Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Civil War

“Decisions of the Vicksburg Campaign” by Larry Peterson

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I’ve completed for reading and research for my Civil War novel, tentatively entitled Brookhaven. It’s been something of a relief to see the conclusion of this phase of the project, and I’ll have more to say about the next phase soon.

The Civil War is something of a publishing mini-industry; new books are coming out all the time. I think we keep examining the war, what left up to it, and what came afterward to try to understand our own times. I can say that much of what I thought I knew has undergone some serious revision.

I’m still following news of new articles and books on the conflict, and one was recently published that I couldn’t resist. Decisions of the Vicksburg Campaign: The Eighteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Operation was written by Larry Peterson and published recently by the University of Tennessee Press. And I couldn’t resist it because it was precisely the operation that framed the Civil War experience of my ancestors. 

They didn’t live in Vicksburg; they lived south of Jackson near the city of Brookhaven. If you travel on Interstate 55 between New Orleans and St. Louis, which I have many, many times, you travel through Brookhaven. 

Vicksburg was the last impediment to Union control of the Mississippi River. New Orleans had fallen in 1862, and Baton Rouge and Memphis not long after. Vicksburg was the blockade point, and it had to be taken. The siege lasted a considerable period, and it involved a number of related operations, including the capture of the state capital at Jackson and what it known as Grierson’s Raid, a cavalry maneuver that started in Tennessee, swept down the state of Mississippi, and end in Baton Rouge. It was designed to confuse and distract the Confederate Army and allow Ulysses Grant to move his troops across the river south of Vicksburg. And it worked rather spectacularly. 

Grierson’s Raid is one of the 18 critical decisions of the Vicksburg campaign. 

With each decision, Peterson explains what the situation was, what the options were, what was decided, and what were the results or impact. The decisions range from the appointment of the military commanders on both sides, failures of command, Grant’s attempted advance through central Mississippi, Union Admiral David Porter’s decision to run the Vicksburg blockade, Grant’s attack on Jackson, the Confederate mismanagement of Vicksburg’s defense, and more. The discussion for each is short and succinct; the main part of the book is only 100 pages.

Admiral Porter’s ships run the blockade.

The appendices are also well worth reading and constitute another 84 pages, including directions for a driving tour you can take of the entire campaign; he Union and Confederate Orders of Battle; and a short discussion about reinforcing Vicksburg. The book also includes notes, a bibliography, and an index.

What I found especially interesting was that Grierson’s Raid almost didn’t happen. The Union officer takseed with the decision initially postponed it because of Confederate activity and because he thought its success was questionable at best. He was eventually overridden, and the raid was authorized, taking place between April 17 and May 2. One stop made by the Union cavalry was Brookhaven, where the rail station was burned and track torn up. 

In my novel, that becomes the event that frames all of what follows.

Peterson retired from United Airlines as a Boeing 757/767 Standards Captain. He’s previously published Confederate Commander: The Remarkable Life of Brigadier General Alfred Jefferson Vaughn Jr and several volumed in the Command Decisions of the American Civil War series. 

Decisions of the Vicksburg Campaign covers an extensive amount of information, and it does so in a highly readable, compact way. You get a full sense of the major decisions, good and bad, that figured in the Union’s ultimate capture of the city. 

Top photograph: Vicksburg during the Union siege, showing the caves where many citizens lived during the bombardment.

Remembering the Journey

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A Brookhaven Short Story

When he looked back on that time, he could see the first days were the easiest, if also the most frightening. And more dangerous days were to follow.

Like hundreds and thousands of others, he walked home from the war, home from defeat and surrender. Glory was long gone, erased in places with names like The Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, Petersburg, and Appomattox.

The road he took began in Virginia. It ended more than 900 miles later in Mississippi, and home. The camaraderie he’d experienced with others walking home disappeared three days into the journey, when he discovered he’d been left behind. Alone, he walked the often-deserted roads, asking the occasional fellow traveler the direction and the next town.

The woods he passed through were often thick, untouched since forever, he thought, dense forests of pine, oak, and elm. When he could, he traveled through trails in the woods that followed the roads. He liked the silence of the trees and undergrowth; he also liked the safety they afforded, unlike the open road.

He also liked the shift from woods to farmers’ fields, most of which were untouched because the men were gone to war. Or gone from the war.

He’d gone about a hundred miles, he reckoned, based on what other travelers told him, when the walk changed to a ride. He’d gotten a feisty stallion and a wagon drawn by two draught horses. But there had been a tradeoff. With the wagon and the horses came a freed slave woman and her two children and a dead planter’s teenaged daughter and her young cousin. He’d probably never understand why he agreed to see them southward, but he had no regrets.

By necessity, homeward progress simultaneously quickened and slowed. The horses made for faster travel; the women and children did not. He’d quickly learned that their needs were always more complicated than his own and required frequent stops. Progress had been further slowed by rain, bandits, and measles.

He’d just turned 15, a war veteran with two years’ experience. His traveling companions made for conversation, but the responsibility for the five lives terrified him. When he felt most afraid, he’d focus on the road. The woman and the girl had no inkling of his fear; they thought him moody and melancholic.

He led them through rain and flood. He protected them from the evil roaming the roads, evil that was all too common, sometimes predators preying on people just like themselves and sometimes desperate people doing desperate things. They had all seen death and destruction, often so bad that even the children stopped talking. 

But he’d seen them all safely home.

He thought he knew the reasons for their success, the reasons they’d survived. He’d trusted the good Lord to watch over them all. And he trusted his determination to do this thing, to see the journey through.

Related:

“Christmas Oranges,” a short story at Cultivating Oaks Press.

“Encounter in the Woods,” a short story.

Top photograph by Lukasz Szmigiel via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Writing a Bibliography – for a Novel

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It’s been two weeks since I read a book about the Civil War, and it feels strange. My draft novel is done, at least for now. It’s not so much a novel about the Civil War as it is a novel of the Civil War.

If you grew up in the South, or even if you didn’t, what happened in the years 1861-1865 affected you, even when you didn’t know it. Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were children of Civil War veterans. They experienced the war in very different ways, both in the fighting and in civilian life. 

My mother’s grandparents were Franco-German immigrants who settled in New Orleans and descendants of the Acadians expelled from Canada after the French and Indian War who settled in what we called “the river parishes” – the stretch of territory along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The men generally fought for the Confederacy; after 1862, the women, children, and elderly men discovered life under Union occupation. 

My father’s grandparents experienced much the same. The men fought for the Confederacy; after the fall of Vicksburg in 1863, their families in southern Mississippi lived under sometimes loose, sometimes tight federal occupation. My great-grandfather Samuel Young was the only son in the family to survive the war.

Much like World War II affected the Baby Boom generation, the Civil War affected my grandparents’ generation. A terrible and collective experience of one generation would inevitably affect their children. Louisiana had the highest per capita income in the country in 1860; it had the lowest in 1865. Family members had died in the fighting; the social order was in chaos and upheaval. What happened to my ancestors was repeated millions of times in both the South and, in a different way, the North.

My history classes in middle school, high school, and college focused on broad themes about the war – like slavery, state rights, battles, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era, and the rise of the “Lost Cause.” When you write a novel rooted in the war, you discover that, while all of that is important, the broad themes don’t tell you much about how people lived, died, fought, and coped with the war. 

Vicksburg during the 1863 siege

I turned to reading and research – not only histories but also memoirs, newspaper accounts, sociological studies, photographic essays, fiction, and even poetry. I had to be selective, and so I focused on 1863 and post-war Mississippi, including Grierson’s Raid of April 1863; the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia in 1864; and the battles in April 1865 around Petersburg and Appomattox. But general histories were needed, too, and Bruce Catton’s The Army of the Potomac Trilogy and James MacPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom were among the readings as well.

Three books were particularly helpful: Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances Clark and Rebecca Jo Plant; Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina by Ernest Dollar; and Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by Caroline Janney. Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches and Irene Hunt’s Across Five Aprils were two works of fiction backed by extensive historical research, and they were both an inspiration. But everything I read helped in at least a small way.

The bibliography includes 84 books and two web sites. They represent an infinitesimally tiny portion of what’s available to read about the Civil War.

It’s awe-inspiring to read what soldiers and civilians alike experienced, including some pretty horrible things. Tragedies abounded. The devastation, especially in the South, was extensive. Soldiers on both sides committed crimes against civilians.

And yet, people coped and went on. They found strength in community and faith. What they had known was gone forever, except in memory. 

Even if the novel never sees the light of day, this has been a humbling and rewarding experience.

Top photograph by Thomas Kelley via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“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.