Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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“My Dearest Julia” by Ulysses S. Grant

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A favorite place to visit in St. Louis is Whitehaven, the home of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) and his wife Julia Dent Grant (1826-1902). It’s operated by the National Park Service in near southwest St. Louis County. It sits across a road from Grant’s Farm, for decades the country estate of the Augustus Busch family (they of Anheuser-Busch fame). Today, Grant’s Farm is a popular attraction for families, with a petting zoo, views of the Clydesdale horses (in stables and adjacent pastures), and even a train that travels around the property. My regular biking trail, named Grant’s Trail, runs right alongside the pastures, the farm parking lot, and Whitehaven. 

Hardscrabble Farm, which Grant operated as a farmer for a short period, is on the Grant’s Farm property, including the log cabin farmhouse. The Dent family had owned about 800 acres in the area and farmed it with the help of slaves. Grant’s Ohio family was not happy at all with their son marrying into a slave owning family in a slave state.

Grant had met Julia Dent while stationed at Jefferson Barracks, in St. Louis County on the Mississippi River and due south of the city of St. Louis. He’d met her through her brother, and he was apparently smitten early on. Because of the many changes in his military assignments (Louisiana, Texas, Mexico, Michigan, the Pacific Northwest, and California), they were often separated, both before and after their marriage in 1848. And then came the Civil War years.

They did what most people did in similar circumstances; they wrote letters. Julia’s letters have not survived, but a considerable number of Grant’s have. Some 85 of them have been assembled into My Dearest Julia: The Wartime Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Wife. This edition includes an informative introduction by Grant biographer Ron Chernow. 

When we read a biography or a history, we usually don’t get the fully emotional side of the story. You usually have a better opportunity with letters. This is the case with My Dearest Julia. The cigar-smoking, often-ruthless general was deeply in love with his wife. The letters make clear his deep regard, as well as his sense of partnership with her in the marriage. He knew she was a capable woman, and he often entrusted her with legal proceedings and other duties, knowing she would carry them out fully, faithfully, and competently. 

Not surprisingly, the letters get shorter during the Civil War. The demands on his time and attention would have been enormous, but he always found the time to send sometimes brief and occasionally longer letters. 

The volume includes one non-military letter – the last one he wrote in 1885. Dying from throat cancer, he was finishing his memoirs for publication of Mark Twain. He was determined that Julia would be provided for; their fortune had been wiped out in bad investments. Finish them he did, and he died a few days later: 

“With these few inunctions, and the Knowledge I have of your love and affections, and of the dutiful affection of all our children, I bid you a final farewell until we meet in another, and I trust better, world.” Signed U.S. Grant.

Related:

The Missouri Civil War Museum. 

“Man of Fire” by Derek Maxfield

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“Well we have had a big battle where they Shot real bullets and I am safe. Except a buckshot wound in the hand and a bruised shoulder from a spent ball…” – Letter from William T. Sherman to his wife Ellen Ewing Sherman, April 11, 1862, after the Battle of Shiloh.

Growing up, I had a grandmother who referred to the Civil War as “The War of Northern Aggression” which had been won for the North by “that drunkard General Useless Grant.” Her father-in-law had been a young soldier in the war; relatives on both sides had fought and died. A century later, the Civil War was still being fought, at least when she was present, wrapped up in loss, memory, and an unshakeable belief in the “Lost Cause.”

But no Union officer received my grandmother’s opprobrium like William Tecumseh Sherman, whom I understood to be a personification of Lucifer. 

William Tecumseh Sherman

And that so-called Lucifer is the subject of Man of Fire: William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War, the highly readable, fact-filled, and wonderfully illustrated biography by Derek Maxfield. This is not a comprehensive, “be-all-and-end-all” study of the man; instead, it focuses on his Civil War years and military service.

The man who emerges from these pages is complex, ambitious, doubt-ridden, often depressed, and an incredibly competent and capable leader. He was lauded in the North and despised in the South and for largely the same reason: the March through Georgia in late 1864. The earlier fall of Atlanta made Sherman a Union hero (and assured Abraham Lincoln’s reelection), setting the stage for the march to the sea. Maxfield notes that many credit Sherman with inventing the idea of “total war.” It wasn’t only about defeating armies in the field but also about destroying the supply base and demoralizing the civilians. And the march did exactly that. It also became one of the major pillars of the “Lost Cause” mythology. 

Man of Fire describes how Sherman, after repeated business failures in civilian life, found a natural home back in the military. But it wasn’t an easy ride. Early on, it appeared his career was over; the man likely had something like a nervous breakdown. But his service at Shiloh helped restore the luster. It also helped that Grant supported him through good times and bad. 

Sherman also had to deal with Washington politics, and specifically Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War. He may have been a military hero, lauded in the press (and Sherman knew exactly how fickle the press could be), but the general had to deal with Stanton’s interfering and eventual humiliation over the peace terms offered to Confederate Gen. Joseph Johnston. Maxfield succinctly summarizes all of this.

Derek Maxfield

Maxfield is an associate professor of history at Genesee Community College in Batavia, New York, and has received several awards for teaching. He previously published Hellmira: The Union’s Most Infamous Civil War Prison Camp – Elmira, N.Y. Maxfield has also written and directed several plays, including Now We Stand by Each Other Always and Grant on the Eve of Victory. He is a lecturer on several Civil War, Victorian America, and American Revolution topics, and he’s been a regular contributor to the Emerging Civil War blog since 2015. He lives with his family in New York. 

Man of Fire doesn’t tell you everything you might want to know about Sherman, but that’s not its intent. It summarizies the Civil War years, highlighting the mjnor events of the general’s military career and personal life (including the death in Memphis of his beloved son from typhoid. It gives you the general and the man, his victories and accomplishments as well as his failures. At the end, you understand William Tecumseh Sherman better than you did when you started to read it. 

But I can still see my grandmother shaking her finger at me.

Top illustration: What the black-and-white photographs of the era don’t pay justice to is Sherman’s red hair.

“The Summer of ’63: Vicksburg & Tullahoma,” edited by Chris Mackowski & Dan Welch

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There are few more momentous years in American history than 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Battle of Gettysburg, ending Robert E Lee’s invasion of the North. The Fall of Vicksburg, which effectively cut the Confederacy in half. More than 30,000 books have been written on the Battle of Gettysburg alone.

And there are few more actively maintained and managed Civil War web sites than Emerging Civil War. With 28 contributors and seven editors (all of whom also contribute), the site is updated daily and often several times a day. 

Chris Mackowski serves as editor-in-chief, and Dan Welch is one of the site’s contributors. Together, they have edited some 40 articles about the Civil War summer of 1863, focusing ontwo major campaigns – Vicksburg in Mississippi and Tullahoma in Tennessee. Usually works about that momentous summer address the Battle of Gettysburg; The Summer of ’63: Vicksburg & Tullahoma are about the other two campaigns whose outcomes had as much to do with the defeat of the Confederacy as did Gettysburg. In fact, one might argue that Vicksburg had at least as great an impact on the war as Gettysburg did, and perhaps more.

The articles cover a broad array of topics. Included are an overview of the stakes of Vicksburg; the turning point for Ulysses S. Grant; photographing Vicksburg; Grierson’s Raid through central Mississippi; how Admiral David Porter ran gunboats past the batteries at Vicksburg; the role of William Tecumseh Sherman; the related Vicksburg battles of Champion Hill and Jackson; how civilians fared during the siege of the Mississippi town; an overview of the Battle of Tullahoma and the related actions at Liberty Gap and Shelbyville; and more.

Chris Makowski

And the book isn’t only about battles and military strategies. We read about Old Abe, the Eighth Wisconsin’s war eagle; the shooting of a Maine deserter; Abraham, the slave “blown” to freedom; a letter-writing campaign to the veterans of Vicksburg; the life of an officer as revealed by his letters; and other human-interest stories.

The result is a collective story of armies, strategy, generals, and civilians who fought and experienced two of the most significant campaigns of the American Civil War.

Dan Welch

A professor at St. Bonaventure University, Mackowski has received B.A., M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. degrees in communication, English, and creative writing. The author of some nine books, he’s written extensively on the Civil War for a number of publications. He also worked for the National Park Service and gave tours of the Civil War battlefields at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania. 

Welch is an educator in a public school district in Ohio and serves as a seasonal park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park and associate editor of Gettysburg Magazine. He’s written two books in the Emerging Civil War Series and co-edited several volumes. 

Mackowski and Welch have done an excellent job in gathering and curating a wealth of material, putting in its context, and helping us make sense of that tumultuous and important summer. The Summer of ’63 is a story told well.

Top illustration: Admiral David Porter’s gunboats run the Vicksburg blockade, lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1863. 

Why Poetry Can Make You a Better Writer

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Like most of my generation, I read poetry in English classes in high school. It wasn’t until I was a high school senior that I read poetry that stuck in my head. And it was T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Four Quartets.” I read poetry in college as well, but my English literature professor gave brutal tests that put me off poetry for years. 

My professional career eventually led me to corporate speechwriting. I enjoyed the work, the executives I wrote for liked what I did, and I had that sense of “this is what I was meant to do.” It was a good friend, one who wasn’t a speechwriter, who suggested that if I were really serious about it, then I needed to read poetry. He sent me three books – the collected poems of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Dylan Thomas. He told me to read them and others on a regular basis.

And I thought, seriously? No speechwriter I knew read poetry regularly. Most then and now would read books about current events, developments in science, politics, and a lot of speeches written by others. But poetry? Really?

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

Photograph by Nick Fewings via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“No One Wants to Be the Last to Die” by Chris Calkins

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In April 1865, the confederate capital of Richmond fell after Robert E. Lee led the Army of Northern Virginia first south to Petersburg, and then westward to the Appomattox area in southwestern Virginia. His first goal was to reach supply trains, waiting with food and munitions. The Army of the Potomac, under Ulysses S. Grant, was moving even faster to capture the trains and cut off Lee’s escape.

If he couldn’t reach the trains, Lee hoped to join up with the army of General William Johnston, now in North Carolina and pursued by Union forces under William Tecumseh Sherman. A series of battles and skirmishes occurred. In No One Wants to Be the Last to Die: The Battles of Appomattox, April 8-9, 1865, historian Chris Calkins details those final days of Lee’s army, often hour by hour. 

There’s likely no one more knowledgeable to tell the story. Calkins is considered the foremost authority on Appomattox and the Appomattox campaigns. Part of his career was spent with the National Park Service at Appomattox Court House. And what a story he tells.

It’s a top-down, bottoms-up account. Calkins draws from official reports, newspaper accounts, military records, memoirs (by combatants and non-combatants alike), letters written to and from soldiers on both sides, claims for reimbursement filed by store owners, itineraries, mileage tables, weather reports, and more. It’s a considerable amount of information to put into context and make sense of, and Calkins does exactly that. And he does it with an engaging, easy-to-read and easy-to-follow narrative. 

The battles didn’t all go the Union’s way, but soldiers on both sides were realizing that this might be the final climactic moment for the Army of Northern Virginia. 

Chris Calkins

Calkins recently retired as site manager for the Sailor’s Creek Battlefield State Park. In addition to his work at Appomattox, he also worked for the National Park Service at the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park and Petersburg National Battlefield. He’s published more than a dozen publications, authored numerous articles, and has spoken at many Civil War and preservation groups. A native of Detroit, he graduated from Longwood University. 

Perhaps the most poignant account in No One Wants to Be the Last to Die is what happened when the men of Lee’s army hear that their general is surrendering. Some became angry and rode off to find Johnston’s army on their own or to head to the mountains to regroup. Some decided to simply leave for home. Some soldiers and officers wept privately; others wept openly.

It’s a fine, richly detailed story.

Top photograph: The McLean House in Appomattox, Virginia, where Rober E. Lee signed the terms of surrender offered by Ulysses S. Grant.

How I Learned About the Coronation

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There I was, doing what I do best in gift shops connected to major tourist sites, in this case the Tower of London. It was 2013, and I was looking through the books for sale. 

One caught my eye: Crown, Orb & Sceptre: The True Stories of English Coronations by David Hilliam. And the reason it caught my eye was that I’d begun to think about the third novel in my Dancing Priest series, my alternative history of the British royal family. And this would be the novel in which Michael Kent-Hughes would be crowned. 

But I didn’t know much about the specifics of the ceremony, other than it took place in Westminster Abbey and every monarch since Edward I had been crowned there. I bought the book at the gift shop, and it accompanied me home to the States. It was another six months before I read it. It had become part of the research for Dancing King.

It’s full of facts about coronations as well as gossipy tidbits. Charles I, the one who lost his head, was all of four feet, seven inches tall. His coronation was marred by several mishaps, seen later as omens. The worst might have neem an earthquake occurring just as the ceremony ended.

Richard III was crowned barefoot. Oliver Cromwell melted down most of the crown jewels. When George I was crowned in 1714, he couldn’t speak a lick of English (he was German with a British royal connection). Two kings were never crowned; can you name them? (Answer below.) Elizabeth II was advised over and over again not to televise the coronation ceremony; she didn’t listen. Instead, she followed the advice of her husband, who urged her to televise. 

For centuries, the coronation procession began at the Tower of London and ended at Westminster Abbey (with a couple of exceptions for plague years). That was eventually discontinued in the 17th century. I fastened on that fact, and I had Michael Kent-Hughes decide to bring that procession back, linking his own reign to that of the originals – and to allow more people to see the procession (it’s a longer route than the Buckingham Palace to the Abbey stretch) and to give a nod to the business community (the route goes through the City of London) and the theater community (it passes near the West End). 

But it was the coronation itself that was the most important information the book provided. When you see the old clips of Elizabeth II’s coronation, you’re struck by the pageantry, the spectacle, and all the visual details. This may have been why her advisors (including Winston Churchill) argued against television – a televised program can easily miss the point. Above all else, the coronation of the British monarch is a religious ceremony, filled with symbols throughout the rite.

King Edward’s throne with the Stone of Scone.

That’s where Crown, Orb & Sceptre really helped my research. It included the step-by-step ceremony for Elizabeth II’s coronation and explained what each part of the program and each of the symbols meant. The religious and specifically Christian elements fit perfectly with the faith of Michael Kent-Hughes in my story, and I followed the general outline laid out by the book.

Some years back, the prince of Wales who will be crowned Charles III this weekend said in an interview that he would like to be known as the “defender of the faiths,” as opposed to the traditional title of the monarch as “defender of the faith.” He was making a bow in the direction of the diversity of religions in Britain, but he was also unintentionally appointing himself as head of all of the faiths in the country, including Islam. More than a few people pointed that out, and the idea was forgotten.

Except in the case of Michael Kent-Hughes. In Dancing King, and before his coronation, he meets with a group of protestors, who (among other things) demand he demand that he recognize himself as “defender of the faiths.” He succinctly explains exactly what that would mean, much to the shock of the protestors.

If you happen to watch the coronation ceremony this Saturday, remember that each step, and each symbol, is filled with religious importance. Above all else, a British coronation is a religious ceremony. 

And the answer to what two kings were never crowned? The boy king likely murdered with his younger brother in the Tower of London on orders of Richard III, and Edward VIII, who gave up his throne to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. 

Related:

Dancing King Stories: The Tower of London.

Dancing King Stories: The Coronation at Westminster Abbey.

My review of Crown, Orb & Sceptre by David Hilliam.

Ritual, not pageantry: Understanding the coronation – Francis Young at The Critic Magazine.

Top photograph: Westminster Abbey, where every British monarch since Edward I has been crowned.