in Tennessee. Along the way, they would tear up track, burn bridges, and do whatever they could to disrupt the Western & Atlantic Railroad Line from Atlanta to Chattanooga. That line was a key supply line for Confederate armies in Tennessee.

It almost worked. Chased by Confederate soldiers upon a train pulled by The Texas locomotive, the raiders made it to within 20 miles of Chattanooga when they had to abandon the locomotive and scatter. Some were caught and imprisoned. Eventually, the survivors were the first to receive the newly created Medal of Honor. 

In 1953, author and historian Robert Ashley published The Stolen Train, a fictional account of the raid. Most of the characters were based on real persons, including the raid’s leader, James Andrews, and the train engineers Andrews had recruited. The primary fictional character was a young, 15-year-old soldier named Johnnie Adams, who has two jobs, lookout atop the train and scrambling up telegraph poles to cut wires.

That a 15-year-old boy is the main character explains who the audience is – squarely aimed at boys in the 10-13 age bracket. I was 10 when I first read it, and even though I thought of myself as a loyal Southerner, I was thrilled by the story. And it is a thrilling story.

Lest you think a 15-year-old would have been too young to enlist, read Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances Clark and Rebecca Jo Plant. They estimate that up to 10 percent of both the Union and Confederate armies were comprised of boys aged 15 and younger. Ashley’s book for boys is more factual than it might appear.

James Andrews, who led the raid

A considerable number of my classmates read The Stolen Train; it was offered by Scholastic Book Service and widely distributed across the country. Rereading it more than half a century later, it’s still a thrilling and riveting read. Despite its ultimate failure, the Andrews Raid made Southern military and railroad authorities look foolish at best and incompetent at worst. But in their defense, who would have expected a raid to begin deep with the Confederacy itself?

The paperback copy I have is from a fifth printing in 1971, with a cover price of 75 cents. I believe my copy in 1961 cost 50 cents. An Amazon Kindle edition was published in 2020 and lists for $1.99, while hardcover and paperback editions were published in 2012 and a mass market paperback edition in 1997.

It’s a good story, and especially for boys. It’s good to see that it’s available.

Top photograph: The General, on display a few hundred yards from where it was stolen in 1862, at the Southern Museum of the Civil War & Locomotive History, Kennesaw, Georgia.

“The Battle of Franklin” by A.S. Peterson

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I’ve been reading fictional treatments of the Civil War lately: Shelby Foote’s Novel Shiloh; Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem John Brown’s Body; Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage; and Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott. I’ve tried to get into E.L. Doctorow’s novel The March, which should be a slam dunk given the subject is Sherman’s march through Georgia, but I’ve started and stopped three times. I’ll give it another go and either succeed or admit defeat. 

The Battle of Franklin: A Tale of a House Divided is a stage play script by A.S. Peterson. With songs (even though it’s not a musical) Patrick Thomas, the play was commissioned by Studio Tenn and produced in 2016. It was a challenge rather admirably met; depicting a battle on the theatrical stage is a difficult feat to pull off, but Peterson does it.

The Battle of Franklin was fought on Nov. 30, 1864, a few miles south of Nashville. The battlefield was the Carter House plantation. A Confederate army under John Bell Hood aimed to take Nashville (occupied by a much smaller army). If they could succeed, they’d cut supply lines to General Sherman’s army in Georgia. 

Peterson tells the battle’s story through members of the Carter family: the patriarch Fountain Carter; his son Tod Carter; his daughter Mary Alice McPhail; German immigrants Albert and Retha Lotz: Henry Carter, a slave and Tod’s friend from boyhood; and Henry’s wife Callie Carter. Non-family roles belong to a Union general and a few soldiers. Through these characters, the playwright threads the story of the war, of slavery, of immigration, of friendship, and of the patriarch’s sense of deep betrayal, first by his son enlisting and second by his slave running away to join the Union army. 

A.S. Peterson

The intensity and ferociousness of the real battle implies that there will be considerable death and destruction in the fictional one. (The actual battle, with a total of 63,000 troops engaged, resulted in almost 8,600 deaths.) One knows from the beginning that the narrator, son Tod (referred to as Mint Julep) is a ghost, but the deaths won’t stop there. What unfolds is a story in which both sides of the conflict, and the roles of master and slave, are shown fairly and true to the historical record.

Peterson is an author, playwright, editor, and speaker. His books include The Fiddler series, Wingfeather Tales, The Timely Arrival of Barnabas Bead, The Oracle of Philadelphia, In the Year of Jubilation, and The Molehill. His plays include the musical Lindenfair, The Battle of Franklin, Frankenstein, and The Hiding Place. He lives in Nashville, where he’s the executive director of The Rabbit Room and Managing Editor of Rabbit Room Press.

The Battle of Franklin is, as its subtitle implies, the story of a country and a house divided. The country, and the house, wouldn’t last in that divided state, and considerable death, destruction, and personal pain was the inevitable price of resolution.

Top illustration: A depiction of the Battle of Franklin, Nov. 30, 1864.

“The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephen Crane

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If I have one vivid memory of high school junior English class, it would be the classic coming-of-age assignment of The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. In the spring, anyone could spot a sophomore, because inevitably each and every one of us was carrying our paperback edition of the classic novel about the Civil War. It was assigned at the same time we were studying the Civil War in American history. 

Crane published the novel in 1895, two years after he’d published the book that put him on the American literary map – Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the story of a prostitute. Crane belonged to the Naturalist, Realist, Symbolist, or Impressionist School, depending upon which critic you ask. The story of a prostitute had not been done before, at least not in a way that made Maggie something of a heroine. 

But it was The Red Badge of Courage that turned Crane into an international literary star. The novel tells the story of Henry Fleming, who lives with his mother, who enlists as a private in the Union army. His mother is deadest against him enlisting, and he does one day on his own and then tells her what he’s done.

We follow Fleming in his new army life. Crane depicts the adulation of the townspeople for his patriotism, how much of army life was characterized by waiting, rumors, and boredom, and Fleming’s fear of facing his first battle and behaving as a coward. In his first military engagement, he performs well, and the enemy is sent running in retreat. But the next day, Fleming and his squad face a renewed attack, and this time it’s Fleming and his cohorts who are running in retreat. He finds himself in dense woods, and in of the most memorable scenes in the novel, he stumbles upon the body of a soldier who died in a battle in the same place.

Still in retreat, he learns that the Union side has prevailed and won the battle. He becomes separated from his regiment, and he’s soon hearing the stories from others. The reader sees how courage and cowardice can exist in the same person at the same time. We learn about the universal complaint of all soldiers in every war – the incompetence of commanding officers. And we see that battles and a war are often won less by brilliant military strategy and tactics and more by who can hold out the longest.

Stephen Crane

What Henry Fleming experienced was life in the army during wartime, and it was (and remains) a far cry from the colorful accounts and government propaganda common to all wars. 

In addition to the first two novels, Crane (1871-1900) also published a poetry collection and another novel, based on his experience as a war correspondent during the Spanish-American War. He published several highly regarded short stories, including “The Open Boat” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” With no actual personal war experience, he said that he drew inspiration for The Red Badge of Courage from football games. His short but eventful life ended when he died in England from tuberculosis. 

The Red Badge of Courage is a short, intense, and essentially plotless story. It explores the psychology of solders and war, long before the subject became a popular war. It likely influenced every novel about war written after it. And it explored through fiction, the experience of the Civil War, still the deadliest war ever engaged in by America. 

Top photograph: An illustration of the First Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861, showing the Connecticut troops standing firm as the battle turns against them.

A Review of All 5 Dancing Priest Novels

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Dancing Priest

Bill Grandi is a pastor in Indiana, cyclist, and regular blogger (two blogs, Cycleguy’s Spin and Living in the Shadow). Cycleguy’s Spin is about whatever might happen to be on Bill’s mind, and it’s always worth reading. Living in the Shadow is about his pastoral work, written largely for his flock but applicable to the rest of us as well. He often discusses what he’s working on for his sermons, inviting comment and commentary.

He also turns out to be a faithful reader of the Dancing Priest novels. 

Bill has reread all five of the books, and today at Cycleguy’s Spin he’s posted a summary of each and an overall review. A writer can’t ask for a greater kindness and encouragement than that. You can read his review here.

Christmas Oranges

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I have a new short story, “Christmas Oranges,” published today at Cultivating Oaks. It’s based on a work-in-progress, tentatively entitled Brookhaven. You can read the story here; the entire Christmas issue can be accessed here. 

The story, like the work-in-progress, is historical fiction, set in 1863 to 1865 during the Civil War, the Reconstruction period, and 1915. It is loosely (very loosely) based upon events in my own family, although the characters are entirely fictitious.

Photograph by Leonardo de Assis via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“John Brown’s Body” by Stephen Vincent Benet

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It’s likely the most successful poem in American literary history, selling more than 130,000 copies. And it’s epic in length.

In 1925, the highly regarded poet Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943) applied for a Guggenheim Foundation grant to write a long historical poem about the Civil War. The foundation came through with a $2,500 grant that supported Benet and his family. Along with a bit of freelance writing, while he researched and wrote. They moved to Paris for him to write; it was cheaper than living in the United States. He thought the effort would take seven years; in fact, it took only two. John Brown’s Body was published in 1928, catapulting Benet into literary stardom.

John Brown

The poem contributed to Benet being the most read American poet between 1918 and his death in 1943. His other poems and short stories were widely popular as well, including the short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Book One of a planned nine-volume narrative of the settlement of America, entitled Western Star, was published after his death and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

The epic of John Brown’s Body, or “cyclorama,” as Benet called it, begins with John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Even more than the Dred Scott decision, this is the event that the poet indicates was the point of no return. The raid horrified the South and electrified the North; in Benet’s hands, national unity was not possible without a war. In the poem, this first section includes some of the most vivid and dramatic imagery of the entire poem. (And I didn’t know that Brown took hostages, including the great-grandson of George Washington.)

John Brown’s Body seems rather curious today, curious in that it isn’t a rant or filled with pious superiority and virtue signaling. It’s almost scrupulously fair to both sides in the war, depicting both historical and fictional characters as they themselves would have seen and experienced the war. His main fictional characters, Jack Ellyat of Connecticut and Clay Wingate of Georgia, are drawn to popular type, Ellyat being a yeoman Connecticut farmer and Wingate being the son of a large plantation owner in Georgia.  They and their families will experience the war in radically different ways.

Benet moves the story from the Harper Ferry’s raid to the firing on Fort Sumter, battles like Bull Run and Antietam, Gettysburg, and finally the surrender at Appomattox. In addition to the fictional characters living the story, historical characters like Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, Ulysses Grant and others describe what is happening. Most of the poem covers the period up to an including Gettysburg; the last two years are rather abbreviated, focusing on Appomattox. But Benet does devote a section to Sherman’s march through Georgia to the sea.

Stephen Vincent Benet

It’s rather astonishing that Benet completed the poem in two years. It still makes for an enthralling read as he tells the story of what is (the present moment notwithstanding) the most divisive period in American history, a time when America was torn apart over four years. 

Writing years after the poet’s death, historian Bruce Catton said that if you wanted to understand the Civil War, you could read the 120 volumes of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, or you could read John Brown’s Bodyby Benet. Benet makes for much more concise and entertaining read.

Top illustration: A drawing of U.S. Marines storming the engine house at the Harper’s Ferry federal arsenal (National Park Service).