Suggestions for Additional Reading

The publishers listed in this Reader's Guide may not be the only publishers of titles mentioned herein. They are the only ones known to us at present. Publishers' names are included to assist the interested reader in obtaining titles from other sources, if they are not available in libraries.

Gibbs, Peter, Crimean Blunder (Holt, Rinehart, and Winstonhardbound)

Hibbert, Christopher, The Destruction of Lord Raglan (Little, Brown & Company-hardbound; Penguin A-618 paperback)

Woodham-Smith, Cecil, Florence Nightingale (McGraw-Hill Book Co.,-hardbound; Avon V 2063 paperback)

The Reason Why (interesting story of the

famed "Charge of the Light Brigade," McGraw-Hill Book Co.,hardbound; Dutton Everyman D 53 paperback)

III

Civil War Novels

Millions of words have been written about the Civil War during the past century. It is probably the most publicized war in history. The centennial observance of the war (1960-65) is producing many more millions of words. Scarcely a day passes without the publication of books or articles on some new aspect of the struggle. During the past 10 years Allan Nevins, Bruce Catton, Kenneth Williams, and Shelby Foote have produced excellent multivolumes of Civil War history (some of which are still uncompleted). The older standard works, such as Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (4 volumes) and A Photographic History of the Civil War (10 volumes), have been reprinted. Indiana University Press is reissuing the personal memoirs of Longstreet, Joe Johnston, Hood, Early, Mosby, and other books which have long been out of print. Numerous biographies of civilian and military leaders represent new research methods and new approaches to the causes, issues, and effects of the Civil War.

Every major campaign and many minor campaigns, battles, and skirmishes are being analyzed by historians, military experts, and that new breed of expert, the "Civil War buff." Old regimental histories are republished with introductions and footnotes by graduate students of history aspiring for doctoral honors and publication credit. Old letters and diaries are resurrected from dusty trunks by "Grandpaw's" doting descendants, who vaguely remember the old man's long-winded stories of Gettysburg, Shiloh, the March to the Sea, or Andersonville prison life. In at least 75 cities, Civil War Round Tables meet monthly to discuss various aspects of the war, often in rancorous detail.

All of this mass of material should be grist for the novelist (or would-be novelist) who seeks a theme of magnificence and scope

on which to hang his tale. Unfortunately, many writers fall back into the tired old cliches and turn out “potboilers" whose main characters are usually the "damyankee" officer, the beautiful Southern spitfire who spurns his love because his blue-clad raiders stole the family silver, the faithful Negro servant keeping the plantation together after "Massa got hisself kilt at Chickymaugy," the villainous carpetbagger, and all the other stock characters. In the wings are stereotyped figures of Abe Lincoln, Jeff Davis, Lee, Grant, Sherman, Jackson, Stuart, Forrest, et al.

The motion pictures and television have added a new dimension and such new and strange twists to the events of the Civil War that it is scarcely recognizable to the serious student of the period. These media have transformed the war into a "Western" in Civil War costume, complete with Indians menacing lonely frontier forts garrisoned by "galvanized Yankees" (Confederate prisoners of war who took the oath of allegiance to get out of Yankee prison camps), who are plotting to kill their villainous or drunken officers and strike another blow for Dixie. There is always the wagon train loaded with repeating rifles or with gold, which the noble Rebs are going to hijack and turn over to Jeff Davis so that the good cause may continue. One of the most popular of the recent television programs purported to tell the story of "the Gray Ghost," Colonel John S. Mosby and his partisan cavalry. later political career as a Republican is ignored.) told the story of two Virginia brothers, one of whom chose the North and the other the South, but the story didn't get much beyond the spring of 1862 before it was felled by low audience ratings or lack of sponsors.

(His Another series

On the other hand, there are some first-class novels about the Civil War, written by excellent authors. We have included Lawrence S. Thompson's fine critical essay in this unit. It is an excellent guide to the Civil War novels and goes back to the time when the first of the breed appeared. For our example we have chosen the one which seems to stand head and shoulders above the rest and is almost universally acclaimed as THE classic novel of the Civil War: The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. We will also list some of the novels discussed by Professor Thompson which are still available in paperback format. There is little point in our including the historical background of the Civil War for it is reasonable to assume that every American knows enough about it to be able to read and understand Civil War novels.

The Civil War in Fiction

by Lawrence S. Thompson

(Reprinted by permission of the State University of
Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, publisher of Civil War History.
This article appeared in the March 1956 issue of Civil
War History.)

When I returned to the United States in the fall of 1945, I stopped by the moribund Southern town of my childhood to pay my respects to a nonagenarian lady whose greenest memories belonged to her teen-age years in the sixties. The world-shaking events of 1939-45 had only made a casual impression on her, and even the tragedy of Hiroshima was insignificant to her by comparison with the burning of Atlanta. But somehow or another she realized that World War II had a real message for her. Over a cup of weak tea she murmured, "If only General Lee had had one, just one tiny little atom bomb!"

The dear old lady didn't quite realize that for almost a century the real secret weapon of those who still fight the last romantic war has been the American novel. A dozen wings of supersonic jets, evenly divided between Uncle Billie Sherman and Jeb Stuart, would have had less effect on the ideas of twentieth-century Americans about the Civil War than the thousand or more fulllength novels set in the stirring years of 1860–65. We Kentuckians (who joined the Confederacy after the war) know better than anyone else how the novel has shaped our sentiments. No true Bluegrasser has failed to weep with Chad Buford, the Little Shepherd, and Margaret Dean when they chose opposite sides in 1860. We are moved deeply by the first chapter of any Civil War novel describing the surrender of Sumter by that gallant Louisvillian, Major Robert Anderson; and the fantastic escape of John Hunt Morgan from the yankee concentration camp in Columbus is thrilling even in the dull prose of one of Mr. Beadle's hacks. Beyond all sentiment, however, the significant thing about Civil War fiction in the history of American letters is that it reflects national literary trends more accurately than any other type of historical novel. This we may ascribe to the abundance of the

genre and to the fact that it has attracted many of our ablest writers.

The fiery gospel wasn't written nearly as effectively in the rows of burnished steel as it was on the sulphite pages of American fiction from 1862 on. Charles F. Brown had Artemus Ward holding forth on the war before the smoke had cleared from the First Bull Run, and Rebecca Harding Davis and Louisa May Alcott were grinding out short stories on the war before Chancellorsville. If the Unionists provided no literary swamp angel, the Secesh did little better. Possibly Jeff Davis' propaganda ministry had vague notions about boring the unionists into surrender by unleashing the Southern branch of the feminine school. Augusta Jane Evans turned on the yankees with all the raw power of a charlotte russe in Macaria; or The Altars of Sacrifice (1864). Almost simultaneously Sally Rochester Ford produced her Iliad of the rebellion, Raids and Romance of Morgan and His Men (1864).

If Mrs. Ford's misbegotten epic was a "cornerstone of Confederate literature," as one bibliographer has argued, it is just as well for the sake of belletristic writing in America that the Cause was lost. She embellished her prose narrative with some snatches of balladry that endow her with the same variety of immortality that The Sweet Singer of Michigan enjoys. Take the half dozen lines celebrating Morgan's number one man (and later the robber baron of L. & N. fame), Basil Duke:

A sad mischance occurred to the heroic Duke,
Who's bold as a lion, but mild as St. Luke;
This brave hero, who is scarce less than Morgan,
Was severely wounded on the cranial organ,
While repelling an attack made on his rear,
He fell by a shell that exploded too near.

In spite of the crudity of the great bulk of imaginative prose dealing with the war in the sixties, at least the spark of an older and far more productive literary tradition remained alive. It was the rich, autochthonous humor of the Great Interior Valley and the South that has flavored virtually all of our better Civil War fiction. A half-forgotten book that belongs in this category is Four Years with Morgan and His Men (1914) by the late Colonel Thomas F. Berry of Woodford County, Kentucky, brother of the noted guerrilla "One Arm" Berry. Published a half century after the events it purports to describe, Berry's book nevertheless points