Civil War

“John Brown’s Body” by Stephen Vincent Benet

December 6, 2023 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

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.

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.

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).

“John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary”

November 29, 2023 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

Much like the Civil War itself, accounts of prison camps can seem at opposite ends of the spectrum. Some, like Camp Douglas in Chicago, are as obscure as the physical sites themselves, buried under city development. Andersonville, the camp for Union POWs in Sumter County, Georgia, has had the most notorious reputation of any camp during the conflict. And yet some Union prisoners, like James Madison Page, reported a very different experience.

The facts are stark. Over the 13 months of its existence, some 45,000 Union soldiers were imprisoned there, and 13,000 died.

John Ransom, an acting quartermaster sergeant for the 9^th Michigan Cavalry, was captured on Nov. 6, 1863, in east Tennessee. He was first sent to Belle Island, an island in the James River adjacent to Richmond, then to a tobacco warehouse building in Richmond itself, and finally by train to Andersonville. He survived the experience, but only barely. In 1881, he published Andersonville Diary, a memoir of his experiences, using the almost daily journal he kept as the basis.

What he described is, by any measure, horrible. The Confederates, like the Union, had no experience managing prison camps. By 1864, the Confederates were already being stretched thin with food and medical supplies for their own armies, and Union prisoners were not high on the priority list. Both the food supply and the medical resources at Andersonville were bad, and it wasn’t long before prisoners began to die.

Exacerbating the already dire situation were the prisoners who formed gangs, robbing and terrorizing other prisoners for food, clothing, and any objects of value. As Ransom continually mentions, it was no surprise that escape and hope for prisoner exchanges were always on prisoners’ minds.

He describes how a prison economy developed, with various prisoners provided services like letter writing to others. But it was an economy in constant upheaval as the death count rose. He noted that some prisoners became mad.

No matter how sick prisoners became, they all wanted to avoid the prison hospital, because no one survived it. Ransom himself became so sick that, he said, he wanted to die. He was kept alive by a fellow prisoner, who happened to be a full-blooded Comanche Indian. Eventually, he and other prisoners were transferred to a hospital in Savannah, where he did receive decent medical care.

Contrary to his fellow prisoner James Madison Page, he had nothing but condemnation for Captain Henry Wirz, the camp commandant who would be hanged after the war ended. He also understood that prisoner exchanges had stopped, because Union Secretary of War Edwin Stanton opposed exchanging Southern prisoners which would likely replenish Confederate armies.

By any definition, Andersonville deserves its reputation. The scenes Ransom describes in his Andersonville Diary are not unlike the scenes of the Holocaust camps in Europe during World Wat II. Some prisoners may have fared better than others, but the death rate and prison conditions speak directly to what can only be called a horror.

The True Story of Andersonville Prison by James Madison Page.

Top photograph: A view of Andersonville.

“Shiloh” by Shelby Foote

November 22, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Shelby Foote (1916-2005) was a journalist, writer, and historian best known for his three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, published between 1958 and 1974. His writings about the war and the South generally tilted in the direction of the Lost Cause, which means he’s as far out of favor with historians today as he can be. And yet his scholarship and depth of research were impressive.

Foote also wrote six novels, one of which was entitled Shiloh, published in 1952. As the title indicates, it was about the Battle of Shiloh, fought April 6-7, 1862, in southern Tennessee very close to the Mississippi border. It was something of a seesaw battle, in that the Confederates under Albert Sidney Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard clearly won the first day, only to see their victory turned into defeat the second day by the Union forces under Ulysses Grant and Don Carlos Buell. There were some 24,000 casualties, the total of both sides, and Shiloh has the dubious distinction of being one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

The name “Shiloh” came from Shiloh Church located near Pittsburgh Landing on the Tennessee River (the battle is also sometimes called the Battle of Pittsburgh Landing). “Shiloh,” interestingly enough, means “peace.”

Foote’s novel is less of a traditional novel and more like seven connected short stories, each with a different narrator. The story moves back and forth between Confederate and Union perspectives. It’s told by a lieutenant and aide-de-camp to General Johnston; a captain in the 53^rd Ohio; a private and rifleman in the 6^th Mississippi; a private and cannoneer for the 1^st Minnesota; a scout in Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry; a squad with the 23^rd Indiana; and then Johnston’s aide-de-camp again, listed as “unattached” because Johnston has been killed in battle.

These men, representing both sides, take the reader through the battle and its different aspects. Palmer Metcalfe, the aide-de-camp who provides the beginning and the ending entries, gives a more strategic, step-by-step description. In fact, the first chapter reads more like history than it does a novel. But we see the attacks, the movements, the deaths, the prisoners taken, and ultimately the general carnage that produced such a high casualty rate.

In Foote’s hands, it’s the battle itself that’s the main character and the main story. It’s less about the men who fought it and more about the inevitable turnings of a great wheel of death and destruction.

The Union dead were buried in individual graves; the Confederate dead were buried in several mass, and unmarked, graves. It was here that a tradition started sometime later. Confederate mothers and wives placed flowers on their sones’ and husbands’ graves. Seeing the bare Union graves, they placed flowers on those as well. When Northern mothers and wives heard the story, the reciprocated in likewise fashion. Some good and some understanding did come from that terrible conflict.

Related:

Battle at Shiloh: The Devil’s Own Two Days – Wide Awake Films.

Top illustration: Battle of Shiloh by Thure De Thulstrup for Harper’s Magazine, via Wikimedia Commons.

“Hospital Sketches” by Louisa May Alcott

November 8, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In 1862, Louisa May Alcott decided she would do her duty for the Union effort on the Civil War and volunteered to become a nurse. She eventually found herself at an army hospital in Georgetown, part of Washington, D.C. She wrote letters to her family in Massachusetts, describing her experiences. And eventually, the letters became the basis for Hospital Sketches, published in 1863.

You would expect an account of Civil War hospital experiences to be extremely serious. And for the most part, Hospital Sketches is. But it is also laugh-out-loud funny, especially in the early chapters.

Alcott turned her experiences into a fictional account. While Massachusetts is the same starting place and Washington, D.C. the destination, the account of traveling from one to the other is close to hysterical. But nothing will dampen the enthusiasm of our intrepid heroine, Nurse Tribulation Periwinkle (Alcott might have been reading too much Charles Dickens to come up with a name like that). Known affectionately to her family as Trib, she will conquer railroads, shipping lines, army bureaucracy, and hospital assignment changes as calmly as the most dedicated Stoic. Well, sort of.

An example is the sailing part of the journey. It is a brand-new ship. Nurse Periwinkle, having two close drowning calls as a child, is convinced that the ship will inevitably pick her journey as the occasion to sink. Sharing a large sleeping room with several other women, and realizing there are no life preservers, she determines that one of the ladies has the best chance for floating on the open sea, and her plan is to latch on to her when the boat sinks. The poor woman doesn’t understand why Nurse Periwinkle becomes so attached to her.

The account of the journey to Washington is filled with anecdotes like that. Once our heroine arrives, however, she will do her duty for her country. It takes her a while to get used to the sights and smells of a Civil War hospital, not to mention the needed washing of the patients. But here the story takes a serious turn, because Nurse Periwinkle will face men dismembered, disfigured, and dying.

Alcott (1832-1888) is best known for her novels and short stories. Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys are American classics. She grew up associating with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was a well-known adherent of Transcendentalism. She was an abolitionist and a feminist. She also wrote numerous gothic thrillers under a pen name.

Hospital Sketches is funny, sad, and poignant. Alcott had more latitude in adapting her letters into a fictional account rather than a non-fiction memoir, but the work still provides insights into the hospital experiences of doctors, nurses, and patients in the Civil War years.

Top photograph: A Civil War nurse, about 1864.

“Belligerent Muse” by Stephen Cushman

November 1, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” One hundred and fifty-eight years after the last battle and the final surrender, it seems we’re still living with the effects of and trying to understand the American Civil War.

Poet and English professor Stephen Cushman has been fascinated with the Civil War since childhood. He understands that any historical event, like a war, is understood generations later through the writings of those who lived it and then those who wrote about it. The subtitle of his 2014 book explains what he was about when he wrote it – Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Out Understanding of the Civil War.

The ”belligerent muse” in this case is war. Cushman points out that “war destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates.” The Civil War brought destruction, especially in the southern states, but it continues to be the source of an enormous outpouring of memoirs, reports, journals, historical texts, biographies, and fiction. In this book, Cushman says that we should not simply see these writings as “transparent windows opening into the past, but also as literary engagements with the momentous events of the war itself. In other words, they were writing to understand themselves the events they were living through.

He uses five writers, all connected to the Union side, to explore. And he uses some of their specific texts to examine as opposed to their writings as a whole. The five are Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William T. Sherman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

For Lincoln, Cushman examines the account of his meeting with Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Gettysburg address, and the Second Inaugural Speech. For Whitman, it’s his Memoranda During the War. He tackles Sherman’s Memoirs of General William T. Sherman. Bierce, famous for his short stories, wrote about the 1863 Battle of Chickamauga, which he fought in as a soldier, and he wrote about it in articles, fiction, and letters. Chamberlain, a Union brigadier general who became something if a Civil War legend in his own lifetime, wrote a memoir that he often revised about the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox.

If you only have a general knowledge of the Civil War and its major personalities (count me in that number), Belligerent Muse contains some surprises. Ambrose Bierce fought in some of the war’s most horrific battles (like Shiloh and Chickamauga), and he kept writing about his experiences throughout his life, almost in an effort to make sense of what he went through. And he never quite succeeded. Sherman described the war almost like a stage play, not entirely unexpected from a man who loved the theater and was perhaps a frustrated actor. Through about four revisions of his memoirs over the year, Chamberlain became more and more specific about what happened at Appomattox, and that included enlarging (or fully acknowledging) his own role. Whitman’s concrern with slavery was less about its brutality or treatment of human beings and more about how slavery competed against the working class.

In addition to his own poetry and historical writing, Cushman serves as general editor of the fourth edition of Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. He’s served as co-editor of Civil War Witnesses and Their Books: New Perspectives on Iconic Works and Civil War Writing 1866-1989. He’s also published numerous articles on both poetry and the Civil War. He received a B.A. degree from Cornell, his M.A. and D. Phil. Degrees from Yale, and a Ph.D. from Yale.

Belligerent Muse benefits from Cushman’s extensive factual knowledge about the war and its battles, a historical grasp that you would expect from a history professor other than an English professor. It’s that singular perspective he brings to the writings of these five major players, and he delivers a fascinating and instructive account.

Bloody Promenade by Stephen Cushman.

Top illustration: The Battle of Chickamauga (1863) depicted in a painting by James Walker about 1870.

“Lee’s Miserables” by J. Tracy Power

October 25, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

As the Civil War dragged on, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, like Lee himself, came to symbolize the South’s hopes and dreams. Ultimately, Lee and his army symbolized the Confederacy itself, which partially explains why so many want Confederate monuments removed.

The soldiers in that army were fiercely loyal to their commander, but they also referred to themselves as “Lee’s Miserables.” Army conditions continued to deteriorate in the last year of the war, with growing shortages of food rations, medicine, uniforms, and more. A constantly hungry army will not fight as well as one that has at least minimum sustenance. And food was a signal factor in the rising numbers of desertions.

In 1998, J. Tracy Power published Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox. It may be almost 25 years old, but the work is still up-to-date, and it is so largely because Power told a very different kind of story that most Civil War histories up to that point.

For many decades after the conflict, books focused on battles, military strategy, generals and leading political figures, and military memoirs. It wasn’t until the 1980s that many historians began paying attention to the daily life of soldiers in the war. And that included Power. He examined thousands of letters, memoirs, newspaper articles, and other sources to create a picture of how the soldiers in Lee’s Army fared during the war’s last year, how they experienced various battles, and what drove an increasing number to desert.

And, yes, it was the soldiers who called themselves “Lee’s Miserables,” a title immediately suggests Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, first published in 1862.

Power organizes his account by the battles, beginning with the Wilderness and Spotsylvania in May, 1864. That’s followed by Cold Harbor, Shenandoah Valley, the siege of Petersburg (with the famous explosion created by Union miners), the Richmond front, a number of smaller battles, and finally Appomattox. He allows the soldiers to describe their experiences, how they understood battle outcomes, and the growing toll of shortages.

When Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865, it was the soldiers themselves who experienced the first and most immediate psychological blow. They had been considered, and likely considered themselves, the last best hope for the Confederacy, and now it was all at an end.

Power is an associate professor of history at Newberry College in Columbia, South Carolina, and director of the Newberry College Archives. He received his B.A. degree from Emory University and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of South Carolina. He taught history at several colleges and served as a historian in the State Historic Preservation Office of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. He’s a past president of the South Carolina Historical Association and has received a number of awards for his academic teaching and his publications. In addition to Lee’s Miserables, he’s also published Stonewall Jackson: Hero of the Confederacy and served as co-editor of The Leverett Letters: Correspondence of a South Carolina Family 1851-1868. He’s lectured and written widely on the Civil War and South Carolina’s history from the American Revolution to the Civil Rights Movement.

Lee’s Miserables is history from the ground up. The men who were the soldiers in the Civil War’s most famous army tell their story and their stories of victory, defeat, daily life, and eventually surrender.

Top photograph: Three members of the 4^th Georgia Infantry Regiment in the Army of Northern Virginia: Capt. Eugene Hawkins, Col. William Willis, and Capt. Howard Tinsley.

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