Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Reviews

“The Stolen Train” by Robert Ashley

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It didn’t change the course of world history, or even the Civil War. It didn’t even end in success. But the Andrews Raid, sometimes called the Great Locomotive Chase, was certainly notable in its daring and how it almost succeeded.

In 1862, with the blessing of Union military commanders, recruited 20 soldiers. Their mission: capture a Confederate locomotive called The General not far from Atlanta and take it all the way to safety behind Union lines in Tennessee. Along the way, they would tear up track, burn bridges, and do whatever they could to disrupt the Western & Atlantic Railroad Line from Atlanta to Chattanooga. That line was a key supply line for Confederate armies in Tennessee.

It almost worked. Chased by Confederate soldiers upon a train pulled by The Texas locomotive, the raiders made it to within 20 miles of Chattanooga when they had to abandon the locomotive and scatter. Some were caught and imprisoned. Eventually, the survivors were the first to receive the newly created Medal of Honor. 

In 1953, author and historian Robert Ashley published The Stolen Train, a fictional account of the raid. Most of the characters were based on real persons, including the raid’s leader, James Andrews, and the train engineers Andrews had recruited. The primary fictional character was a young, 15-year-old soldier named Johnnie Adams, who has two jobs, lookout atop the train and scrambling up telegraph poles to cut wires.

That a 15-year-old boy is the main character explains who the audience is – squarely aimed at boys in the 10-13 age bracket. I was 10 when I first read it, and even though I thought of myself as a loyal Southerner, I was thrilled by the story. And it is a thrilling story.

Lest you think a 15-year-old would have been too young to enlist, read Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances Clark and Rebecca Jo Plant. They estimate that up to 10 percent of both the Union and Confederate armies were comprised of boys aged 15 and younger. Ashley’s book for boys is more factual than it might appear.

James Andrews, who led the raid

A considerable number of my classmates read The Stolen Train; it was offered by Scholastic Book Service and widely distributed across the country. Rereading it more than half a century later, it’s still a thrilling and riveting read. Despite its ultimate failure, the Andrews Raid made Southern military and railroad authorities look foolish at best and incompetent at worst. But in their defense, who would have expected a raid to begin deep with the Confederacy itself?

The paperback copy I have is from a fifth printing in 1971, with a cover price of 75 cents. I believe my copy in 1961 cost 50 cents. An Amazon Kindle edition was published in 2020 and lists for $1.99, while hardcover and paperback editions were published in 2012 and a mass market paperback edition in 1997.

It’s a good story, and especially for boys. It’s good to see that it’s available.

Top photograph: The General, on display a few hundred yards from where it was stolen in 1862, at the Southern Museum of the Civil War & Locomotive History, Kennesaw, Georgia.

“The Battle of Franklin” by A.S. Peterson

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I’ve been reading fictional treatments of the Civil War lately: Shelby Foote’s Novel Shiloh; Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem John Brown’s Body; Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage; and Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott. I’ve tried to get into E.L. Doctorow’s novel The March, which should be a slam dunk given the subject is Sherman’s march through Georgia, but I’ve started and stopped three times. I’ll give it another go and either succeed or admit defeat. 

The Battle of Franklin: A Tale of a House Divided is a stage play script by A.S. Peterson. With songs (even though it’s not a musical) Patrick Thomas, the play was commissioned by Studio Tenn and produced in 2016. It was a challenge rather admirably met; depicting a battle on the theatrical stage is a difficult feat to pull off, but Peterson does it.

The Battle of Franklin was fought on Nov. 30, 1864, a few miles south of Nashville. The battlefield was the Carter House plantation. A Confederate army under John Bell Hood aimed to take Nashville (occupied by a much smaller army). If they could succeed, they’d cut supply lines to General Sherman’s army in Georgia. 

Peterson tells the battle’s story through members of the Carter family: the patriarch Fountain Carter; his son Tod Carter; his daughter Mary Alice McPhail; German immigrants Albert and Retha Lotz: Henry Carter, a slave and Tod’s friend from boyhood; and Henry’s wife Callie Carter. Non-family roles belong to a Union general and a few soldiers. Through these characters, the playwright threads the story of the war, of slavery, of immigration, of friendship, and of the patriarch’s sense of deep betrayal, first by his son enlisting and second by his slave running away to join the Union army. 

A.S. Peterson

The intensity and ferociousness of the real battle implies that there will be considerable death and destruction in the fictional one. (The actual battle, with a total of 63,000 troops engaged, resulted in almost 8,600 deaths.) One knows from the beginning that the narrator, son Tod (referred to as Mint Julep) is a ghost, but the deaths won’t stop there. What unfolds is a story in which both sides of the conflict, and the roles of master and slave, are shown fairly and true to the historical record.

Peterson is an author, playwright, editor, and speaker. His books include The Fiddler series, Wingfeather Tales, The Timely Arrival of Barnabas Bead, The Oracle of Philadelphia, In the Year of Jubilation, and The Molehill. His plays include the musical Lindenfair, The Battle of Franklin, Frankenstein, and The Hiding Place. He lives in Nashville, where he’s the executive director of The Rabbit Room and Managing Editor of Rabbit Room Press.

The Battle of Franklin is, as its subtitle implies, the story of a country and a house divided. The country, and the house, wouldn’t last in that divided state, and considerable death, destruction, and personal pain was the inevitable price of resolution.

Top illustration: A depiction of the Battle of Franklin, Nov. 30, 1864.

“The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephen Crane

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If I have one vivid memory of high school junior English class, it would be the classic coming-of-age assignment of The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. In the spring, anyone could spot a sophomore, because inevitably each and every one of us was carrying our paperback edition of the classic novel about the Civil War. It was assigned at the same time we were studying the Civil War in American history. 

Crane published the novel in 1895, two years after he’d published the book that put him on the American literary map – Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the story of a prostitute. Crane belonged to the Naturalist, Realist, Symbolist, or Impressionist School, depending upon which critic you ask. The story of a prostitute had not been done before, at least not in a way that made Maggie something of a heroine. 

But it was The Red Badge of Courage that turned Crane into an international literary star. The novel tells the story of Henry Fleming, who lives with his mother, who enlists as a private in the Union army. His mother is deadest against him enlisting, and he does one day on his own and then tells her what he’s done.

We follow Fleming in his new army life. Crane depicts the adulation of the townspeople for his patriotism, how much of army life was characterized by waiting, rumors, and boredom, and Fleming’s fear of facing his first battle and behaving as a coward. In his first military engagement, he performs well, and the enemy is sent running in retreat. But the next day, Fleming and his squad face a renewed attack, and this time it’s Fleming and his cohorts who are running in retreat. He finds himself in dense woods, and in of the most memorable scenes in the novel, he stumbles upon the body of a soldier who died in a battle in the same place.

Still in retreat, he learns that the Union side has prevailed and won the battle. He becomes separated from his regiment, and he’s soon hearing the stories from others. The reader sees how courage and cowardice can exist in the same person at the same time. We learn about the universal complaint of all soldiers in every war – the incompetence of commanding officers. And we see that battles and a war are often won less by brilliant military strategy and tactics and more by who can hold out the longest.

Stephen Crane

What Henry Fleming experienced was life in the army during wartime, and it was (and remains) a far cry from the colorful accounts and government propaganda common to all wars. 

In addition to the first two novels, Crane (1871-1900) also published a poetry collection and another novel, based on his experience as a war correspondent during the Spanish-American War. He published several highly regarded short stories, including “The Open Boat” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” With no actual personal war experience, he said that he drew inspiration for The Red Badge of Courage from football games. His short but eventful life ended when he died in England from tuberculosis. 

The Red Badge of Courage is a short, intense, and essentially plotless story. It explores the psychology of solders and war, long before the subject became a popular war. It likely influenced every novel about war written after it. And it explored through fiction, the experience of the Civil War, still the deadliest war ever engaged in by America. 

Top photograph: An illustration of the First Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861, showing the Connecticut troops standing firm as the battle turns against them.

“Shiloh” by Shelby Foote

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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 53rd Ohio; a private and rifleman in the 6th Mississippi; a private and cannoneer for the 1st Minnesota; a scout in Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry; a squad with the 23rd Indiana; and then Johnston’s aide-de-camp again, listed as “unattached” because Johnston has been killed in battle. 

Shelby Foote

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.

“Kayaking with Lambs” by Brian Miller

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I grew up in a rather stereotyped suburb of New Orleans. Except for the last names, which reflected the post-World War II migration out from the city center, it could have been a suburb in Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, or any other American city. Suburban kids learned early that food came from grocery stores and supermarkets. An uncle had a small farm across Lake Pontchartrain, and we visited a time or two. There’s even a picture of five-year-old me on a horse to prove it.

Decades later, I found myself working for a company in the agriculture business. I had one the best jobs imaginable – I gave money away. For years I traveled back and forth across the country, funding programs for wheat growers, corn growers, soybean producers, farm youth, farm broadcasters, and more. I’d visit farms, tour grower associations, and visit research centers. And I’d attend their conventions – in Nashville, Des Moines, Reno, Denver, San Diego, Orlando, Phoenix, and more. Once I was even forced to spend a week – on business – in Honolulu.

I was a latecomer to agriculture and farming, but once I was in it, I learned that farming is something for life. Even when you retire from it, you still pay attention.

Brian Miller came to agriculture considerably earlier. I found his blog, A South Roane Agrarian, through a site called Front Porch Republic. Miller posts weekly about weather, raising cattle, sheep, and pigs, weather, farm life, neighbors, weather, crops, life in rural East Tennessee, family (he’s a southwest Louisiana boy), weather, and more. Oh, did I mention weather? (No one in the planet is more concerned about weather than a farmer. That’s true for every culture, climate, and continent.)

To continue reading, please see my post today at Faith, Fiction, Friends.

“Belligerent Muse” by Stephen Cushman

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“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.

Stephen Cushman

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.

Related:

Poets and Poems: Stephen Cushman and Keep the Feast.

Bloody Promenade by Stephen Cushman. 

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