Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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“Irish American Civil War Songs” by Catherine Bateson

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My thoughts, lately, have been turning toward the green. Not environmental green, but Irish green.

A couple of years ago, my brother did one of those “Spit in a tube and mail it in” DNA tests. We’d always understood our heritage to be (in this order) English, Irish, French, and German. The results mostly corroborated that, except in the order: Irish (County Cork, Irish, in fact) led the blood pack, with 38 percent of our DNA. English (Midlands) was in second place at about 18 percent, followed by English (London) at about 10 percent. French (Alsace Lorraine) was there, to be sure, and so was German (Saxon). We even had a surprising 7 percent Scandinavian, which I suspect went back to the Vikings conquering England and Ireland. 

The Irish, as it turns out came from our father’s side of the family, through both of his parents. On his father’s side, it likely came sometime in the 18th and early 19th centuries, on his mother’s, mostly the 19th century.

The Irish had been emigrating to North America for a considerable period of time, likely as long as European emigration has existed. But it was in the 1840s that Irish emigration became a flood to America, following the Potato Famine. By the time of the Civil War, Irish immigrants accounted for 1.5 million of the total U.S. population (slave and free) of 31.5 million. The U.S. population had increased 35 percent from 1850 to 1860, and a considerable portion of that increase was due to immigration.

Some 200,000 Irishmen / Irish Americans fought in the Civil War. Most fought on the Union side, but about 20,000 signed on as Confederate soldiers. They brought with them their history, their political leanings, and their experiences with the famine and immigration. And they brought their songs.

Catherine Bateson, a lecturer in American history at the University of Kent in England, has documented the importance of Irish music, ballads, and songs in Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood. I knew that music was important for both sides during the Civil War; it was used for marching, ceremonial activities, rest periods, and even for propaganda purposes with both soldiers and civilians. Thousands of songs and hymns were written and sung during the war years.

As Bateson makes clear, the Irish brought with them their longstanding love of ballads and music. They told stories with their songs and ballads, tales of victories and defeats. They expressed their political leanings (and desire for independence from Britain). And their music made its way into general overall American music, including to provide the music (and some of the lyrics) for “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” the Confederate anthem, and “The Fighting 69th,” the song of the famed Irish brigade from New York that provided the basis for so many other songs then and afterward.

Catherine Bateson

Bateson describes the background of Irish music and songs in mid-19thcentury America; how Irish American Civil War songs were produced; the ballads of the battlefield; how lyrics reinforced Irish cultural identity and Irish nationalism; how the songs and ballads expressed wartime politics; and how their music provided Irish Americans with identity and expressions of loyalty. Irish American music celebrated their military leaders, like Thomas Francis Meagher and Michael Corcoran, and their music provided solace after devastating defeats like the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. 

Bateson received her undergraduate degree in history from University College London and spent a year abroad studying at the University of Pennsylvania. She received an M.A. degree in American Studies from King’s College, London and her Ph.D. in history from the University of Edinburgh. She’s also an associate editor in the Irish in the American Civil War project and a former vice-chair of the Scottish Association for the Study of America. 

Irish American Civil War Songs provides a detailed study of some of the important music associated with the Civil War. It also opens a window into what some 200,000 soldiers sang during the war, and how their music provided very specific meanings. 

Top photograph: Soldiers of the Fighting 69th (Irish) Brigade. Michael Corcoran is standing at left, his hand on the gun carriage wheel. Thomas Francis Meagher is standing behind the gun. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

William’s Faulkner’s Civil War

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If there is one writer who cast the largest shadow upon southern U.S. literature in the 20th century, it’s William Faulkner. He also cast one of the largest shadows over all American literature in the 20th century. At my university, few escaped the required courses in American literature without reading the short stories “Barn Burning” and/or “The Bear.” I’d read “Barn Burning in high school, but, taking English rather than American literature in college, I didn’t read Faulkner until years later. It was Flannery O’Connor who led me to Faulkner, and then I read nearly everything he wrote.

Michael Gorra has studied and taught Faulkner, Faulkner’s works, and literature for more than 40 years. The Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, he’s also served as editor of the Norton Critical Editions of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. The man knows his Faulkner.

William Faulkner as a young man

And to know Faulkner, you have to know the Civil War. The war, its aftermath, the “Lost Cause,” and the memory of the war – even by those who didn’t experience it – is a major theme, perhaps the major theme, in the history and literature of the South. Gorra knows his Civil War, too, and he’s a Connecticut-born Yankee who teaches at a Yankee university in Massachusetts.

Gorra’s The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War is a remarkable work of literary criticism. It’s about the themes of the war in Faulkner’s writings, but to understand those themes, you have to grasp the story of the war and its significant details. Gorra does that, but he does more. He’s read the letters and memoirs of people who fought and lived the war. He’s studied the major battles, especially the ones that play even a small role in Faulkner’s novels and stories. He’s walked the terrain of the war, and he’s studied how the war was fought in Faulkner’s home state of Mississippi. 

All of this permeates Faulkner’s novels and short stories. Sometimes it’s an overt influence; sometimes, it’s very subtle. Reading Faulkner years after university might have been the best thing that happened to me in understanding his works, because I recognized how much he was talking about had permeated my own family.

Michael Gorra

Literary criticism is often tedious and difficult. Gorra’s work on Faulkner here is anything but that. His writing is accessible, and he tells Civil War stories that amplify and expand upon what Faulkner did. He makes the writer understandable in a way few critics can. And he doesn’t shy away from the controversial aspects of Faulkner’s works, and there are plenty of controversial aspects.

Gorra’s published works include Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of An American Masterpiece (2012), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography; The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany (2004); After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (1997); and The English Novel at Mid-Century (1990). He’s also served as editor for volumes of stories by Joseph Conrad and Henry James for Penguin.  His awards and recognitions include a Guggenheim fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, including a Public Scholar Award, and a National Book Critics Circle award for his work as a reviewer.

The Saddest Words tells a wonderful story of how one of the most important American writers used family history, family stories, and historical events to create what became some of the most significant literary works of the 20thcentury. The Civil War sits at the center of it all, much like it continues to sit at the center of American life.

“Hymns of the Republic” by S.C. Gwynne

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During the last year of the Civil War, roughly April 1864-April 1865, everything changed. And “everything” includes more than the collapse of the Confederacy and the surrenders of the Confederate armies. At the beginning of that year, the eventual outcome was not a foregone conclusion. How the waging of the war itself changed made the outcome inevitable.

Popular historian, author, and journalists S.C. Gwynne explains what changed in Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War. This is popular history at its best, with an account filled with anecdotes, written in a broad sweep og events, and written so well that the book sweeps the reader up and places him right in the middle of the narrative.

Gwynne doesn’t attempt a day-by-day diary of the last year. Instead, he’s selected key events and personalities, and then he elaborates upon his subjects. We read about Ulysses S. Grant’s arrival in Washington to receive his commission as head of the Union armies – and his hasty departure. We stand with Robert E. Lee as he watches the arrival of the Union armies across the Rapidan River. We experience the Battle of the Wilderness in all its horror. We read about why shovels were so important, and how Clara Barton fundamentally changed battlefield medicine forever. We ride with Confederate Commander John Mosby and his Rangers, borderline terrorists who operated as comfortably behind Union lines as in front of them. 

The central characters of the book are Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Neither Union general would have been marked to become military success stories, and Gwynne explains how they did it. 

Grant changed how the war was fought, adopting a “keep pounding them and throwing men at them until they relent” approach. It eventually worked, but the cost in human life and suffering – on the Union side as much or more than the Confederate – was staggering. 

S. C. Gwynne

Sherman was one of the first more modern generals who advocated total war. It wasn’t enough to defeat an army; you had to destroy that army’s ability to function, and that meant destroying the crops that fed the army, the cotton that helped pay for its weapons, and the civilian morale that kept up support for the army. While his march across Georgia was vilified as a heinous crime by Southerners, it wasn’t as bad as they made it out to be, and least in most places. What did live up to the vilification was the looting and destruction by Sherman’s army of Columbia, South Carolina’s capital.

On both sides, and it was likely more marked on the Union side, the last year of the war became a war of revenge and retribution, paving the way for Radical Reconstruction, especially after President Lincoln’s assassination.

Gwynne is the author of Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, Rebel Yell; The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, and The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football. His journalism work has been published in Time, Texas Monthly, The New York Times, Harper’s, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Hymns of the Republic is a stirring, marvelous work, explaining how a war that had already cost so much became even more vicious, more ruthless, and more punitive.

Top illustration: The burning of Columbia, South Carolina, on Feb. 17, 1865, as depicted in Harper’s Weekly.

A Year of Reading the Civil War

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For a few years before 2022, I’d been occasionally reading about the American Civil War. It’s something I grew up with; my grandparents were all born after it was over, but their parents lived through it. Tw sets of great grandparents lived through the Union occupation of New Orleans; one set lived in an unoccupied part of Louisiana; and one set survived the war as parts of Mississippi were ravaged by war (and often repeatedly). 

This last group was the Youngs. Three sons and a son-in-law all enlisted in the Confederate army. One, the youngest, was too young to enlist when the war began but somehow signed up as a messenger boy. He was the only one to survive, and he was my great-grandfather Samuel. Not long after the war, his father died, and Samuel became the family patriarch at the ripe old age of 23 or 24. Samuel lived until 1920; my father was four years old when his grandfather died. 

This year, I began reading about the war in earnest. Except for the Battle of Vicksburg, I had not known what Mississippi experienced during the war. The Young family, with my aging great-great grandfather with several daughters and daughters-in-law, lasted out the war in Brookhaven, Mississippi. I had to search hard to find out what, if anything, had happened in Brookhaven. The town was visited twice by Union troops, both times in 1863. First was Grierson’s Raid in April, which became the basis for the 1959 movie The Horse Soldiers with John Wayne. The second time was in July, during the siege of Jackson by Generals Grant and Sherman. A small contingent of Union troops made its way some 70 miles south of Jackson to Brookhaven, burning some mills, tearing up railroad track, and talking 200 prisoners at the conscript camp for the Confederate army there. 

Few family stories have survived over the succeeding 160 years, and only a few about my great-grandfather the messenger boy. I’ve turned to books, articles, and research papers to find out at least some small idea of what my ancestors experienced. I’ve been left amazed.

Here are some of the best books I’ve read this year. 

The Real Horse Soldiers; Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid Through Mississippi by Timothy Smith. Smith corrects the misinformation contained in Grierson’s Raid by Dee Brown, published in 1953 and which provided the basis for the John Wayne movie. 

The Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army After Appomattox by Caroline Janney is an excellent history, making the case for the unfinished business becoming the mythology of the post-war South.

Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina by Ernest Dollar Jr. I blogged twice on this book; once for the review and once explaining how it was a book that wouldn’t let go. What we now call post-traumatic stress disorder was alive and well in the Civil War and particularly at its end. 

The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-6, 1864 by Gordon Rhea. Published in 1994, this is the classic history of one of the most horrific battles of the Civil War (1994).

Diary of a Confederate Tarheel Soldier by Louis Leon. Published in 1913, this war memoir was written not only by a Confederate veteran but also one who was Jewish – and his parents in New York City sent him care packages when he was taken as a prisoner of war.

The Confederate Surrender at Greensboro by Robert Dunkerly. This is one of many concise Civil War histories published by Emerging Civil War. Dunkerly explains the surrender of General William Johnston to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, and how Sherman’s terms were considered far too lenient by official Washington.

The Civil War in Mississippi: Major Campaigns and Battles by Michael Ballard. I never realized how much of the state was was fought over by the opposing armies. It was far more than only Vicksburg.

Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front by Timothy Smith. Smith (who wrote the account of Grierson’s Raid noted above) also produced a book on what life was like for civilians in Mississippi – and it was anything but easy.

The Limits of Loyalty: Ordinary People in Civil War Mississippi by Jarret Ruminski. Ruminski covers some of the same ground as Timothy Smith above, but with a different focus. He looks at what happened to civilian loyalities over the course  of the war.

The Battle of Jackson, Mississippi by Chris Mackowski and The Civil War Siege of Jackson, Mississippi by Jim Woodrick. Mackowski gives considerable details on the battle, while Woodrick takes a broader look (and includes what happened in outlying areas like Brookhaven). 

Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi by William Harris (1967) and Reconstruction Mississippi by James Wilford Garner (1901). Harris looks at the program for Reconstruction approved by President Andrew Johnson (and eventually set aside by Congress; the Radical Republicans wanted vengeance and punishment, and they got it. The Garner book started life as a Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University; it is filled with data, charts, and graphs and a highly readable interpretation of them.

Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Mississippi in the Civil War by Bobby Roberts and Carl Moneyhon (1993). In the 1990s and early 200s, a series of these photography books were published, covering most of the states in the former Confederacy. Pictures can tell just as good a story as text.

The Army of the Potomac Trilogy by Bruce Catton (originally published 1951-1954; Library of America edition 2022). This is a classic, one that remains a remarkably up-to-date history of the army eventually commanded by Ulysses S. Grant. Two other classic histories I hope to read in 2023 are Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative and Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson.

North Against South: The American Iliad 1848-1877 by Ludwell Johnson (1978). This is decidedly not a classic history. It is, however, a well-research and documented history of the Civil War from the Confederacy’s perspective. 

Top photograph: Camp scene, Union soldiers guarding Confederate prisoners; National Archives. 

“The Civil War Siege of Jackson, Mississippi” by Jim Woodrick

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For most of us, the role of Mississippi in the Civil War revolves around Vicksburg and the months-long siege of that Mississippi River city in 1863 by the army of Ulysses S. Grant. Vicksburg was a critical target for the Union; until it fell, it prevented Union control of the Mississippi River. 

But for Mississippi, the war was far greater a force than only Vicksburg. Northern Mississippi, and cities like Corinth, Holly Springs, and Oxford, experienced the destruction of war before Vicksburg did. From early in the war, the Gulf Coast was effectively controlled by the Union Navy. The state’s citizens experienced increasing degrees of shortages of foodstuffs and basic necessities. 

And then there was Jackson, the state capital.

Jackson was important primarily because of its railroads. Grant’s army, in a pincer movement, occupied Jackson once in 1863 because of those railroads and how they supplied Vicksburg. The rail lines were disrupted first, and then the Union Army turned back on Vicksburg. Once that city was surrendered on July 3, Grant once again turned his eye on Jackson.

What happened next is the subject of The Civil War Siege of Jackson, Mississippi by historian Jim Woodrick. As he notes, much of the siege works and battlefields involving Jackson have long been paved over and developed; there’s precious little left to show exactly where the military action happened. (As many times as I’ve been to Jackson and traveled through it, little did I know of what happened on what is now the area of the Mississippi Medical Center.)

The book is primarily a military history. Woodrick describes how Union forces converged on the capital city, how the Confederate army of Joseph Johnston dug in, the movement of Union forces in nearby towns like Canton, how part of the siege was conducted from the grounds of the State Insane Asylum overlooking the capital, and how and why Johnston determined to abandon the city and move to the east. 

Jim Woodrick

The story includes small, fascinating details, like how the piano at a local home survived the siege and subsequent looting and burning and eventually found a home in the Civil War Museum in New Orleans. And Woodrick describes the side activities, including how a Union troop found its way to Brookhaven, some 75 miles south, wreaking more havoc and capturing some 200 Confederate conscripts at the camp there. (I mention Brookhaven because my ancestors were living there at the time.) He also considers how much damage was actually done to the capital, which for years afterward was referred to as “Chimneyville,” for what was left of so many burned buildings.

A native of Meridian Mississippi, Woodrick was graduated from Millsaps College in Jackson. Since 1997, he has served on the staff of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH), notably as the Civil War sites historian, and is currently the director of the MDAH Historic Preservation Division. 

The Civil War Siege of Jackson, Mississippi is a compact, fact-filled account of how a Confederate state capital experienced the Civil War and eventually fell to Union forces. Woodrick tells a fascinating, concise story. 

Related:

Jim Woodrick discussing the siege of Jackson.

Top photo: A view of the Mississippi state capital after the siege. The capital building survived.

“Reconstruction in Mississippi” by James Wilford Garner

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James Wilford Garner (1871-1938) was born and raised in Pike County, Mississippi, the same county where my paternal great-grandparents were born and raised (during the Reconstruction period, the state legislature split the county into two, with the southern half retaining the name and the north half being renamed Lincoln County). Garner graduated from the Mississippi Agricultural & Mechanical College in 1892 and went on to study at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. 

Garner would become a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Illinois, and he also did extensive teaching work in India. He co-authored a history of the United States with Henry Cabot Lodge, and he published a number of other works on government and political science.

The work he is best known for is his Ph.D. thesis, published in 1901 under the title of Reconstruction in Mississippi. It firmly established him as what was then called the Dunning School, named for Columbia professor William Archibald Dunning. The school of thought generally favored a conservative, more pro-Southern understanding of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. 

The thinking of the Dunning School was influential in universities through World War II, although it was not without its critics, notably historian and civil rights activist W.E. B. DuBois. However, DuBois did consider that, of all the writings associated with the Dunning School, Garner’s Reconstruction in Mississippi was the fairest.

Reading it today, 120 years after it was published, is to see it as a product of its time. Yet Garner did marshal a huge amount of data to support his thesis that Reconstruction, managed by Radical Republicans and backed by the U.S. Army, was largely a disaster for the state of Mississippi. 

The work begins with a summary of secession and the Civil War and the transition from war to reconstruction. It covers presidential reconstruction under Andrew Johnson, followed by congressional reconstruction. The period of congressional reconstruction was particularly marked by rampant theft and corruption in the state government, involving Northerners called carpetbaggers and Southerners know as scalawags who seemed determined to raid the state of as many resources as possible. Garner notes that many of the Union soldiers who had fought in Mississippi returned after the war to live there. (He also notes than roughly one fifth of private property in the state changed ownership during the period.) 

James Wilford Garner

It was a difficult time for many in the state. Not only was Mississippi economically devastated by the war, rail lines had to be rebuilt, the postal service reestablished, social order restored, and a civil government created that could function. Garner also devotes entire chapters to the creation and functioning of the Freedman’s Bureau, the disturbances associated with the Ku Klux Klan, and the creation (or re-creation) of the public school system, which was also plagued by corruption. 

Reconstruction in Mississippi has a definite pro-Southern tilt to its depiction of Reconstruction, but I understand why DuBois considered it relatively fair. Garner is evenhanded in his criticisms, and he does discuss the period broadly and rather inclusively. He doesn’t paint the period of slavery as some happy, pleasant time for all concerned. But it’s his extensive use of data, tables, and charts that is most impressive. 

Top illustration: A Drawing of a Freedman’s School in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1866.