Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

book review

“Across Five Aprils” by Irene Hunt

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In 1964, author Irene Hunt (1907-2001) published the middle-grade novel Across Five Aprils. It’s the coming-of-age story of nine-year-old Jethro Creighton, the youngest of five brothers and a sister. They live and work with their parents Matt and Emma on a farm in southern Illinois.

This coming-of-age story is set during the Civil War, beginning in 1861. It’s so well done, and such a good story, that it’s no wonder that it was runner-up to the Newberry Medal in 1965 (her second book, Up the Road Slowly, won the medal in 1966). In 212 pages, Hunt manages to tell both the story of the Creighton family and the story of the Civil War itself. 

Told from Jethro’s perspective, we watch what happens when the reports come of the fall of Fort Sumter. The oldest brother has not been heard from in years, having gone to California for the Gold Rush. Two brothers and the cousin who lives with the family join the Union army; Jethro’s favorite brother Bill joins the Confederate army. Jenny’s beau, the schoolteacher Jethro adores, eventually throws his lot in with the Union. 

While it is the story of the war and how his brothers fare, Across Five Aprils is also Jethro’s story and what happens back home. When Jethro is 10, his father suffers a heart attack, and the boy suddenly finds himself of being head of the family. Through Jethro’s eyes, we see the violence that happens in a region of conflicted loyalties, the impact of the war’s news on the family, and how the war meant unexpected struggles on the home front. 

The characters seem like real people. Hunt had a gift for characterization, and even the minor characters come alive on the page. Hunt based the story on the tales and letters of her own grandfather, who experienced the Civil War much as Jethro does in the novel. She also did extensive research in newspaper reports, government documents, histories, biographies, and memoirs.

Irene Hunt

Hunt, a native of Illinois, taught English and French in Illinois schools and later psychology at the University of South Dakota. She returned to Illinois to become director of language arts at a junior high school. Including Across Five Aprils, she published eight novels between 1864 and 1985, and she won several awards for children’s literature. She died on her 98th birthday in 2001.

After 60 years, Across Five Aprils has stood the test of time. It’s a riveting read as we watch, through a boy’s eyes, as the war unfold. The Creighton family will endure heartbreak and tragedy, fear and violence. But it is the family that endures. 

Top photograph: A farmer and two boys cutting hay in Kentucky during the Civil War.

A Confederate Recipe Book for the Civil War

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It’s well known that the Union blockade of Southern ports during the Civil War reduced imports of luxuries and basic necessities to a virtual trickle. A considerable number of common foodstuffs were soon in short supply, including coffee and salt. Southerners had to develop creative approaches for common foods; for example, chicory became a common substitute for coffee beans (and you can still drink coffee and chicory in New Orleans as well as find it on the interest and specialty food stores). 

In 1863, the only cookbook compiled and published in Confederacy during the Civil War was entitled, aptly enough, The Confederate Receipt Book. The book included more than 100 receipts (or recipes), but recipes adapted for war-time conditions for soldiers and the home front alike. The book also included recipes for homemade ink and other necessities, cures for various ailments for which traditional medicines were not available, and homemade toothpaste (it’s difficult for me to imagine brushing my teeth with charcoal, but the procedure is included).

Food writer Patricia Mitchell unearthed the recipe book and provided an introduction to a contemporary edition. 

You can find instructions for raising bread without yeast and making your own yeast; how to used potatoes for pie crusts; apple pies without the apples; using corn to create fried oysters without the oysters; making tomato catsup; producing your own soap; and making a “Confederate candle.” Several entries in an appendix explain how to use rice flour instead of wheat flour for various breads and bakery items.

Remedies and cures covered instructions for dealing with dysentery (particularly useful in military camps), chills, asthma, croup, scarlet fever, headache and toothache, burns, camp itch, and even warts and corns. The book also provided instructions for preserving meat without salt, curing bacon and bad butter, clarifying molasses, and using acorns to brew coffee.

Do-it-yourself home repairs covered preserving steel pens, cementing home china or glass, purifying water, charcoal tooth powder, sealing wax, preventing rust, and drying herbs. 

Patricia Mitchell

Patricia Mitchell’s in food and food history began when she was a writer for the Community Standard magazine in New Orleans. Back home in Virginia, she and her husband operated a bed-and-breakfast inn, and guests asked her to compile some of her recipes in a book, which she produced as a pamphlet. A museum director asked for copies to sell in his museum shop, and the rest, as they say, is food history. She’s written and compiled more than a hundred titles, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in bookstores, museums, historic sites, and shops. 

We can’t fully know how well received the book was in 1863, but many must have welcomed its instructions and advice. Common foods and household necessities taken for granted before the war had almost disappeared, and the use of substitutes was widespread. The book provides a window on home life and camp life, and how people adapted to shortages. 

Top illustration: The Richmond Bread Riot, April 2, 1863.

“God Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers” by James McIvor

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In 1861, the first year of the Civil War, soldiers on both sides still felt some sense of momentum. Overly optimistic, many believed the war would over by Christmas. As the war stretched into 1862, the initial optimism was giving way to something else – a sense of failure and despair. And that sense affected both sides. 

The South was beginning to feel the bite of the Union blockade of Southern ports. The North was watching a series of what seemed like only Confederate victories on the battlefield. Soldiers were becoming demoralized. It didn’t help the Union’s cause that so many senior officers were “political generals” and appeared sorely lacking in experience and common sense. The sense of failure and isolation was especially acute around Christmas, when soldiers would have ordinarily been home with their families.

Using books, articles, letters (both published and unpublished), archival papers, and diaries, author James McIvor has written God Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers: A True Civil War Christmas Story. He’s provided a snapshot of what the Christmas season was like during the four years of the Civil War. His focus is the soldiers, what they thought, what they experienced, and often why they wanted to be anyplace other than where they were. The book was first published in 2006. 

Sometimes the Christmas season and holiday coincided with battles, and soldiers found themselves marching to battle when they would have preferred to be at home, or at worst sitting around a campfire and enjoying a good meal. More often, Christmas was quiet, leaving too much time to think and reflect, and miss fallen colleagues and the family at home.

He points out that the Civil War changed perceptions of the holiday. The suffering on both sides had been great, and the feelings about Christmas that had been growing for decades before the war became something much stronger with the end of the way. “The Civil War, in fact,” McIvor writes, “made Christmas a truly American holiday in a way it had never entirely been before.”

McIvor is a longtime Civil War enthusiast and freelance writer. He lives in Virginia. 

God, Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers is a poignant narrative, but it avoids sentimentalism. Soldiers who served before and after the Civil War would likely find some of their own story here.

Top illustration: Christmas Eve 1863 by Thomas Nast, the German-born Civil War cartoonist who is credited with creating the image of Santa Claus.

“The Gettysburg Reunion of 1913” by John Hopkins

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In July 1913, some 53,000 Civil War veterans gathered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the famous battle. Almost every veteran was, by this time, an old man, with most in the 70s. The youngest was 61; he’d been an 11-year-old drummer boy in 1863. The oldest was 110; he’d fought when he was 60.

The anniversary event didn’t happen by itself; planning had gone on for years, at least in theory. The commemoration almost didn’t happen because of what was falling through the cracks as the date got closer. But competent people intervened, and the commemoration happened.

In The World Will Never See the Like: The Gettysburg Reunion of 1913, author John Hopkins tells the story in all of its chaos, splendor, and glory. Veterans, mostly Union because those states provided at least some transportation costs, came from all over the country to find old friends and sometimes old enemies, remember, and celebrate a unified country. 

The idea was first raised in 1908 in the Pennsylvania legislature. Five years later, a host of state legislatures and the U.S. Congress had weighed in. Hopkins concisely details the planning, the organization of the event, and what happened during the four days of celebration (including 100+-degree weather and a storm). The program itself may have been the easiest part to create. Organizers had to consider food, housing, medical facilities (a number of the veterans would get ill during the celebration, and some would die), travel arrangements, and sanitary facilities. A huge tent city was erected at the site of the battle, with neighborhoods and streets. Boy Scouts were enlisted to be information and direction guides.

The participants knew they had made history in 1863 and were making history again in 1913. There would indeed never be a celebration like this on American soil. 

Hopkins also discusses the politics. How would attendees and speakers alike describe what had caused the war and led to the battle. The “Lost Cause” idea was likely at its high-water mark in the South, and it had certainly influenced Northern thinking as well. In the end, everyone agreed that the causes were less important than what had resulted – a unified country once again. In particular, the veterans were less interested in discussing and debating the causes of the Civil War, and more interested in remembering, connecting, and finding out what had happened to the men they had fought with and against. (A small group of elderly women, who had been nurses, also attended.)

John Hopkins

Hopkins, a communications and public relations professional, received his degree in political science from Williams College. He’s worked for more than three decades in higher education, nonprofit, and agency settings. For this book, he made extensive use of letters, memoirs, news reports (more than 150 journalists covered the event), and official proceedings. 

The Gettysburg Reunion of 1913 tells a story that is informative, often enlightening, and surprisingly poignant. Certain parts may move you to tears. Most of those present would be gone within a decade, and they laughed, cried, and often drank (a lot) with the men they shared the most formative moment of their lives with. The event itself might have been a defining moment in the passing of the 19th century and the arrival of the 20th.

Top photograph: Veterans arriving in the tent city for the 50th reunion of the battle.

“Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott

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I was in 9th grade, at the time part of the middle school where I grew up. Our English teacher assigned our all-boy class two papers about authors – one English and one American. We were required to read one work by each author for our papers. She had a list of 35 English writers and 35 Americans, one for each person in our class. Our choices, however, were determined alphabetically, which meant whoever was last would get the two no one else wanted. Which meant me.

No one wanted to read a play by William Shakespeare, which meant he would be my English author. And the last American author on the list (remember this was an all-boys class) was Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888).

When my name was called, general laughter erupted. The teacher, with her soft Alabama accent in a roomful of New Orleans boys, was irate. She loved Alcott, she said, and she loved Little Women. And if any of us ever wanted to understand girls, we should read the Alcott novel. I knew what I had better read for my report.

Louisa May Alcott originally published Little Women as two books, Part 1 in 1868 and Part 2 in 1869. The story is based on the lives of Alcott’s sisters, family, and friends. A first read of Part 1 by her publisher found it boring, until he had his two daughters read it. Then he had more girls in the target audience read it. The 2,000-copy first edition sold out almost immediately.

The book has been as popular in Britain as it has in the United States, even though the setting is Civil War Massachusetts (Part 1) and Massachusetts and Europe for Part 2. G.K. Chesterton, when he read it, said it had anticipated the Realism School in literature by about 30 years.

To read it today, you also realize how it anticipated the television mini-series. It’s episodic chapters are almost ideally suited for the small screen (see the 2017 mini-series version developed by Heidi Thomas, she of Call the Midwife). The well-loved work has been adapted countless times for stage, movies, and television. It’s even been adapted as a musical and for anime.

And Little Women is well-loved with good reason. It captures of the lives of the four March sisters living between childhood and adulthood (thus the title, “little women”). The family is living through the Civil War period, with their father serving as a chaplain with the Union army. Each chapter centers on a particular sister – Meg the wise one, Jo the headstrong one with a burning passion to write, Amy the pretty and artistic one, and Beth, the youngest, most frail, and kindest of the girls. In their father’s absence, their mother Marmee presides over the family. 

For all four girls, and the next-door neighbor Theodore (“Laurie”), the story is something of a coming-of-age novel. While the story is set during the Civil War, the war itself rarely intrudes, until in Part 1 Mr. March is taken ill with pneumonia and Mrs. March travels to Washington, D.C. to care for him. Part 2 occurs after the war is over.

Louisa May Alcott

It’s a well-written, engaging story. As you read, you come to like these sisters, and you keep reading o find out what will happen to them and their mother. I have to admit, having seen the 1994 movie version, I can only identify Susan Sarandon as Mrs. March, although Emily Watson did a fine job in the 2017 BBC television series. Those two adaptations stick very closely to the original novels. 

I read the work thinking there would be more about the Civil War than I had remembered from my first reading back in high school. There’s not. The war is a distant and unrelated event in the story. Even Mrs. March rushing to her husband’s bedside is never detailed. 

But it’s still a good story. Alcott wrote well, with passion and with humor. Some of the predicaments that Jo and Amy in particular get into are close to hilarious.

For my ninth-grade papers, I read Julius Caesar and Little Women. My lack of choice ended up standing me in good stead with the teacher, who gave the class a Southern evil eye, daring anyone to laugh, when I read my paper (as we were required to do). I saw a few grins, which quickly disappeared when she turned her attention upon the miscreant. No one laughed.

Top illustration: A drawing of the March house. 

Related:

Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott. 

“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.