Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Civil War

“The Southern Tradition at Bay” by Richard Weaver

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It’s something of an obvious truism to say that “winners write history.” That’s my starting point for considering The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought by Richard Weaver.

First published in 1968, the work was republished in 1989, and then again in the past year. It is a thoughtful examination, or re-examination, of the mind of the South after the Civil War and how Southerners interpreted their defeat. Weaver isn’t about defending the “Lost Cause” as much as is he focused on what was in the mind of the South before the war, what was driving those thoughts, how it developed during the war and after.

If you read the vast majority of histories and commentaries on the Civil War and its causes (and I read more than my fair share during the research for my novel Brookhaven), the vast majority will tell you that the cause, THE cause, was slavery. That determination, however, ignores considerable evidence. Even most northerners believed that the war was about preserving the Union, not to eradicate slavery. Slavery certainly moved more into the driver’s seat with the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

Henry Grady, who coined “The New South”

Weaver takes a different approach. He spent considerable time and effort examining memoirs, letters, journals, and other “first-hand” materials and concluded that what drove secession and war for the South, and in reverse for the North, was the clash of what was essentially a feudal society motivated by a romantic idealism and the egalitarian, more mechanized ideas born during the French Revolution and eventually finding their way into industrialization. Notions of chivalry were no match for the industrial juggernaut the Northern states were becoming. 

These ideas are not merely historical; they still are playing themselves out in culture, politics, and even religion. Consider the writings of Wendell Berry about localism, community, and agriculture, and the research writer Paul Kingsnorth has been doing on what he calls “the machine.” We’re still grappling with many of the same ideas that Weaver saw as bringing on the Civil War and what followed. After the war, Southerners, he says, were outraged at being called traitors; they saw the North as having betrayed the constitution and its principles. This belief seasoned their defenses, eventually leading to the “Lost Cause” idea. 

He considers the background or heritage of the war, what the apologists said, what both Southern and Northern soldiers themselves said in letters and memoirs, the fiction that came from the war, what notable figures like Henry Grady (the Atlanta publisher who coined the phrase “the New South”) said and defended, and the writings of the critics of the Southern feudal tradition. 

Rochard Weaver

His conclusion: “The South possesses an inheritance which it has imperfectly understood and little used. It is in the curious position of having been right without realizing the grounds of its rightness. I am conscious that this reverses the common judgment; but it may yet appear that the North, by its ready embrace of science and rationalism, impoverished itself, and that the South by clinging more or less unashamedly to the primitive way of life prepared itself for the longer run.”

Weaver (1910-1963) taught English at the University of Chicago, yet he was mostly known for his work on intellectual history, rhetoric, and politics. A native of North Carolina, he received his A.B. degree in English from the University of Kentucky and his M.A. degree from Vanderbilt University.  Before the University of Chicago, he taught at Auburn and Texas A&M universities and then returned to school to earn a Ph.D. degree from Louisiana State University. He was influenced by the so-called Agrarians, which included Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom. 

His thesis was titled “The Confederate South, 1865-1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and a Culture.” It would eventually be published as this book, The Southern Tradition at Bay. Throughout his life, he was strongly associated with political and social conservatives. Having reading the work, it seems that Weaver thoughtfully, quietly, and comprehensively made his case.

Research Doesn’t Stop with Publication

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It was a year ago that the manuscript for my historical novel was attached to an email and sent to the publisher who requested it. I felt an incredible sense of relief. The thing was done. I could take a break from literally years of reading and research about the Civil War. Nine years of reading and research. 

I had started this even before I’d thought about writing a historical novel. I started reading about the Civil War because I was interested in it. It was only when I stumbled across an event called Grierson’s Raid, a Union cavalry raid in 1863 that the idea for a novel arose. The raid began at the border between Mississippi and Tennessee, swept down through the state, and eventually ended at Baton Rouge in Louisiana. It was designed as a diversion for Ulysses S Grant to quietly move his Union army across the Mississippi and attack Vicksburg from the east.

My ancestors had experienced that raid. They lived in the Brookhaven, Mississippi, area, one of sites that Grierson’s raiders had visited.

I researched everything I could about the raid and the broader war. Once I knew I would be writing a novel, my research intensified. By the time I sent the email to the publisher, I was close to exhausted, at least mentally.

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

The Biography of a Civil War Regiment

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In my historical novel Brookhaven, the elderly Sam McClure recalls his experience with the Iron Brigade in the Civil War. It was of short duration, only about three weeks, but he attached himself to the brigade’s soldiers after the Battle of Gettysburg. He was following his orders; he was all of 13 years old, but he was working as a spy for a Confederate group called Colby’s Rangers.

Sam admits he never really learned anything of importance; what he did was to run errands and keep the soldiers entertained with recitations of poetry by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The brigade suffered a high casualty rate during the war; it was known for its fearlessness. Sam meets up with a bare handful of survivors at the Gettysburg Reunion of 1913, but he never reveals his identity. He listens as the veterans eventually discuss “the boy who recited Mr. Longfellow’s poems.” 

He tells his listeners that he’s always felt bad for misleading the men; the reporter Elizabeth Putnam gives him another insight, that he provided a respite to the men from the horrors of war. Her words move Sam to such an extent that he spends time alone in the woods.

Historian James Marten has written a somewhat unusual history of a key part of the Iron Brigade. The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment is not an history of all of the battles the regiment fought in. The battles are included, of course, because they played such an important role in the lives of regiment’s men. But Marten uses the word “biography” very deliberately; he’s not telling the story of the regiment’s history so much as he’s telling the story of men who comprised the regiment. As he writes, the book is a story of “how men made war and what the war made of those men.”

Marten’s subject: the 2,000 men who served in the regiment at one point or another. The men wore distinctive black hats; in fact, they because known as the “Black Hat Brigade” as well as the “Iron Brigade” for their seemingly utter fearlessness. And the regiment was changing fairly constantly; the often horrendous losses suffered required a constant infusion of recruits. And his study goes well beyond the war years of 1861-1865, because while the fighting may have stopped, the impact went on for decades. One could argue that we still feel the impact of the American Civil War.

He addresses four areas: the men’s military history as well as their lives as veterans; what they survived as veterans; how the generation of Civil War men “invented the very idea of war,” and the kind of “constructed community” that the Sixth Wisconsin became. It’s a fascinating way to tell a well-known story.

James Marten

Marten in a professor emeritus of history at Marquette University. His academic work has focused in two areas: the Civil War and the histories of children and youth. His more than 20 books includes The Children’s Civil War, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America, America’s Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace, and Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America. He is a past president f the Society of Civil War Historians and the Society for the History of Children and Youth. 

The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War is an extraordinarily well-research account of a famous Civil War regiment, not only through the war years but in the long decades that followed. And it explains why war isn’t only what happens on the battlefield.

Top photograph: Men of the Sixth Wisconsin in their famous black hats.

Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride”: Creaing a National Legend 

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It’s a tossup as to whether the most famous or best-known poem in America is Clement Moore”s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (aka “Twas the Night Before Christmas”), first published in 1823, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” (1860). My money is on “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Whole generations of schoolchildren, myself included, grew up reciting the lines that begin “Listen my children, and you shall hear…” 

Both poems are no longer taught in most of America’s public schools, but I know from my grandsons’ experience that they are taught (with great gusto) in many private schools, especially those offering a classical education. “Paul Revere’s Ride” commemorates one of the significant of the beginning of the American Revolution, a horseback ride at night to warn the cities of Lexington and Concord that British troops were coming.

That ride occurred 250 years ago tomorrow.

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

Artwork: the illustration accompanying the poem in the January 1861 edition of The Atlantic Magazine.

“Defending Dixie’s Land” by Isaac Bishop

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I grew up with relatives who were still fighting the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression, as my grandmother described it). I knew about the Lost Cause, usually referred to simply as “The Cause.” I had watched Gone with the Wind countless times with my mother, and I knew it not as a movie based on a novel but as history. It wasn’t until I was a junior in high school that my American history teaching challenged our class to explore received history and find out what really happened in the Civil War.

It was an eye-opening exercise. And yet I knew that while my relatives and my received wisdom were largely and mostly wrong, my understanding wasn’t entirely wrong. For example, the abolition movement in America was empowered by a powerful propaganda war, which often exaggerated reality to score points in public opinion (as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, himself a part of that propaganda war, would come to realize and regret). Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin without having set foot on a slave-owning plantation, yet Northern readers accepted it as fact. And the idea of secession by individual states were first advanced and popularized, not by the southern states, but by the New England states, which wanted high tariffs to protect their own manufacturing interests and were willing to entertain leaving the Union to achieve their goals. 

Still, it was something of a surprise to read Defending Dixie’s Land: What Every American Should Know About the South and the Civil War (2023) by Isaac Bishop, a pen name for writer Jeb Smith. He’s born and raised in Vermont, no less (a Yankee!). 

Bishop’s journey into the Civil War, began with his studies on the American Revolution and the country’s founders. He realized that most of what he was learning was about the founders from the Northern colonies, with very little being said about the founders from the South and what they believed. From there he studied what he terms “the most terrible sin in our history” – slavery. His previous understanding began to unravel. And the more he looked, the more unraveled it became.

Wherever possible, he looked at original source documents – writings of the protagonists, accounts by former slaves, and the people on both sides who were living through a tumultuous political conflict that became a devastating military conflict.

In Defending Dixie’s Land, Bishop lays out his defense of the South by examining several broad areas: slavery, secession of the cotton states, secession of the Upper South, the Union as created by the founders (all of them), African-American support for the South during the Civil War, America’s agricultural past, treatment of minorities by both North and South, slavery around the world, and finally the fundamental antagonism between North and South. The North, he argues, accepted modernity and the radical beliefs of the French Revolution, while South is “perhaps best understood as a Protestant version of medieval Europe.” 

Isaac Bishop / Jeb Smith

Yes, my mouth hung open in surprise as I read the book, especially when he writes about the individual he views as the chief villain in the play – Abraham Lincoln. Even if I might disagree with him on many things, I was still left with a sense of Bishop may not be entirely right, and he may not be even largely right, but it’s difficult to ignore or discount many of the arguments he makes.

Bishop, a penname for author Jeb Smith, has published two other books: Missing Monarchy: Correcting Misconceptions About the Middle Ages, Medieval Kingship, Democracy, and Liberty; and The Road Goes Ever On and On: A New Perspective on J. R. R. Tolkien and Middle-earth. He’s written more than 100 articles for such publications as History is Now, The Postal Magazine, the Libertarian Institute, History Medieval, Rutland Herald, Vermont Daily Chronicle, Medieval Magazine, Medieval Archives, the Libertarian Christian Institute, and Fellowship & Fairydust Magazine. He lives in Vermont.

Top illustration: an 1852 publicity poster for Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

10 Great Resources for Teaching the Civil War

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I was drafting and researching what would become my historical novel Brookhaven, and I looked at the census records for Pike County, Mississippi. I’d been having trouble finding my ancestor Samuel Young listed anywhere in Confederate rosters. The only one clue I’d previously found was a listing for S.F. Young, who joined a Mississippi rifles unit late in the Civil War and was sent to Texas. And I thought the census record might have another name by which he was known.

I found the list of Youngs. And the family I’m looking for. There he was – Samuel F. Young, age 13. My eye traveled up the list to his father, Franklin. And the occupation listed was farmer. The same occupation was listed for Samuel’s two older brothers. 

Something was wrong. 

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

Photograph: The 1885 (first) edition of The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.