Civil War

“Midnight on the Potomac” by Scott Ellsworth

October 1, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

A considerable portion of my historical novel Brookhaven is set in the last year of the Civil War, and yet the novel only covers a few of the momentous events – the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse, the final siege of Petersburg, Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox, and Johnston’s surrender to Sherman near Greensboro.

Indirectly, the novel covers Grierson’s Raid through Alabama, the fall of Atlanta and Sherman’s march to the sea, and the political and social chaos that followed. People lived through those times; my own ancestors (on both sides of my family) lived through it.

The last year of the Civil War is also the focus of Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America. In almost a conversational vignette style, historian Scott Ellsworth guides the reader through the major events of 1864-1865, showing how they not only were significant in and of themselves but also how they shaped post-war America.

You meet spies and ghost armies, experience the horrific battle in the Wilderness near Richmond, and discover how slaves were liberated and sometimes abandoned by Union armies. You follow the acting career of John Wilkes Booth and how it led to that fateful night at Ford’s Theater. You learn how the fall of Atlanta assured Lincon’s reelection, and you join Booth in listening to Lincoln’s second inaugural speech. You meet the famous and not-so-famous, and you experience history in many of the words and first-hand accounts of the people who were themselves involved.

It says something of Ellsworth’s skill that the writing and stories seem almost effortless. You know they’re not; a prodigious amount of research and knowledge was required for that “effortlessness.”

Ellsworth previously published The Ground Breaking: The Tulsa Race Massacre and an American City’s Search for Justice; Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921; The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph; and The World Beneath Their Feet: Mountaineering, Madness, and the Deadly Race to Summit the Himalayas. He attended Reed College in Oregon and graduate school at Duke University in North Carolina. And he also worked as a historian at the Smithsonian Institution. He lives with his family in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and he teaches at the University of Michigan.

Through the power of stories, Midnight on the Potomac explains what happened that last, fateful year of the Civil War, and it does so in a highly readable, engaging way.

“The Summer of ’63: Gettysburg” by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch

September 17, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

My historical novel Brookhaven is set during the Civil War’s final two years and immediately after, and then in 1915, 50 years later. The moment that sets the story into motion happens in late April of 1863 – Grierson’s Raid, in which a troop of some 1700 Union cavalry made their way through Mississippi from the Tennessee border to (eventually) Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The soldiers came to Brookhaven, most notably burning the train station and tearing up railroad track.

The raid had a specific point: divert attention from Gen. Grant’s army preparing to cross the river from Louisiana and end the siege of Vicksburg, the last Confederate position on the river. The fall of Vicksburg would been the Union controlled the entire length of the river and would split the Confederacy in two.

The Vicksburg campaign was covered in a collection of articles edited by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch, part of a series called “Summer of ’63.” Their Vicksburg & Tullahoma covered the events and milestones of that campaign, including a raid on Mississippi’s capital of Jackson, which eventually led to a Union victory.

Now Mackowski and Welch have done it again, this time turning to another major Union victory in 1863 – the Battle of Gettysburg.

The Summer of 1863: Gettysburg follows a similar format. Mackowski and Welch have gathered and edited articles from the Emerging Civil War web site (which I can’t recommend highly enough if you’re interested in American history generally and Civil War history specifically). When you read a concentration of work like this, you realize just how fine the historical scholarship is on the site.

The subjects include understanding why the Battle of Chancellorsville is so vital to understanding Gettysburg; how Gen. Meade took control of the Union army on the eve of battle; the mascot of the 11h Pennsylvania; prominent local families; how the Union retreated through the town at the beginning of the three-day battle; the impact of three men on the battle’s outcome; the role of Stonewall Jackson; the poet and writer Herman Melville on Pickett’s Charge; the aftermath, including the effort to punish Gen. Meade for “allowing” Lee’s army to escape; how the wounded saw the battle; how the battle was memorialized; the famous 1913 reunion of both Union and Confederate veterans,; and much more.

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.

A collection like The Summer of ’63: Gettysburg makes you appreciate the quality of the articles at Emerging Civil War. It also reminds me of the debt I owe to the writers there; I spent considerable time using the site for research and background for Brookhaven. It’s a debt I can’t repay. And my book has been published for some months, yet I still spend considerable time on the web site.

Top illustration: The Battle of Gettysburg as depicted by artist Thure de Thulstrup for Harper’s Weekly.

Stephen Foster: How Song Opened a Door on History

August 26, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

You can’t research and write a novel about the Civil War, or anything else set in the mid-19^th century, without quickly running into the songs people sang. As I researched what would eventually become my novel Brookhaven, I came across war songs, anthems, sung by the Irish who came to America and enlisted, hymns, songs by the home folk, and more.

I went looking for a book about music in the Civil War, and I found ta small volume published by the Library of America in 2010, Stephen Foster & Co.: Lyrics of America’s First Great Popular Songs. It’s a small, eye-opening gem. I discovered that songs I learned in elementary school had been around for more than a century.

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

How a Book Inspired a Character

August 13, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I was struggling while I was writing the manuscript of what would become Brookhaven. I was up to my eyeballs in research; I had the overall story arc in my head. I knew it would be 1915, and the character of Sam McClure would be explaining his life during the Civil War.

I had one problem.

What would he be telling the story in the first place? Why would he be recounting both what he had previously told his family and what he hadn’t told them? I knew that in the 1890-1920 period, memoirs of the Civil War were a major genre of autobiography, but this wasn’t a case of Sam writing his story or dictating his story for it to be published as a memoir. The whole idea was him to tell the story not as it happened or chronologically, but how different events of the war shaped the rest of his life.

Bah, humbug.

I happened to be reading a biography of a woman journalist. Entitled Newspaperwoman of the Ozarks: The Life and Times of Lucile Morris Upton, it has been written by Susan Croce Kelly, herself a former journalist at the now-shuttered St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

Susan and I had met (I can’t believe it’s been this long) some 45years ago, when we both worked in public relations. In fact, we were in the same speechwriting department for a few years. Another speechwriter in the group named Jim Fullinwider and I had lived through a book she was writing at the time, Route 66: The Highway and Its People. She used weekends and vacation time to travel the length of the old Route 66, at least where it still existed.

The highway started in Chicago and end in Los Angeles, and it was the stuff of legends. It still is today. Jim and I would sit in Susan’s office on Monday mornings, listening in wonder as she told of her weekend Interviews. She’s a born storyteller, and she was telling us stories that we and most other people had never heard before. In 2014, she published her second book, Father of Route 66: The Story of Cy Avery.

As I was struggling with myself over my own novel, I glanced at the cover of her Lucile Upton book. And I thought. If I went back about a decade in time from the photo of Lucile Upton, I would see the fashions of 1915. (I can’t explain why that thought occurred; it just did.)

Eureka! That was it. Sam McClure would be telling his story, shrouded in mystery still unsolved 50 years after the war had ended, to a newspaperwoman. And her story would turn out to be entangled with his.

Elizabeth Putnam was born. Headstrong journalist, determined to make her way in what had been a man’s world, not intimidated by what others thought, passionate about women’s right to vote as a first step, and hoping to be sent by her New York newspaper to cover the Great War in Europe.

That’s when I rewrote the beginning of Brookhaven. And that’s when I started rewriting the entire manuscript. Because Brookhaven was never meant to be a story of only the Civil War; it was the story of how a war changed lives and a culture, and how it continued to do that.

You might say I owe Lucile Morris Upton and Susan Kelly a debt of gratitude. They both helped me tell a story.

Top photograph: Lucile Morris Upton about 1915. She would be about six years younger than the character of Elizabeth Putnam in Brookhaven.

A Bible Verse and a Fictional Scene

July 30, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

For the past few months, our church pastors have been preaching a series on the Gospel as seen in the life of David. We’re nearing the end of the series. The sermons have focused on some of the highlights of David’s life, including his anointing by the prophet Samuel, the confrontation with Goliath, the growing animosity of King Saul, the friendship with Saul’s son Jonathan, David becoming king, and Bathsheba.

Last Sunday, the sermon centered on the end of the rebellion by David’s son Absalom (2 Samuel 18). The army gathered by Absalom has been defeated and scattered; Absalom himself, trying to escape, is caught by his trademark flowing hair in the branches of a tree. He’s dangling there when found by David’s general, who wastes no time in ignoring David’s earlier command to spare Absolom’s life and putting the young man to the sword.

I’m familiar with the account. I’ve read it many times, my attention caught by the image of Absalom dangling from the tree limb. It is a truism that you can read a book of the Bible, a passage, a chapter, and even a verse scores of times and not see something that will suddenly catch your attention during an additional reading.

This is what I had overlooked: “The battle spread over the face of all the country, and the forest devoured more people that day than the sword” (2 Samuel 18:8, English Standard Version; italics added for emphasis). The penultimate example of this was Absalom himself, but I wondered what had happened to everyone else.

My mind strayed 2,800 years forward to the American Civil War, the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864 near Richmond, Virginia. No rain had fallen for weeks, and the dense brush of the woods was tinder-dry. When the Union army began firing its artillery, the resulting explosions ignited the woods. Soldiers on both sides found themselves not only fighting the enemy but also and even worse foe – a quickly spreading forest fire. (It’s said that the Union artillery killed more of its own men than anything the Confederates did.)

For my novel Brookhaven, I read extensively about this battle. It’s the setting for the second of three encounters between Captain John Haygood and the young teenager Samuel McClure. Haygood has been wounded and can’t walk unassisted. Not recognizing Sam at first, at gunpoint he orders Sam to take him back to the Union line, dodging animals like snakes fleeing the fire, dying soldiers, and the sounds of single gunshots as the dying and wounded killed themselves rather than be knowingly consumed by the raging fire. It was a fictional scene based entirely on what really happened.

From all accounts, the Wilderness was a horrific battle. If there was a “winner,” it was General Lee’s Confederates. But Ulysses Grant, now in command of the Union army attacking Lee, had something Lee did not – an almost endless supply of recruits – and he was not shy about using them. The Battle of the Wilderness extended for weeks, and it grew to include the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse.

It’s a crucial scene in the novel. A year after Grierson’s Raid came to Sam’s hometown of Brookhaven, Mississippi, he again meets the man who had a huge impact on his mother’s life and, indirectly, his own. They will meet once more during the final Battle of Petersburg in 1865.

Absolom’s army was fleeing woods burning from artillery fire, but one can sense the desperation of men who will be judged traitors to King David. They would have met obstacles like lack of paths, ditches and ravines, wild animals, sudden drop-offs, and, like their leader, unexpected low-hanging branches.

Researching and writing that scene in Brookhaven gave me a better understanding of that Bible verse. Even when it’s me, I’m fascinated in the way a writer’s mind can work.

The Battle of the Wilderness by Gordon Rhea.

Diary of a Confederate Tarheel Soldier by Louis Leon.

Hell Itself: The Battle of the Wilderness May 5-7, 1864 by Chris Mackowski.

Photograph by Filip Zrnzevic via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Three Fictional Encounters in Three Factual Events

July 16, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In my novel Brookhaven, the teenaged Sam McClure has three fateful encounters with John Haygood. The three happen in successive years, and each of the three involve Civil War military operations.

I was reminded of this when Emerging Civil War posted articles on two of the three operations a week apart this month.

The first encounter happens during Grierson’s Raid, an operation ordered by Ulysses S. Grant to distract the Confederates during his siege of Vicksburg in 1863. Some 1,700 Union cavalrymen rode through Mississippi, starting at the Tennessee border and finishing in Union-occupied Louisiana. They tore up railroad track and caused considerable havoc, but more importantly, they kept the Confederates focused away from Grant transferring his army across the river to besiege Vicksburg from the east.

One of the towns visited by Grierson’s cavalrymen was Brookhaven, where they burned the train station and tore up track. In the novel, Captain Haygood meets Sam in the McClure General Store, where Sam’s grandfather is accidentally pushed against a counter and dies in the boy’s arms. Sam later hears a conversation between Haygood and Sam’s mother Louisa, and he realizes what their relationship had been years before. It’s that knowledge which sets the story of Sam’s enlistment in the Confederate Army into motion.

*An artist’s depiction of trying to escape the fires with wounded during the Battle of the Wilderness. (Library of Congress)*

The second encounter happens a year later, during the Battle of the Wilderness near Richmond. Samis carrying messages between generals, and in the thick of the fighting, he meets John Haygood once again, this time at the point of a pistol.

This battle was horrendous, even in the context of all the other Civil War battles. The Wilderness was dense scrub forest. The weather had been dry for weeks, and Union artillery shells ignited the dense, dry woods into a blazing inferno. The Union guns are said to have killed more of their own army’s men than anything the Confederates did. Wounded men, unable to escape on foot, often shot themselves rather than be burned alive.

The Emerging Civil War story I read on July 3 was about an Australian general in World War I, Sir John Monash, who is considered to be one of the best generals of that war. One reason is how closely he studied the American Civil War’s Battle of the Wilderness and how Grant modified his strategic objectives. I’m neither a veteran nor a military historian, but I read so much about the battle for the novel that I think I felt like one.

*A depiction of the Union breakthrough at Petersburg, April 2, 1865. (Library of Congress)*

The third encounter between young Sam McClure and John Haygood happens during another military encounter, the final Battle of Petersburg. Petersburg, south of Richmond, was an important railroad junction to keep Richmond and Lee’s army supplied. It had been under Union pressure for a considerable period, and the pressure was finally working. Petersburg’s fall forced Lee (and the Confederate government) to abandon Richmond. Lee fled west, reaching the town of Appomattox Courthouse, where he surrendered.

Sam, still running messages between armies, takes cover in the woods during a Union cavalry charge. And it is the mortally wounded John Haygood whose horse collapses there, almost at Sam’s feet. This third and final encounter will lead to a meeting two years later.

I don’t such a cavalry charge took place in fact, but Emerging Civil War published an article July 11 that described the final piercing of Petersburg’s defense on April 2, 1865. That would be the date of Sam’s final meeting with Haygood. A week later, Lee surrendered. (I deliberately chose April 9 as Sam’s birthday; the surrender happened the day Sam turned 15.)

I probably shouldn’t be surprised; this is what happens with historical novels. But I find myself still taken with how factual reports continue to bring me right back to the story I wrote.

Related:

Bloody Promenade by Stephen Cushman.

The Battle of the Wilderness by Gordon Rhea.

Echoes of the Wilderness: Grant, Lee, and Monash’s Art of War – Leigh Goggin at Emerging Civil War.

Petersburg Breakthrough – Edward Alexander at Emerging Civil War.

Top illustration: Major Benjamin Grierson and his cavalry make a triumphant entry into Union-controlled Baton Rouge at the conclusion of their famous raid through Mississippi. (Library of Congress)

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