Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

book review

“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.

“Hospital Sketches” by Louisa May Alcott

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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. 

Louisa May Alcott

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

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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.

“Lee’s Miserables” by J. Tracy Power

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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.

J. Tracy Power

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

“The Story of Camp Douglas” by David Keller

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One Civil War prison has tended to receive most of the attention from historians, and with some justification. Andersonville in Georgia was a POW camp that housed up to 45,000 Union soldiers, and nearly 13,000 died from disease, overcrowding, or exposure. After the war, its commandant, Austrian-born Captain Henry Wirz, was arrested, charged, tried by a military tribunal, and hanged.

I’d heard of the POW camp in Elmira, New York, which imprisoned Confederates referred to as “Hellmira.” In 2020 Civil War historian Derek Maxfield published Hellmira: The Union’s Most Infamous Civil War Prison Camp—Elmira, NY. Almost 3,000 prisoners died at Elmira. And I’d heard of the prison at Alton, Illinois, which housed up to 1,900 Confederate prisoners at any given time and at which some 1,500 died. If you add the totals for all prisons, more Confederates died in Union prisons than Union soldiers in Confederate prisons. But the numbers can be deceiving; the totals on both sides were likely higher.)

But a prison camp in Chicago, which started life as an army base near the present campus of the University of Chicago, holds the dubious honor of being the Union prison where more Confederates died than any other. Officially, about 4,400 Confederate prisoners died at Camp Douglas, the highest number of deaths of any Union POW camp.  And the number is likely higher because of poor recordkeeping and the destruction of records in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

With its dismantling after the war and development that came later, the prison almost disappeared from popular history. But David Keller (1940-2022), who spent his working career as a banker, had a passion for Camp Douglas. He founded the Camp Douglas Restoration Foundation in 2010, served as a docent at the Chicago History Museum, and was a popular speaker on the prison camp and the Civil War. The foundation has conducted four archaeological excavations of the Camp Douglas site.

Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas; Library of Congress

In 2015, Keller published The Story of Camp Douglas: Chicago’s Forgotten Civil War Prison. The book includes Keller’s extensive studies and investigations, and it sheds considerable light on a long-forgotten story in Civil War and Chicago history.

Camp Douglas, named after Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas (the Douglas family owned land nearby and may have donated some for the army base), opened first as an army base. But by late 1862, prison space was needed for captured Confederate POWs, and the army base soon was accepting prisoners. Overcrowding happened almost immediately, and the site was in a swampy area near Lake Michigan – a disaster waiting to happen for poorly-clothed POWs.

David Keller

Keller provides both details and context. He explains Chicago’s role in the Civil War and how Camp Douglas was created as a reception and training center for Union troops. He then gives a short but fact-filled overview of how prisoners of war had been treated in America up until the time of the Civil War, pointing out that no one had much experience in housing and dealing with thousands of POWs. He details how the camp was selected as a prison and how the problems of prison life were exacerbated by the eventual ending of prisoner paroles and exchanges.

The author draws upon both what official records exist as well as the memoirs of several prisoners. He looks at prisoner health and medical care, deaths, the reasons for the conditions and deaths at the camp, and how Camp Douglas compared to other prison camps on both sides of the war. Keller also includes a chapter on the Conspiracy of 1864, a plot devised by Southern sympathizers to free the POWs.

The Story of Camp Douglas is an important contribution to a little-known chapter of Civil War and American history, as well as to the history of POW camps in the 19th century. It was Keller’s passion to shine a light on a chapter of Chicago and Civil War history that had long been forgotten. 

Related:

The True Story of the Andersonville Prison by James Madison Page.

Top illustration: A drawing of the general layout of Camp Douglas.