Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

The Horse Soldiers

My Enchantment with (Addiction to?) the Civil War

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My enchantment with, or addiction to reading about, the Civil War has deep roots that go back to early childhood. And it came through both sides of my family.

From my mother came the romance. If you had asked her, at any time of her life, what her favorite movie was, you would have received the consistent answer of Gone with the Wind. She was 16 when she first saw the movie. I don’t know how many times she watched it, especially after it became a regular staple of television. But the story of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, set against the backdrop of the Civil War and its aftermath, captured my mother’s romantic heart.

The novel by Margaret Mitchell won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The movie passed into American film legend, and my mother knew all the details, like how the directors searched long and hard for an actress to play Scarlett. Filming had started (like with the scene depicting the burning of Atlanta) when they finally decided on Vivien Leigh. And my mother adored Clark Gable, talking about him long after his death in 1960.

The movie, like the book, was imbued with the myth of the Lost Cause, that the Civil War had really been about states’ rights and that the South had fought a just and noble war. Today, our understanding has turned 180 degrees. It makes one wonder about the validity of extreme positions, whatever extreme they represent.

Because my father didn’t care much for movies, I became my mother’s movie partner by default. One of the movies we saw together was The Horse Soldiers, starring John Wayne and Constance Towers. It is a highly fictionalized and considerably misleading account of Grierson’s Raid, an 1863 foray through Mississippi by 1,700 Union cavalry troops. (A better account is the book The Real Horse Soldiers by Timothy Smith.) I must have been an impressionable age; I still remember much of the movie today, and it, too, channeled my interest in the Civil War. When we told my father about the movie, he mentioned that the raid went right through the area where his father and grandfather had lived.

A few years later, I attended LSU. At the time, chaired by T. Harry Williams, it had one of the most highly regarded history departments in the U.S. Williams had published a slew of books on the Civil War, but it was his biography of Huey Long that won the Pulitzer Prize and the national Book Award. He taught a senior-level history course on the Civil War that was limited to 12 students, and history majors had first call. I had to content myself with reading his books, like his biography of Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard. 

John Wayne and Constance Towers in The Horse Soldiers (1959)

The subject of the war remained a reading interest, like Bruce Catton’s Civil War trilogy and James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. About 25 years ago, I was in a local antique store that also carried books, and I found a first edition of Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs in two volumes). Grant’s memoirs have been reprinted in numerous editions over the years; you can even find a Kindle edition for 49 cents. I paid $75 for my edition; the same edition now lists on some web sites for $1,250. Who knew?

I’m not a fan of visiting battlefields, but my youngest son and I did visit the Pilot Knob Battlefield Park, less than an hour from St. Louis. And I discovered that the Missouri Civil War Museum sits adjacent to the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, about a 20-minute drive from my house.

The clincher for my Civil War interest was family history, again on both sides. My mother’s grandparents lived in New Orleans when it was occupied by Union forces; my paternal great-grandfather, born and raised in Mississippi, was a Confederate soldier. 

It is that great-grandfather’s story that has turned out to be the most problematic. What was handed down by my grandfather and father may, or may not, be what actually happened to my great-grandfather in the war. While it’s been frustrating to track it down, it’s been a fascinating research exercise as well. And I’ve followed all kinds of trails down Civil War rabbit holes. 

My interest in the Civil War has taught me many things, but most of all it’s taught me is that the past is never really the past.

Top photograph: Clark Gable and Vivien Liegh in Gone with the Wind (1939).

Grierson’s Raid and “The Horse Soldiers”

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After I started elementary school, I became the movie partner of my mother. My father rarely went to the movies; my mother had been starstruck since she was a child. During the summer months, and on weekends during the school year, I accompanied her to one of the big theaters in downtown New Orleans to watch the latest movie she was interested in. We started with the Disney films – my earliest remembered movie is Bambi, the 1942 film which I would have seen via re-release in 1956 or 1957.

My most vivid memory was going to the Saenger Theatre on Canal Street to see The Last Voyage, starring Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone. Released in 1959, it was a tension-filled story about a passenger liner sinking in the Pacific, with rescue boats too far away to reach it before it sank. I cried through most of the movie. My mother felt so bad for taking me to see what was an adult-themed movie that, when it ended, she took me across Canal Street to see Some Like It Hotat the Joy Theatre. It was certainly funny, but it was even more adult-themed than The Last Voyage. 

That same year, she took me to see The Horse Soldiers, a Civil War epic starring John Wayne and William Holden. (She liked John Wayne, but William Holden was one of her three favorite actors, with Robert Stack and Clark Gable rounding out the list.) The movie was based upon a 1956 historical novel of the same name by Harold Sinclair. The book itself was based upon a true story generally referred to as “Grierson’s Raid.” 

Col. Benjamin Grierson

From April 17 to May 2 of 1863, Colonel Benjamin Grierson (a pre-war music teacher in Illinois who happened to hate horses) led a brigade of three cavalry regiments from LaGrange, Tennessee to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, slicing right down through the state of Mississippi. Grierson’s Rad was intended by Gen. Ulysses Grant to be both a diversionary campaign and an effort to disrupt Confederate supply lines leading up to the siege of Vicksburg.

The raid was an unqualified Union success and proved critical to Grant’s ultimate victory at Vicksburg (William Tecumseh Sherman, who rarely said anything complimentary or even kind about other Civil War efforts, called the Grierson campaign “the most brilliant of the war.” Down through the state of Mississippi, train depots were burned (sometimes igniting nearby homes and businesses), railroad tracks were torn up, and stories of food, munitions, and clothing meant for Vicksburg were destroyed.

In 1954, Dee Brown, who years later would win the Pulitzer Prize for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published Grierson’s Raid, a historical account of the campaign. Later historians have offered unflattering critiques of the book; Brown does have a tendency to occasionally invent dialogue which, while based on letters and memoirs, was closer to imagined than real. But his day-to-day account provides the sweep of the raid, the people and towns involved, how it was both resisted and (sometimes) welcomed, how the brigade “lived off the land,” and its rather unqualified success. It does provide the narrative sweep of the story, even if even amateurs like myself can easily spot what clearly Brown had to invent. 

A more historical account of the campaign can be found in the 2018 book by Timothy Smith, entitled The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Raid Through Mississippi, published in 2018 (more on that book next week). 

It’s strange that this campaign, so critical to the Union victory at Vicksburg, one of the two turning points of the Civil War in 1863 (the other being Gettysburg), is rarely mentioned in American or Civil War history classes, at least in pre-college education. Perhaps the paucity of solid historical accounts is one reason. 

Dee Brown

But there are historical records. Brown cites five primary sources he used for his 1954 book: Grierson’s manuscript autobiography and papers in the Illinois State Historical Library; Grierson’s privately printed Record of Services Rendered the Government; the journals of Stephen Alfred Forbes and his family letters; Griersons Raids, an account published by Richard Surby, a sergeant who took part in the raid; and the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion.

The 1959 movie Horse Soldiers changed names, invented scenes that never happened, and added a romantic interest with the Southern plantation owner Hannah Hunter who deliberately eavesdrops on campaign discussions and is taken along for the raid. The movie was fairly popular at the time but never broke even; the two top stops were each paid $750,000.

What neither my mother nor I knew at the time was that Grierson’s Raid was part of our family history, with the Youngs’ home being in the Brookhaven, Mississippi area at the time. The raiders discovered pocket allegiance to the Union among some Brookhaven residents; the town had been established by a New Yorker and named for a town in that state. And when the burning of the train deport threatened to spread to the town itself, Grierson ordered his troops to help the town’s citizens fight the fire. My the 61-year-old great-great-grandfather would have likely been there. His youngest son and my great-grandfather would have been 16 at the time and might have been there or might have already enlisted.