Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Battle of the Wilderness

Three Fictional Encounters in Three Factual Events

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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)

“Bloody Promenade” by Stephen Cushman

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I found Stephen Cushman’s poetry first, and then I discovered he wrote about the Civil War as well.

Cushman is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. He’s known for his seven collections of poetry and two books of literary criticism, Fictions of Form in American Poetry and William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure. 

But when he was a child, he was given a book about the American Civil War. It was The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (1960), with a narrative by noted Civil War historian Bruce Catton. The book became the key that unlocked a lifelong interest in the war, to the point where he’s published three books about it – The Generals’ Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War, and Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle.

Cushman lives about 50 miles from the battle cited in that last work. It happened over two days, May 5 and May 6, in 1864, and it was one of the most horrific battles of a war known for its horrific battles. The Battle of the Wilderness was the first direct confrontation between Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee, and Grant proved he would be relentless even if he lost. Lee had not come upon an opponent like this before, an opponent determined to defeat Lee whatever it took in lives and material. 

Cushman explains that he’s not providing a history of the battle or an analysis of its strategies and tactics. Bloody Promenade doesn’t fit a precise literary genre. It’s not so much a story of the battle as it is a reflection of what that battle meant in the war, in American history, and to himself. I live more like 750 miles from that battle, but it is the one that has come to be something of a metaphor for the war to me. I understand Cushman’s preoccupation with it.

The book is about ancestors and people who engage in re-enactments. It’s about what eyewitnesses reported and how newspapers and magazines covered it. It’s about the battle as described in memoirs of the famous and not-so-famous. It’s about the battle and the war in histories and poetry. And it’s about the terrain itself, that dense thicket of trees, shrubs, tall weeds and scrubland that, given the dry weather, was almost waiting for something to set off a conflagration. Which is what happened.

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: New Perspectives on Iconic Works. He’s also published numerous articles on both poetry and the Civil War. He received a B.A. degree from Cornell, an M.A. and D. Phil. Degrees from Yale, and a Ph.D. from Yale. 

Bloody Promenade fully resonates. It’s not an account of a battle (several other books are available with as much or as little detail as you could want). It’s a book about the meaning of a battle – how it was understood at the time, after decades had passed, and now. It’s a reminder that the past is never really past. 

Related:

Bear in the Wilderness by Donald Waldemer.

A Season of Slaughter by Chris Mackowski and Kristopher White.

Grant vs. Lee, edited by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch.

The Battle of the Wilderness by Gordon Rhea.

Top photograph: What the Wilderness “battlefield” looked like.

“Bear in the Wilderness” by Donald Waldemer

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One of the many features of the Missouri Civil War Museum is the gift shop, which has artifacts, souvenirs, refreshments, t-shirts and jackets, and books. Lots of books. Lots of new and used books all about the Civil War. (I wrote about the museum here.)

I found more than a few things of interest, but I didn’t overdo it. I walked away with an old copy of Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic book-length poem John Brown’s Body, the novel Shiloh by Shelby Foote, and a few others. One, as it turned out, had a strong St. Louis connection.

Donald Waldemer (1925-2021) was about totally St Louis as you can get. He was born here. He received two degrees from Washington University in St. Louis. He worked for Union Electric (now Ameren, the main electric utility) for 34 years.  He and his wife raised a family in Brentwood, a close-in St. Louis suburb, and he’s buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Kirkwood, the suburb where I live.

Waldermer was also an avid student of the Civil War. He published Triumph at the James: The Checkmate of Gen. Robert E. Lee in 1998 and Bear in the Wilderness: The Battle of the Wilderness May 5,6,7 1864 in 2001. It was the book on the Battle of the Wilderness that I found at the Missouri Civil War Museum.

It’s not a battle we heard much about in school, yet, in its own way, it was just as important as Gettysburg or Vicksburg. It was the last battle for which Robert E. Lee went on the offensive. It was the first battle matching lee and Ulysses S. Grant as commanders. And it was the battle in which Grant determined how he was going to defeat the Confederacy – by wearing Lee’s army down, no matter what the cost to the Union side. And the cost here was terrible.

Seven years before Waldemer published his Wilderness book, Gordon Rhea had published The Battle of the Wilderness, which is still considered the definitive account of the battle. Waldemer took a different tack. He used the official letters, orders, and reports and knitted them together with brief contextual information, allowing the official reports to tell the story of the battle.

Donald Waldemer

What results is something lopsided – it’s a story told almost entirely from the Union side. And it was for a very simple reason – there was little to no similar records on the Confederate side. Lee and his generals wrote very little down. It’ also something of a lopsided account because it is a top-down view. If you want to see what Abraham Lincoln, Grant, and Grant’s generals were thinking and planning, this is a solid account. You won’t get much of the perspective of the soldiers doing the actual fighting.

That doesn’t make Bear in the Wilderness unimportant. Waldemer had a gift for context, taking a wide array of texts of all kinds and assembling them in an order that makes sense and helps in understanding how the battle unfolded. If you want to know Grant’s thoughts, fears, strategies, and tactics, and how Lincoln responded with his own, this is an account that’s easy to follow.

Related:

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.

Top photograph: A photograph of the Wilderness, showing the kind of terrain where much of the three-day battle was fought. Photo courtesy of Encyclopedia Virginia.