Reenacting and Me

Over at the blog, My Year of Living Rangerously, Manny writes that he has "always been ambivalent about the hobby of reenacting." I know just what he means. I have had mixed feelings about the practice for as long as I've been involved with the larger community of Civil War enthusiasts. With apologies to my reenactor friends, it has always struck me as more than a little bit strange to dress up as 19th century soldiers and engage in mock battle. We've all got our particular pastimes, of course, any of which might make other people scratch their heads. Lots of these activities take up large chunks of our free time and disposable income. According to Dave Barry, "There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."

Unlike reenacting, though, most other hobbies don't involve pantomiming horrific scenes of bloody slaughter. We all played war at some point. I recall many times as a child when my brothers, neighborhood friends, and I were called upon to neutralize some particularly stubborn Nazi pillboxes in the backyard, or to mop up the last of the Imperial Army holdouts down the block. We had trouble with the Lakota, too. But there's something fundamentally odd about grown men dressing up to replay the scenes of historic bloodshed, perfecting how they take a hit, mimicking agony, and playing dead.

I did mention that my feelings were "mixed." That is to say, I'm grateful for the opportunity to visualize a Civil War soldier—to see a park ranger demonstrate loading and firing, for example—and I think there's real educational value in so-called "Living History" scenarios as one might see at Colonial Willaimsburg, or Mount Vernon. As Manny said, referring to a grand review, there are moments when reenactors allow us to think, "So that's what it must have looked like." Really, I think he meant that begins to approximate what it must have looked like. But this only goes so far. Often as not, a reenactment may serve most to show you what it didn't look like. The celebrated use of reenactors as extras in Civil War films has failed to prove a boon to cinematic realism. Turner's use of reenactors in the movie Gettysburg was as much a distraction as an asset, projecting America's present-day obesity epidemic back to the summer of 1863. The Romanian extras of Cold Mountain (coached by Pohanka) looked more authentic on the silver screen.

MY FIRST REENACTORS

Admittedly, my first interactions with reenactors colored my views of the hobby in a negative way. I remember the first meeting of the South Bay Civil War Round Table in San Jose, sometime in the late 80s. We had gotten the word out with various flyers, and the inaugural meeting, held in Ted Savas' living room, attracted something like ten people. Half of those were members of the local reenacting association, all impressively decked out in full uniform, portraying members of the 1st Virginia Infantry. Ted gave the talk that evening on, if memory serves, Chancellorsville. After a time, the reenactors were getting antsy, awaiting some mention of how the 1st Virginia contributed to one of Robert E. Lee's most glorious victories. And that was their first question when Ted had finished.

Ted's reply that the 1st was not present for the battle, they being part of Longstreet's command, and Longstreet being detached on his Suffolk expedition, was not received favorably. You'd have thought Ted had pulled a big leather riding glove off one hand and roughly slapped the lead reenactor across the face with it, such was the umbrage taken. The Q&A became a challenge and didn't end till Ted took the ranking living historian upstairs to consult the O.R. Membership in the Round Table took a hard dip in the 2nd month, but recovered nicely, in time.

The point of that long anecdote is that much of my bias toward reenactors initially stemmed from the sense that the time and effort put into learning about uniforms, and maneuvers, didn't leave any time for studying the Civil War (during that same time frame I also met a reenactor who could speak in great detail about CS and US uniform buttons—I think you'd have to say on an expert level—but who had never heard of Joseph Hooker).

To be fair, part of the problem was that the reenactors I first spent time around were members of fledgling organizations in California. Later, I met a broader spectrum of hobbyists around the country, including many who are more versed on the literature of the war than I will ever be. Brian Pohanka, for example, did lasting scholarship, and more than probably anyone, made people think of reenacting as a noble endeavor.

WHY REENACT?

I would be interested in hearing what it is that motivates people to put the time and money into reenacting. The motivation that makes the most sense to me would be to take the study of the Civil War one step beyond reading and visiting battlefields. But even that, I think, would be a short-lived experiment, not an ongoing hobby.

The principle reason one hears, in my experience, is that reenacting honors the Civil War soldier—his service, his sacrifice. I can see that. But likewise, I can understand those who think it inappropriate. This past Veterans Day brought the widely-published lamentation of a Vietnam vet whose son is now in Iraq. In "Reenacting War," he writes that "I've never dealt well with Veterans Day. Perhaps it's because I knew too many men whose names appear on a black wall in Washington D.C." . . . . I do not believe people should 'play' war. I am upset by children with toy guns or sticks—or adults with real guns and mock uniforms who 'pretend.'"

I don't have any right to question others' motivations, but it would be refreshing, for once, to hear someone say they just like to dress up, camp out, and play army.

Helping to educate the public, and children, is another reason given for participating in the hobby, but this rationale is sometimes problematic. The uniform, naturally, and unfortunately, embues the reenactor with an air of authority—surely someone who goes so far as to dress in the uniform of a Civil War soldier will be an expert on the subject. It's a powerful thing to show kids, and adults, what an authentic uniform looked like, how the accoutrements were worn, and accessed. But they're not all students of the war, and fewer still are in the Pohanka league. I imagine it's fairly common to have "one-book-wonders" standing before classrooms of schoolchildren, pronouncing that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, a nugget that may remain with the children through all their days of learning. At the only reenactment I've ever attended, I stood by and listened to a reenactor explain to a spectator that slavery was incidental to the sectional divide, the spectator nodding in wide-eyed wonder at the revelation. An earlier entry in this blog highlighted a reenactor going into classrooms to say pretty much the same thing.

Reenacting is not a new thing. Kevin Levin has an interesting post on reenacting the Crater fight at Petersburg in 1937. But it really hit its stride in the decades since the centennial celebrations (along with Civil War publishing, and the explosion of Civil War Round Tables). I don't feel strongly enough about reenacting to say it's "right" or "wrong," as in the Veteran's Day editorial cited above. I am not a combat veteran, and have no emotional investment. It's just another hobby, except with black powder.

Photo credit: Chicago Daily News negatives collection, DN-0003451. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society. Image of a boy standing with rifles and a drum in a room in Chicago, Illinois, as part of Civil War reenactments on the 50th anniversary of the war, with events sponsored by the Chicago Daily News held in Grant Park in Chicago, Illinois.

I can see for miles and miles and miles

—Pete Townshend


Take the Greek "pan," for "all," and stick it on "horama," meaning view, and you get panorama. So says Nicole, and with a smile that confident, I'm just going to take her word for it.

One of the most amazing things about the internet these days is unfettered access to photo collections at various repositories. I can get swept away for hours just randoming searching the digital offerings at the Library of Congress. This evening I got lost in the Panoramic Photograph Collection. Initially I was looking to see what they had in the way of panoramic Civil War images (the key words "civil war" will bring up 33 hits), and there are some good ones, particularly covering Gettysburg and Vicksburg, taken mostly in the early 1900s. The view at top is of the Round Tops at Gettysburg. It's worth visiting the site and viewing the images at full size (click on the image here, then click on it again at the LoC site to expand the view). To find other Civil War images, start at the PPC home page, and be sure to use the "search this collection" as opposed to the "search all collections" box, to restrict your search to the panoramas.

The breadth of what they're offering online is pretty impressive, though presumably a fraction of their holdings. The Panoramic Photograph Collection has some 4,000 images "featuring American cityscapes, landscapes, and group portraits." I spent about 90 minutes just searching for different places I've lived, and finding some stunning views I'd never come across before. One example: I lived in Evansville, Indiana for six years, and the riverfront—where downtown edges up to the broad sweep of the mighty Ohio—was one of my favorite places. There's just something about a big old river. It was there before cameras, and buildings, and it will be there after. I was happy to find this view of that oft-visited spot.


It is absolutely mesmerizing to see a frozen moment in time, of a very familiar place, but populated with people and buildings lifetimes removed from your own experience. The panoramic view has the effect of breathing more life into the scene, and the old black and white, grainy quality accentuates the feeling that one is looking through a mysterious window into the past.

I want to mention another site that's been around quite awhile, in case you're not already familiar with it, or you didn't have the processing power to tackle it on first encounter. Adding some modern technology to panoramic views, the folks at Behind the Stonewall have produced over one-hundred 360-degree panoramic videos on Civil War battlefields (stitching together still snapshots into spinning images that can be controlled—left or right, slow or fast—with your mouse). They cover a number of battlefields to-date, and give especially good coverage to Gettysburg, Manassas, Antietam, and Chickamauga, where the various panoramas are keyed to a map. The view window is small, but the images are sharp—still not recommended for dial-up, I'm guessing. I would like to give encouragement to sites like this one, which use the internet in creative, useful, and magnamimous
ways.


Below: written on front: "[Copyright] 1912, S.U. Bunnell, Pasadena, Cal., Largest trees on Earth series, #572."

Letters Home

One often reads that Civil War soldiers were the most literate in our history, a fact attested to by the voluminous letters, diaries, and reminiscences penned by participants, many of which are available to us in some published form, or preserved in various archives and repositories. Caches of soldier letters and previously unseen diaries routinely surface even today, and every Civil War publisher, I would wager, has a number of proposals in the hopper right now for previously unpublished material. So common are Civil War letters and diaries that publishers, thank goodness, are more discriminating than they used to be. The University of Tennessee Press' Voices of the Civil War series, under the masterful guidance of series editor Pete Carmichael, is as good as it gets in that department.

One also reads that the Civil War was the last in which soldiers' letters home were uncensored by the military. I'm not sure how true that is—whether, for instance, letters home in the Spanish American War were censored—but certainly by WWI the army was cutting or blacking out certain references (I have a stack of letters that my grandfather wrote in WWI that were too innocuous to be edited, but bear the stamp of the censor's approval).

In some ways, with the current U.S. deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are harkening back to something akin to the Civil War era—we have a highly literate soldiery with nearly unfettered channels to communicate their experiences to the citizenry back home. During the Civil War, some soldiers acted as war correspondents for their hometown paper. Today, soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have the internet—email and blogging—with unlimited readership.

In recent weeks, some of my fellow (Civil War) bloggers have been announcing the discovery or appearance of a flurry of Civil War blogs, and I would welcome them too, but can't keep up with them all. Instead, I wanted to make mention of a blog that has kept me mesmerized and riveted for weeks now—The Sandbox—with it's well-written, moving insights, alternately horrific, funny, deeply touching, or pins-and-needles suspenseful, from the latest generation of Americans at the front.

You can't stop reading this stuff. Nor should you.

The Art and Obligations of Criticism

Some book reviews are so harsh, so thoroughly biting and dripping with such disdain, you figure either the reviewer has peeled away all of a book's pretense and exposed the fraudulent core to sunlight, or else it's personal—maybe the author stole money from the reviewer at some point in the past, or treated his sister poorly. I'm not sure which is the case with Stephen Metcalf's scathing assault on Thirteen Moons, the new novel by Charles Frazier. He takes Frazier to task for "bad faith" with the reader, a damning indictment, indeed.

Reviewing fiction is a tricky thing, subjective by definition—subject to wildly varying tastes and points of reference. We all have favorite novels that have been both praised and panned. Because of the marketing machine behind Frazier's new release, we can already find an assortment of reviews from major outlets. I read three in the first week, including a so-so critique at Salon.com, and a generally positive endorsement in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Reviewing non-fiction is another matter. The work is still subject to the reviewer's personal perspective, but things like accuracy and organization weigh heavily in the analysis. Some reviewers have vendettas, apparently, but generally speaking, a good reviewer who skewers a work of non-fiction does so with the spirit of a faithful guard dog, whose loud growls tip off the reader that his time and money are best spent elsewhere. Fangs are also bared to serve notice that a particular work does not deserve to share shelf space with worthwhile Civil War books. Sometimes the skewering is simply the natural response to being insulted as a reader, and consumer.

The expanding Civil War market of the 80s and 90s (now rapidly fading), and the advent of myriad self-publishing options and vanity presses, has kept the guard dogs busy. I should have mentioned at top that critiquing a book is a solemn endeavor, and just as surely as there are poor authors, there are poor reviewers, ill-equipped for the task, who do the reader and the author a disservice.

That said, few things are as satisfying to read or write as the authoratative annihilation of a piece of crap passing itself off as a work of serious scholarship. I wish I could find an old clipping I had from The Civil War News, many years ago, of a Richard McMurry review of The South Was Right, by Kennedy & Kennedy. It was deliciously dismissive of one of the worst books ever written on the subject, with all of the sarcasm and wit that has garnered McMurry fans and detractors for decades.

When I started this blog entry, I intended to spend some time musing about the responsibility (obligations) of the book reviewer, and where the best (Civil War) reviews might be found—things I've spent some time thinking about as a former book review editor, and occasional reviewer myself. I have long loved the book review sections of newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and such. The right reviewer for the right book makes for a great essay, smart and informative. Everything I know about some subjects, I read in the Sunday book review section.

But I've rambled enough for tonight, and will weigh in on the subject in a more focused way later, if I can think of a way to do it without sounding like a pompous ass. This entry made mention of skillful skewerings of a work of fiction that might not have deserved it, and a work of non-fiction that fairly begged for the coup de grace. But there's more to the art of critiquing Civil War studies than shish kebab. Sometimes just an honest overview, with commentary on the bibliograpy, suffices.

Photo: Washington, D.C. In the library at the United Nations service center. Boys are urged to take books back to camp with them. Bubley, Esther, photographer. 1943 Dec.

The year 1862 was a remarkably bloody time for the American experiment.

[Photo: "People escaping from the Indian massacre, at dinner on a prairie," Library of Congress, details below]

It's well nigh impossible for people today to conceive of how chaotic and unsettling things must have looked in the 2nd year of the war. All of the enthusiasm for a quick victory, and the anxiety of young men deeply worried that the war would end before they had a chance to participate, was played out and spent in desperate, gory killing fields that had nothing of romance or glory about them.

HIGH TIDE
In April, at Shiloh—to cite an oft-repeated statistic—casualties in the 2-day battle exceeded the combined casualties for Americans in all previous wars (Mexican War, War of 1812, Revolution). In September, casualties at Antietam remain the single highest one-day total in American history. In 1862, the real "high tide" of the Confederacy swelled, and fell back, in all theaters of the war. It was the only year that Confederate armies made major offensive incursions across the board. The Confederate invasion of New Mexico fell short at Glorieta Pass in the Far West; in the Trans-Mississippi, Van Dorn's designs on St. Louis were thwarted at Pea Ridge in the Boston Mountains of NW Arkansas; in the Western Theater, Bragg's movement with the Army of Tennessee surged as far north as Perryville, Kentucky, before the great southward ebb; in the East, Lee's first invasion across the Potomac ended in stalemate at Sharpsburg. Add to all that Jackson's Shenandoah Valley Campaign, the slaughter of the Seven Days on the Peninsula, and another, far-bloodier battle along Bull Run, and surely for many, the erstwhile, gung-ho sense of adventure dissolved into an uneasy feeling of apocalyptic dread.

DARK STAINS
If epic battles weren't enough, the close of 1862 was marked by a series of mass executions, signaling that whatever business was afoot in these disunited states, it was not business as usual. In a span of roughly 10 weeks, between mid-October and the day after Christmas, 1862, at least 60 people were executed—some in summary fashion, the rest after trials of a sort, but none in a way that makes anyone beam with pride today.

Most famous, perhaps, was the execution of 38 Sioux Indians on December 26, in Mankato, Minnesota, in the aftermath of the Sioux uprising there. Lincoln, to his credit, commuted the death sentences of over 250 Sioux, but the mass hanging remains the largest in U.S. history. The "Palmyra Massacre," in Palmyra, Missouri on October 18, was a simple case of murder. On that day, ten Confederate prisoners were ordered shot in an act of cold-blooded retaliation.

Less well known is the Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, also in October. There, 40 citizens thought to be overly sympathetic to Union war aims were executed (two others were reportedly shot while attempting to flee). It's a chilling thing to contemplate, and but for the scale, not unlike the internecine bloodshed already well advanced in Kansas, Missouri, East Tennessee, and other places.

Dark chapters, all, and all have been written about with varying degrees of success. For the latter event, most easily accessible is Tainted Breeze, by Richard B. McCaslin.
Lots of things have been written on the Sioux War in Minnesota—I still like an old (1961) booklet by Kenneth Carley, put out by the Minnesota Historical Society.

I'm not sure what might be reliable with respect to the Palmyra killings, though accounts of the event are included in any number of texts on the Trans-Mississippi. One can see the mass grave of the victims here.

[Photo at top by Adrian J. Ebell, created or published August 21, 1862. Library of Congress summary reads, “A Group of men, women, and children rest and eat during their flight from Fort Ridgely, Minnesota during the Native American Sioux uprising. Stephen R. Riggs sits near a woman who stands by a wagon." See image here.]

Potatoes in the Wheatfield?

Two potatoes, one in Union blue, one in Confederate gray, pause from the fighting long enough to endorse the culinary standards at Gettysburg's Hunt's cafe. [posted with permission].

Some think of commercial exploitation like this as sacrilege, but if that's the case, the student of American culture can hardly avoid acknowledging that blasphemy is as American as apple pie. If there's a dollar to be made—if it will cause curious travelers to take THIS EXIT—then it is fair game, even if it involves an event most notable for unspeakable carnage and suffering. Civil War themes are a big draw, bolstering the kepi industry. Cha-Ching!

No one does the Roadside Attraction like Americans do. We may not have invented it, but certainly we were able to broaden the definition of "attraction"—and unselfconsciously—to include everything from 2-story outhouses to the World's Largest Rubber Stamp (for the record, in recent years the world's largest rubber stamp title has moved here).

To amuse myself, I recently searched the ever-interesting Roadside America site for some Civil War-specific destinations. We've all been appalled at the state of Civil War-era medicine. For those of you whose imaginations are lacking, you may want to take in a reenactment of the first reported Civil War amputation, in Philippi, West Virginia, assuming they're still putting on the "show."

If you're passing by Elberton, Georgia, make time for a visit to see "Dutchy," the Yankee Confederate, one of those ubiquitous, town square memorials that was torn down in disgust after only two years. Might have been the unfortunate Federal overcoat.

If your family vacation checklist reads something like this: 1) Grand Canyon, 2) Yellowstone, 3) Mount Rushmore, 4) Replica Head of William Quantrill, you're in luck. The first three, you can find on your own. The fourth one is here. Is that a bottle of catsup?

This image from a vintage postcard shows the "Lincoln Oak" in Albany, GA. Maybe some local reader will weigh in on whether the tree is still there, or has subsequently been trimmed to resemble Jimmy Carter.

Georgia has its odd-shaped trees, but truly, Illinois remains the land of Lincoln. Where else would you expect to find the "World's Largest and Ugliest Abe Lincoln Statue"? One astute observer commented that, "from the highway it appears that Abe is making an obscene gesture with his finger." For my money, the Charleston, Illinois Lincoln statue has the same essential, frighten-the-children quality as the cartoonish Nathan Bedford Forrest statue alongside I-65 south of Nashville.


Happy trails.

"People don't ask you questions like that about your wife"

—John Y. Simon's response to my first question. . .

Lately I have been mining the transcripts of various author Q&A sessions held in the Civil War Forum over the past ten years, featuring 40-some guests, as I collect the material together into some web-friendly format. Here are a few juicy tidbits I came across this weekend.

One thing that I asked of nearly everyone, often the first question, was whether there was anything in their studies that surprised them, or caused them to rethink their understanding of a person, a battle, or event. I love the idea of a scholar or researcher making discoveries, or experiencing revelations, or epiphanies. Here are a few examples of answers to that question by Jeffry Wert, William Marvel, Scott Harwig, and John Simon. And for the fun of it, I've tagged a couple more quotes onto the end, by Terry Winschel and Richard McMurry, just to tweak the sensibilities of those students hopelessly stuck in the Eastern Theater.

Jeffry Wert, author, among other things, of books on Custer, and Longstreet, spoke with us on January 30. 1997.

Q. We'll start off with a question about Custer. Did you have any preconceived notions about George A. Custer that your research on the man caused you to rethink?

A. (Jeffry Wert): I probably had most of the preconceived ideas that most people had about Custer, and dealt with him in my first book, but now three things strike me—really changed with my research on Custer: 1) was his zest for life; 2) was the regard that his men held for him during the Civil War. I was surprised by the depth and the breath of it; and 3) was Little Big Horn, but that resulted from my lack of knowledge prior to it. My ideas on how it unfolded, and why he did certain things, changed considerably. We don't know all the answers, but his actions make sense -- not all of them, but numbers of them do.

Q. I would like to ask a similar question about James Longstreet, Lee's "Old Warhorse." How did your understanding of the man evolve during the course of your research?

A. (Jeffry Wert): I wish there had been more personal material, first of all, but they seem to have been destroyed in the fire that consumed his house after the war. But with that said, I found him to be a better general than I thought he would be. I think he was very much of a realist about war, far more than other Southern generals. Despite his post-war politics, most of the men who served under him never lost their respect or admiration for the man. And, finally, I was surprised at the dissension among the Army of Northern Virginia officer ranks, particularly among 1st Corps officers, in their perception of alleged favoritism towards Virginians.

William Marvel, author of Andersonville, The Last Depot, and many other titles.

Q. During the course of your research on Andersonville, were there any discoveries or realizations that substantially changed your understanding of Civil War-era prisons, and prisoners?

A. (William Marvel): Yes. Specifically, the degree to which the suffering on the Southern side was much less as a result of deliberate maltreatment than was originally thought. And also how much worse the treatment of Confederate prisoners by Union soldiers was, than was originally believed—not that the Union guards were particularly malicious, but they were much more stern and tended to shoot much more frequently for minor infractions than I was led to believe by the rather cursory secondary works on the subject.

And at Andersonville in particular I was impressed by the efforts that were made to meet the needs of the prisoners. It was generally believed that the Confederates tended to force the Union prisoners into such actions as crossing the dead line so they could be shot—for sport, virtually—and that the prisoners were starved deliberately. In fact, only on a few occasions was food deliberately withheld from them, and most of their suffering resulted from the general poverty of the Confederate government. The only administration policy to withhold food from prisoners was actually exercised by Union prison authorities, in retaliation for the perceived deliberate starvation of their own prisoners in Confederate hands.

D. Scott Hartwig, then chief historian at Gettysburg National Military Park, joined us on Thursday, July 18, 1996:

Q. In your capacity as historian at the Gettysburg battlefield, I imagine you've had the opportunity to tramp all over that hallowed ground. Can you think of any discoveries you've made, or revelations you've had, which resulted from a more intimate knowledge of the topography of the battlefield?

A. (Scott Hartwig): Sure, lots of them—this would be the case with any battlefield that you're able to spend a lot of time on. When you can walk a field from many different angles and approaches, you learn the subtleties of the ground. When you start to understand those, the battle begins to become understandable, and you can fill in details that the soldiers who were there may not have mentioned. Last year I did a program on the attack of Laws' brigade on Little Round Top, and the Confederates all mentioned that Union sharpshooters were posted behind a stone wall, near the Slyder Farm, and I couldn't find the stone wall. There wasn't one, and I looked and looked and looked, and I kept walking down the line where the wall would have been, and there it was. I found the remnants of it. So there was confirmation, to me, that there had been a wall there, and that the wall had been removed after the war—for unknown reasons. That's just one example.

John Y. Simon, speaking on September 29, 2000, is the editor of the The Papers of U.S. Grant.

Q. Dr. Simon, welcome. You've been editing "The Papers" since 1962. Are you getting tired of Grant yet, or still finding new information, or new sides to the man?

A. (John Simon) I've never thought that I understood the man fully, and for that reason I've never become tired of him. People don't ask you questions like that about your wife, and I've been married to her for a long time. Grant's a very real person, and one with many dimensions to him. There's still more to learn and I'm eager to do it. We're into the presidential years now, but I'm still fascinated by the Civil War period. And there are documents that we haven't found yet, but those that are coming to light, almost daily, cast new perspectives on Grant.

Q. What do you think, based on your readings of his correspondence, may be the biggest misconceptions about Grant? Was there anything that you were surprised to learn, or which slowly changed your perception of him?

A. (John Simon) Well I've been increasingly impressed by what a good writer he is. He has the capacity to express what he's thinking in the clearest possible form. He's a maker of memorable phrases. One of our interesting discoveries many years ago was when he wrote the famous line about fighting it out on this line if it takes all summer, he originally wrote, "If it takes me all summer." Then he went back and crossed out the word "me." He's conscious of just who's doing that fighting, and knows that that word "me" is inappropriate. Normally, the words just flow out as they did in the celebrated letter that he wrote at Appomattox, but when necessary he revised what he was writing.

Bonus Stonewall had nothing on Grant question:

Terry Winschel, chief historian at Vicksburg National Military Park, joined us on December 5, 1996.

Q. How do you think Grant's movements from the time that he crossed the Mississippi till he invested Vicksburg compare with Stonewall Jackson's Valley campaign?

A. (Terry Winschel): Grant's movements after he crossed the Mississippi River were bold, decisive, and kept his opponent unbalanced, and in that regard compare quite favorable with Stonewall Jackson's movements in the Valley. They demonstrate that Grant was master of the situation, and was a bold and aggressive officer. In a 17-day period, Grant's army would push deep into Mississippi, encounter and defeat Confederate forces in five engagements, and drive Pemberton's army back into the city's fortifications.

It is a brilliant campaign that is studied by professional soldiers to this date, and Grant's campaign for Vicksburg is highlighted in the chapter on offensive operations in the army's current field manual FM100-5.

Bonus Gettysburg is fascinating-but-irrelevant question:

Richard McMurry, author of Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military History, speaking with us on Thursday, August 1, 1996

Q. Thank you for being with us tonight. In your book Two Great Rebel Armies, and elsewhere, you have made the point—convincingly, I think—that the war was won and lost in the West. I wonder if you would start us off this evening with a summary of that argument, for the benefit of any Virginia-centric members who may be in attendance.

A. (Richard McMurry): I think the best way to answer that is just to ask people to look at a map, and to ask where the armies were in 1861, 1862 1863, 1864, 1865. If you do that you will see that the armies that started out in 1861 in Missouri and Kentucky were in Tennessee, Mississippi in 1862 and 1863. They were in Georgia in 1864. They were in the Carolinas in 1865. And where were the armies that started out in Virginia in 1861? Or to put it another way, the Federal armies captured, if memory serves me correctly, 9 of the 11 Confederate state capitals. The western armies captured 8 of them, including Columbia, South Carolina and Raleigh, North Carolina, which means that at the end of the war, the western Union armies were about 160 to 170 miles from Richmond. What it amounts to is that Western battles and campaigns produced results. Eastern battles and campaigns produced stalemates. And I would just summarize it all by saying that no battle fought east of the Appalachian Mountains had any military impact on the outcome of the war.

Behind every great caricature, there's a great caricature

"Many say, they would almost worship you, if you would put a fighting General, in the place of McClellan—This would be splendid weather, for an engagement. . ."
—Would-be National Security Advisor Mary Todd Lincoln to Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 2, 1862.

Some good advice from the First Lady (though I don't imagine Ambrose Burnside is who "they" had in mind). Full transcript of the letter is here; an image of the letter itself is here: Mary Todd Lincoln remains something of an enigma, or a caricature, in a way that's rarely challenged. Her eccentricities and illnesses later in life are, I think, often projected on her personality retroactively, as if she were always that way. As if the unspeakable losses she suffered wouldn't have put anyone's sanity or daily demeanor to the test.

Civil War history offers many caricatures—the hero, the scapegoat, the scoundrel, the marble man—some so comfortable we never question them, others are so well embraced, they have achieved the status of assumed truth. But the truth is never so simple, and not surprisingly, the people who have studied particular individuals in any depth invariably paint a more complex picture. So it is with Mary Todd Lincoln, and her relationship to the president, which is sometimes seen as one in which the president is merely tolerating an unstable spouse, while privately reflecting on his lost love, Ann Rutledge (John Y. Simon wrote a thorough essay on the subject of Lincoln and Rutledge that can be read here).

When Jean Baker, a biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln, participated in a Q&A in the Civil War Forum on June 9, 1998, I asked her what the biggest misconceptions are today regarding Mrs. Lincoln. She replied:

certainly the biggest misconception is that Mary Todd Lincoln was a terrible wife and mother, which was a devastating criticism of a 19th century woman. It's a hard stereotype to beat down, even though there's a lot of evidence to the contrary. Certainly Mary Todd Lincoln had a temper, and she was very strong-minded, and had a lot of independent ideas, and when she got to the White House, tried to arrange things in a way that few of her predecessors had done. So, I think this is the image that the American people have of her, as undermining her husband, often embarrassing him, because she spent a lot of money.

But I think that's the wrong way to think about her, and I think that's what my research certainly indicated to me. I found her forceful, interesting, intelligent, and to turn the stereotypes upside down, a very supportive wife, and an excellent mother. The evidence for this is clear—it exists in the relationship that Lincoln had with his wife. There are not a lot of surviving letters between the two, but the ones that we do have are clear evidence of a very warm, loving, and certainly sometimes tempestuous relationship.

As far as a mother, Mary Lincoln was totally engaged with her children. She played games with them, she dressed up as characters from Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. She gave parties for them, and we're all familiar with birthday parties today for kids, but in the 19th century, and especially in the small provincial capital of Springfield, Illinois, mothers were mostly much less engaged than Mary Lincoln.

So, to sum all this up, I think that we need to get beyond the image of Mary Lincoln that was promoted by her arch enemy, William Herndon, whom many of you will remember was [Lincoln's] law partner in Springfield—we need to get beyond his view of her, as he once called her the "hellcat of all time." And it's his image of her in a biography of Lincoln that he wrote that has really stamped her reputation as an impossible mother and wife. And that's something that I think is wrong.

Likewise, when Harold Holzer, who has written much highly-regarded material on Lincoln, fielded questions in the Forum on August 26, 2000, he commented on the damage done to Mary's reputation by this same arch enemy, saying Herndon was

an invaluable source on their law practice together, but less reliable on his controversial 'interviews,' which were probably skewed to shine positive light on the people he liked, and do harm to those he didn't. For example, he hated Mary Lincoln (though she probably hated him first). [He was] presumptuous in that he gave the ridiculous public lecture after the assassination claiming Ann Rutledge was the only woman Lincoln ever loved, brutally hurting the widow. Even if we believe (and I'm not sure) that Lincoln did once love Ann, he certainly loved Mary later, and ardently.

Another participant in the session queried Holzer about Lincoln as suitor—what it was about him that appealed to Mary—asking "what attracted her to him? As you say, he was marrying up—to her family, certainly, he could well have appeared as 'undesirable' from a marrying standpoint." I interjected that it must have been the hat, but Holzer offered more:

That's a very good question indeed. The answer must be that Mary deserves lots of credit (she doesn't often get) for seeing something in Lincoln that few, maybe none, of his contemporaries perceived in 1840: that he could 'go places.' He was brilliant, he probably wrote her great letters (they didn't survive, of course), and she was after a big future, and saw it, wisely, in him. Then there's the hat, as David says.

When Jenny Reb Shipped Out for the Front

Earnest defenders of the cause busy themselves in blurring the distinction between slaves impressed into labor for the army, and so-called black Confederate soldiers in the ranks, but no one seems willing to celebrate the honor of the truly forgotten, and curviest, Confederates. While perusing transcriptions of wartime Southern newspapers tonight, I came across this intriguing item from the New Orleans True Delta by way of a Natchez paper:

NATCHEZ DAILY COURIER, April 1, 1862, page 1, column 2

Women in for the War. We find the following dispatch in the New Orleans True Delta of last Saturday evening. We publish it for the information of our readers: Natchez, March 29. The girls, one hundred and three rank and file, each in herself a Joan of Arc or a Maid of Saragossa, have completed their military organization, and are in for the war. They will leave here by steamer for New Orleans on Monday morning. Give them a warm embrace. Hurra for Mississippi!

Imagine that, a full company of fighting women heading off to war, fully 58 years before they had the right to vote. I ran across this particular snippet while scrolling the addictive web site maintained by Vicki Betts, University of Texas at Tyler, the URL for which was posted on one of the history lists. Ms. Betts describes here website, found here, as "Beyond the usual commercial online newspaper databases . . . which includes articles from less frequently cited Southern papers. These transcribed articles, searchable by word, focus primarily on the Southern homefront, although there are some Northern papers and some military letters home, etc."

Alas, the saga of the female company was short lived. One week later, the day after the folks of Natchez turned out down at the landing "under the hill," the Daily Courier offered a correction to its April 1st article, this time citing the New Orleans Bee:

NATCHEZ DAILY COURIER, April 9, 1862, p. 2, c. 2

All Fool's Day. A large number of persons took a stroll yesterday afternoon on the steamboat landing, with the fond hope of witnessing the arrival of the young female Mississippi volunteers. But they saw nothing of the kind, though there were at that time on the levee many a Miss Volunteer of another sort. It was soon whispered in the crowd that they had been badly sold it being All Fool's Day, and then one by one they all retired, very much excited against the newspapers, and more particularly the True Delta, which published on Sunday, with a flaming heading, a telegram from Natchez, "from a respectable party," in which it was announced the girls would leave that place for this city on Monday. The female company turns out to be a military canard. —N. O.
Bee, April 2.

Well, it was fun while it lasted, but rest assured that discrediting the account will not impede someone among today's serial memorialists from ordering a governent tombstone for a member of this phantom unit (quick, someone get the word "memorialist" into the dictionary).


There are some fascinating tidbits at Betts' site, which is particularly enjoyable for the convenient access and searchable text (though heed her warning about double-checking the transcription before you get serious with citations). I found a number of items about slaves joining in the attack on the Yankees, which was interesting. There was also an item about the "Preacher's Regiment," an Arkansas unit with "no less than eight preachers in the regiment—one of whom is over seventy years of age!" There is an indignant editorial about "Negro parties," which sound, frankly, like they must have been the best parties in town, but the editorialist is suspicious about where the party-goers were finding the provisions for such general feasts.

There was this strange snippet:

TEXAS BAPTIST [Anderson, TX], April 6, 1860, p. 2, c. 4

During the past session of our court, nineteen negroes chose masters for themselves and were made slaves for life. Wise choice, far better than to sink to the level with the free blacks of Canada and the North."

Not sure what to make of that. I will indulge myself here and include several full excerpts from my casual reading tonight. You can dig out some highlights of your own. It's always striking to recognize how much the people of the past sound like the people of today, just with different trappings. We're no smarter today, and less hearty—that much seems plain.

Most interesting, to me, were the helpful hints for health, and hearth. A couple of letters to the editor offered detailed instructions on making homemade salt from the dirt of the smokehouse—not as white as you'd like, but just as good as imported. Other helpful entries told how to clear a room of bedbugs, which, disgustingly, are enjoying a resurgence in hotels and motels today. I can't tell you how disappointed I was to learn that this archaic bug of the past—something I thought would always be relegated to books, and quaint "goodnights" about sleeping tight—is still with us, as tenacious as the Taliban (if you travel a lot for work, you might not want to read this at the NYTimes, or this at the LATimes (subscription required for both). But I digress.

Lastly, I'll paste in a bit of an editorial from a no-nonsense author in Fort Smith, Arkansas that sums up the centrality of slavery in the secession crisis as succinctly as possible.

AUSTIN STATE GAZETTE, June 22, 1861, p. 4, c. 1

Interesting to Housewives.—Fly time is now fairly upon us, and these troublesome little insects are as much of a nuisance as the Black Republican army in St. Louis. The weapon wherewith to repel this invasion may be found in the following, which we find in an exchange: Take three or four onions and boil them well in a pint of water, and then brush the liquid over your glasses and frames, and the flies will not light in smelling distance of them. The receipt is a safe one, and will do no injury to your furniture.

CHARLESTON MERCURY, May 24, 1861, p. 4, c. 2

How to Take Care of the Hair.--As to men, we say, when the hair begins to fall out, the best plan is to have it cut short; give it a good brushing with a moderately stiff brush, while the hair is dry; then wash it well with warm soap suds; then rub into the scalp, about the roots of the hair, a little bay rum, brandy, or camphor water. Do these things twice a month--the brushing of the scalp may be profitably done twice a week. Damp the hair with water every time the toilet is made. Nothing ever made is better for the hair than pure soft water, if the scalp is kept clean in the way we have named. The use of the oils or pomatums, or grease of any kind, is ruinous to the hair of man or woman. We consider it a filthy practice, almost universal though it be, for it gathers dust and dirt, and soils whenever it touches. Nothing but pure soft water should ever be allowed on the heads of children. It is a different practice that robs our women of their most beautiful ornament long before their prime; the hair of our daughters should be kept within two inches, until their twelfth year. —Hall's Journal of Health.

SAVANNAH [GA] REPUBLICAN, August 20, 1861, p. 1, c. 5

A Remedy for Killing Bed Bugs.—When the crevices are large enough, insert gum camphor, or make a solution of two ounces of camphor and one pint of alcohol, and apply in the cracks with a feather. Follow up the application a few days and you will exterminate your disagreeable visitors. In warm weather musquitoes [sic] may be kept at bay by keeping a cloth wet with camphor near the person.

DALLAS HERALD, May 22, 1861, p. 2, c. 5

The Rusk Enquirer says that a number of young ladies of Cherokee County have formed themselves into a corps of sharpshooters, for rifle practice. At their first practice, they had an effigy of Old Abe, for a target, which they completely riddled with bullets. The Enquirer adds: "Talk about wiping out a people whose women and children are expert rifle and pistol shooters! The idea is absurd."

FORT SMITH NEW ERA, August 20, 1864, p. 3, c. 2

No man ever yet saw an American who hated slavery, yet upheld the rebellion; and no one ever saw an American who justified and wished to perpetuate slavery who had not at least a sneaking tenderness for the rebel cause. For all practical purposes, the rebellion and slavery are related as mother and child.

Mad Freak of Heroic Incompetence

"The dense forests wholly or partly in which were fought so many battles of the Civil War, lay upon the earth in each autumn a thick deposit of dead leaves and stems, the decay of which forms a soil of surprising depth and richness. In dry weather the upper stratum is as inflammable as tinder. A fire once kindled in it will spread with a slow, persistent advance as far as local conditions permit, leaving a bed of light ashes beneath which the less combustible accretions of previous years will smolder until extinguished by rains. In many of the engagements of the war the fallen leaves took fire and roasted the fallen men. At Shiloh, during the first day's fighting, wide tracts of woodland were burned over in this way and scores of wounded who might have recovered perished in slow torture. I remember a deep ravine a little to the left and rear of the field I have described, in which, by some mad freak of heroic incompetence, a part of an Illinois regiment had been surrounded, and refusing to surrender was destroyed, as it very well deserved. My regiment having at last been relieved at the guns and moved over to the heights above this ravine for no obvious purpose, I obtained leave to go down into the valley of death and gratify a reprehensible curiosity."

from "What I Saw of Shiloh," by Ambrose Bierce

Shiloh is among my favorite Civil War battlefields to visit, for a number of reasons. There are familial connections, on my wife's side; the Western Theater aspect, involving troops from states in which I lived (North and South); and perhaps most of all, the pristine condition of the battlefield, situated as it is far from urban encroachment (not that it isn't threatened by development, particularly in the area of power production on the Tennessee River).

On my first visit to Shiloh, I drove several hours to fit it in to the one free day of a business trip to Little Rock. I arrived around noon, and had four or five hours to tour the field before my return trip. For most of the afternoon, there were no other visitors in sight. My second visit was with the Civil War Forum, a two-day, intensive tour with Stacy Allen, and talks by Larry Daniel and Wiley Sword (who laid out his theory of where A. S. Johnston really fell, outlined in the revised edition of his Morningside classic, Shiloh, Bloody April).

Even then, the field was empty, and peaceful. It's a complicated battle, and the Park Service has done an admirable job of delineating, with coded markers, two days of overlapping action on the same ground. Even so, the movement of opposing troops over the battlefield is a confusing morass.

As a Civil War buff, and someone intimately involved in Civil War publishing, I have taken a particular interest in battlefield guides, whether NPS brochures, USMA staff rides, or the "General's Tour" feature of Blue & Gray magazine. And I was especially excited to see the publication of modern guides written by some of our best Civil War historians today, Shiloh, A Battlefield Guide, by Mark Grimsley and Steven Woodworth, and Gettysburg, A Battlefield Guide, by Grimsley, and Brooks Simpson.

Mark Grimsley will be the guest in the next live Q&A session in The Civil War Forum, October 21, at 4:00 p.m. EST, to discuss what goes in to creating a worthwhile battlefield guide, how to "read a battlefield" (the subject of one of his presentations), and to field questions about his other books, and his ground-breaking military history blogs, Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, and Civil Warriors.

Above: top of Iowa monument at Shiloh; at right, Professor Grimsley, and Jethro.

I'm just about the only person I know who has an abiding interest in the American Civil War, and yet has never taken the time to read Charles Frazier's spectacularly successful first novel, Cold Mountain (even as I typed this, I had to go back and change "Harbor" to "Mountain," a mistake I make every time I reference the book or movie).

I can't satisfactorily explain why I haven't read it yet—I still plan to. Really. It's a little odd that I've put it off, because I very much enjoy artfully done, authentic, historical fiction. And I love the atypical story line of Cold Mountain (atypical for Civil War fiction, but, in fact, something of a classic quest story as old as Gilgamesh), and from what I've skimmed, the prose looks beautifully wrought, and mesmerizing. It is interesting to me that Inman is an actual ancestor in the author's life. I like the fact that the narrative is a journey, that it isn't, at heart, a tale of battle, or a fictionalized portrayal of great generals. Frazier stands as a kind of anti-Shaara, and that appeals to me in a big way. Okay, that settles it. Tonight I'm moving Cold Mountain into the nightstand rotation.

I suspect, but try not to admit it, that my avoidance of the novel initially had to do with the fact that it was so immensely popular—even outside of Civil War circles—causing the inner-elitist in me to momentarily stall any deep interest. I should also say that I'm a relatively slow (deliberate) reader with a ridiculous backlog of books. By the time I had an opening on the active stack for Cold Mountain, I had read untold numbers of reviews, had skated around the periphery of 100s of online discussions about the book, and had even stood transfixed at parties where people who would not read a nonfiction Civil War book to save their lives, enthusiastically summarized Frazier's story. Not long after that, I was seeing trailers for the movie. I did eventually rent the film, thought it was great, and was quick to purchase the soundtrack (I am not ordinarily a big customer of sound tracks, but Jack White's renditions of some essential American sounds was irresistible, like the "Oh Brother Where Art Thou" soundtrack, or Ry Cooder's work on numerous films).

Charles Frazier is a true inspiration to those of us who know, deep down, we have at least one good novel in us, and hope we, too, can buck the lottery-like odds of getting a novel published, and noticed. Frazier went from underpaid English teacher, to stay at home dad hanging with the other moms on field trips (driving for elementary school field trips has been a great source of enjoyment for me, in this, my 2nd childhood—where we live, my kids go to places like NASA Ames Research Center, or Pacific tidepools, a stark contrast to the only field trip I can remember taking as a kid, out to the local water treatment plant in small town Iowa (not that it wasn't interesting—in fact, it answered many unspoken questions). I just did a Google search out of curiosity—kudos to the 8th grade faculty for creating a virtual tour of the very same water treatment plant that so impressed me in the early 70s.

I digress, but only barely. Frazier came out of nowhere, quit his job, finished his book and got Atlantic Monthly Press to buy it for $100,000. The success of that novel led Random House to pay something on the order of $8 million for his 2nd novel, based on a one-page synopsis. In the new book, Thirteen Moons, the Civil War is only incidental to the larger, decades-long timeline, and focuses on the Eastern band of Cherokee who managed to avoid removal to the Indian Territory.

I was excited to learn that Frazier has again incorporated subjects of great interest to me, specifically Native Americans, and Indian participation in the Civil War (way back when, I managed to get two embarrassingly amateurish articles published in an old Civil War glossy on Stand Watie, and Ely Parker). Making an appearance in Thirteen Moons is the endlessly intriguing William H. Thomas, of the Thomas Legion, memorialized in Vernon H. Crow's out-of-print (I think) Storm in the Mountains: Thomas' Confederate Legion of Cherokee Indians & Mountaineers. What a fascinating story. Thomas, who was not himself a Cherokee, formed a Civil War command that remains one of the most unique and colorful outfits in the annals of the Late Unpleasantness.

The saga of the Eastern band of Cherokee is a bigger story than Thomas's Legion, of course, and I'm anxious to see how Frazier treats the subject in Thirteen Moons. He wrote a little essay in 1997, at Salon.com (subscription required, probably), under the title, "How the Author Found the Inspiration for his Civil War-era Novel Among the Secrets Buried in the Backwoods of the Smoky Mountains." Inman's trek, and the Cherokee, it becomes clear, are just different stories about the same place:

Last year, when I was nearly finished with the book, I went looking for yet another grave. I climbed up the hill where my father says the real Inman is buried. There's nothing to tell exactly where he lies. Just a bunch of sunken oblongs with wooden markers rotted down to stubs or flat stones with unreadable scratching on them. All anonymous. If he's there he has a fine view to the forks of the Pigeon River, where once stood a Cherokee town called Kanuga, not a trace of it left but potsherds in the river sand. His long view is up toward Cold Mountain. I am in his debt and I wish him peace.

Behind the smokehouse we had a kind of map.

Vicksburg was a handful of chips from the woodpile and the river was a trench we had scraped in the packed ground with a hoe, that drank water almost faster than we could fetch it from the well. This afternoon it looked like we would never get it filled, because it hadn’t rained in three weeks. But at last it was damp-colored enough at least, and we were just about to begin, when all of a sudden Loosh was standing there watching us. And then I saw Philadelphy over at the woodpile, watching Loosh.
“What’s that?” Loosh said.
“ Vicksburg,” I said.
Then Loosh laughed. He stood there laughing, not loud, not looking
at me.
“Come on here, Loosh,” Philadelphy said. There was something queer about her voice too. “If you wants any supper, you better tote me some wood.” But Loosh just stood there laughing, looking down at Vicksburg. Then he stooped, and with his hand he swept the chips flat.
“There’s your Vicksburg,” he said.
“Loosh!” Philadelphy said. But Loosh squatted there, looking down at me with that look on his face. I was twelve then; I didn’t know triumph; I didn’t even know the word.
--------------------------------------


In honor of William Faulkner’s birthday, September 25, I read a few pages this morning, recalling the tale of the two boys who take a potshot at one of the leading horsemen in the approaching Yankee army, then seek refuge under the skirts of one boy's grandmother during a tense exchange with a Federal colonel.

Faulkner is not always easy to read, but he is one-of-a-kind, and evokes a place and time—and a people—in such a powerful and enduring way, the images and atmosphere of his fictional Mississippi time capsules remain with the reader long after the details of a particular story are forgotten.

One might assume, or have the impression, that Faulkner would naturally have incorporated the Civil War directly into his narratives, but the war is rarely used as a setting so much as it is part of the larger landscape. If the Civil War and the South are inseparable, if black and white make up the essence of southern identity and, as Faulkner wrote, “the past is not dead,” then the tension leading to, and the fallout resulting from the Civil War are unspoken if not explicit threads in his Yoknapatawpha County novels.

Most anyone with an interest in Faulkner has discovered that the Old Colonel, John Sartoris, in The Unvanquished and other writings, is inspired by William Clark Falkner, the larger-than-life great-grandfather of the famous author who served with Mississippi troops at First Manassas and elsewhere (various accounts explain when the “u” in the surname was dropped, and later added again).

Back in the spring when father was home before, he sat in his chair in front of the fire and Ringo and I lying on our stomachs on the floor. Then we listened. We heard: The names—Chickamauga and Lookout Mountain—the words, names like Gap and Run that we didn’t have in this country; but mostly the cannon and the flags and the charges and the yelling. Ringo was waiting for me in the hall; we waited until father was settled. Then I said, “How can you fight in mountains, father?” He looked at me. “You can’t. You just have to. Now you boys run on to bed.”

Faulkner, the American icon, son of old Mississippi, was one of the great inspirations for another novelist from Mississippi, Shelby Foote, who himself became an icon in the world of Civil War historiography. There are various accounts of the time Foote and his friend, the unsung Walker Percy, made a visit to William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi. Foote’s Washington Post obituary put it this way:

He said the peak of his college career was a surprise visit he made to Faulkner with his close friend, the future novelist Walker Percy. Pulling up to Faulkner's home in Oxford, Miss., Percy was too shy to enter the house, but Foote knocked on the door, stayed several hours and apparently never bothered to tell Faulkner of his friend in the car.

An account from Foote’s presentation at the New York State Writers Institute's Visiting Writers Series, March 20, 1997, goes in to more detail:
-------------------
Foote was at his most captivating when answering audience questions or spinning impromptu yarns in response to comments. How did he meet the great Faulkner, for instance? Foote was 19 years old and he and Walker Percy were planning to drive from Foote’s hometown, Greenville, Miss., through Faulkner’s town, Oxford, Miss.

Foote: “Let’s stop in Oxford and meet William Faulkner.”
Percy: “I’m not going to just knock on his door.”
Foote: “I will then.”
Percy: “Go ahead. I’m staying in the car.”

Foote recalled the walkway to Faulkner’s house was lined with cedar trees and he was greeted by three hounds, two fox terriers and a Dalmatian in the yard. Soon, a small man, shirtless and barefoot, naked save for a pair of shorts, and seemingly drunk, appeared and asked Foote what he wanted. “Could you tell me where to find a copy of Marble Faun, Mr. Faulkner?” Faulkner grunted for Foote to contact his agent. Faulkner was gruff and abrupt during that unannounced visit, but later befriended Foote, who walked Faulkner around the Civil War battlefields of Shiloh.
-------------------

Shelby Foote and William Faulkner strolling the still-pristine battleground of Shiloh. I would not have minded tagging along for that walk.

-------------------

Postscript: also on this day, in 1789, about 108 years before Faulkner was born, the very first Congress passed a series of 12 amendments outlining the most basic and essential rights that—eventually—all American citizens would come to enjoy. Ten of the 12 were ratified as the Bill of Rights. Ah, those were the days.

both excerpts, top and middle, are from “Ambuscade,” under Stories Revised for Later Books (The Unvanquished), in Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, ed. by Joseph Blotner.

"It is not hard to have mixed feelings about the American South."

So goes the opening line to the preface of Edward L. Ayers book, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History. What follows is a thoughtful—and readable!—series of essays by a "professional historian who is both a native and a longtime resident of the South" endeavoring to understand the region. The opening passage of the essay of the same name (minus the subtitle) gets to the heart of the matter in a language we can understand, which is to say the language of Matt Groening:

On The Simpsons, a popular animated satire of American life, Apu Nahasapeemapetilan, an industrious South Asian immigrant in Springfield, U.S.A., has studied hard for his citizenship test. "What was the cause of the Civil War?" is the final question on the oral quiz. "Actually, there were numerous causes," says Apu. "Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and inter—" The official, clearly bored with such superfluous erudition, intones flatly: "Just say slavery." Apu eagerly concedes the point: "Slavery it is, sir." With this declaration Apu wins his citizenship. Why is this funny? It's not because slavery was not the cause of the Civil War, but because the bureaucrat demands a rote answer to explain a profoundly complex problem at the center of the nation's experience.

Professor Ayers will be the guest in the next Civil War Forum Conference Series, a one-hour Q&A session on October 7 at 4:00 p.m. EST in the Forum's "Room 1." He'll be on hand to discuss his various Civil War-related titles, and innovative work with the Valley of the Shadow web site. He is the Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. Whenever I want a reminder of how little I accomplished in my squandered youth, I'll take a glance at Ayers's biblio, C.V., etc., at the university's web site.

Mark your calendars.