Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

S. Thomas Summers’ new volume of poetry, Private Hercules McGraw: Poems of the American Civil War, is out now. I’d highlighted Summers’ work a while back (here and here) during a guest-blogging stint at The Atlantic, but I don’t think I’ve done so yet here. The release of Private Hercules McGraw gives me an opportunity to correct that.

Private Hercules McGraw is a series of interconnected free-verse poems in the voice of the title character, chronicling his experiences during the war. S. Thomas Summers is a teacher of Writing and Literature at Wayne Hills High School in Wayne, NJ and an adjunct writing professor at Passaic County Community College in Wanaque, NJ. He blogs original Civil War poetry at Lint in My Pocket — Artillery on the Ridge. Used with permission.

Devil’s Den

by S. Thomas Summers

I could tell, sun was gonna pour fire
and we was gonna sweat. Found Willy
soaking up as much shade as he could
under an oak big enough to offer Goliath
a place to sit. Willy was glad to see me breathing,

told me we was gonna fight again.
that we was gonna run up some hill
named Devil’s Den. Willy was scared.
Seemed a rattler fat as a log lived ‘tween the rocks
on that hill. Guess it was the devil locals

spoke about. Anyways we started moving
and Yanks started spitting at us, but Willy
kept an eye out for that snake. Bullets didn’t
bother him none. Once I yelled —
Willy, there’s that devil now. He done fainted

dead away. Whole regiment probably thought
he-caught one cause he lay still as death.
It’s the only time the war let me laugh.

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I’ve just finished Walter Jon Williams’ 1989 short story, “No Spot of Ground.” In Williams’ alternate history, Edgar Allan Poe does not die in a dissipated, incoherent condition in a Baltimore charity hospital in 1849, but recovers to conquer his alcoholism with the help of a wealthy Maryland widow, marries the widow’s beautiful young daughter, and founds a successful literary magazine. With the coming of the war, Poe goes south and obtains a commission as a Colonel in the Confederate army.

Poe is old for field command — just two years younger than Robert E. Lee, to the day — but he manages to advance in spite of his prickly relations with his fellow officers. Poe is personally brave enough, but hardly an heroic figure. As depicted by Williams, Poe is vain, dismissive of the skills of other officers, considering them to be his social and intellectual inferiors. They are, he believes, mere vulgar prose in contrast to his elevated poetry. Poe is utterly paranoid about their plots against him. Every burble of disorganization or mislaid communication in the field — things that a later generation would refer to with the acronym SNAFU –Poe views as part of a larger plot to make him look like an incompetent. Poe has little regard for the common Confederate soldier and, one imagines, the feeling is mutual. Poe imagines the entire Federal army facing him across the lines. Williams also gives the reader a glimpse of Poe’s obsession with romantic death, and his inability to move past the loss of his first wife, Virginia Clemm (1822-47), even though he assures himself he’s moved on. Unlike the Confederate officers of another recent bit of Civil War fiction, here Poe carries all the prejudices and attitudes of his day and place.

The main action of Williams’ tale takes place in late May 1864, when Poe unexpectedly takes command of George Pickett’s division at Petersburg, and moves with them into the line north of Richmond near Hanover Junction, just after the Battle of North Anna during the Overland Campaign. But much of the story is told in flashback, including a segment where Poe commands one of Pickett’s brigades in the famous assault on the third day at Gettysburg:

The sound was staggering, the banging and the clanging of the guns, guns, guns, but fortunately Poe had nothing to do but keep his feet moving forward, one after another. The officers had been ordered to stay dismounted, and all had obeyed but one: Dick Garnett, commanding the brigade on Poe’s left, was too ill to walk all that way, and had received special permission to ride.

Garnett, Poe knew, would die. The only mounted man in a group of twelve thousand, he was doomed and knew it.

Somehow there was an air of beauty about Garnett’s sacrifice, something fragile and lovely. Like something in a poem. The cemetery, their target, was way off on the division’s left, and Pickett ordered a left oblique, the entire line of five thousand swinging like a gate toward the target. As the Ravens performed operation, Poe felt a slowly mounting horror. To his amazement he saw that his brigade was on the absolute right of the army, nothing beyond him, and he realized that the oblique exposed his flank entirely to the Union batteries planted on a little rocky hill on the Yankee left.

Plans floated through his mind. Take the endmost regiment and face it toward Yankees? But that would take it out of the attack. Probably it was impossible anyway. But who could guard his flank?

In the meantime Pickett wanted everyone to hit at once, in a compact mass, and so he had the entire division dress its ranks. Five thousand men marked time in the long grass, each with his hand on the shoulder of the man next to him, a maneuver that normally took only a few seconds but that now seemed to take forever. The guns on the rocky hill were plowing their shot right along the length of the rebel line, each shell knocking down men like tenpins. Poe watched, his nerves wailing, as his men dropped by the score. The men couldn’t finish dressing their ranks, Poe thought, because they were taking so many casualties they could never close the ranks fast enough, all from the roaring and the soaring of the guns, guns, guns. . . He wanted to scream in protest: Forward! Guide center! but the evolution went on, men groping to their left and closing up as the shells knocked them down faster than they could close ranks.

Finally Pickett had enough and ordered the division onward. Poe nearly shrieked in relief. At least now the Yankees had a moving target.

But now they were closer, and the men on the Yankee ridge opened on Poe’s flank with muskets. Poe felt his nerves cry at every volley. Men seemed to drop by the platoon. How many had already gone? Did he even have half the brigade left?

The target was directly ahead, the little stand of trees on the gentle ridge, and between them was a little white Pennsylvania farmhouse, picture-book pretty. Somewhere around the house Poe and his men seemed to lose their sense of direction. They were still heading for the cemetery, but somehow Garnett had gotten in front of them. Poe could see Garnett’s lonely figure, erect and defiant on his horse, still riding, floating really, like a poem above the battle.

The cemetery was closer, though, and he could see men crouched behind a stone wall, men in black hats. The Iron Brigade of Hancock’s Corps, their muskets leveled on the stone wall, waiting for Garnett to approach. . . .

And then suddenly the battle went silent, absolutely silent, and Poe was sitting upright on the ground and wondering how he got there.

I don’t consider myself a fan of the alternative history genre, but I liked Harry Turtledove’s “Lee at the Alamo,” and enjoyed this one, as well. Has anyone else read it? Thoughts?

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Other bloggers have praised the special Civil War issue of The Atlantic, which appeared on newsstands some weeks ago, and is still available for order. It’s really a remarkable collection of essays, published at the time in that magazine, that capture a lot of the detail and color of the period. Although the cover inevitably touts contributions by the great names in American literature and history — Douglass, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Twain — to me, some of the most revealing pieces are those composed by writers much less known today, whose work seems as fresh and new as when it was first published. Much of it was what we now view as reported journalism — not just observations or analyses of current events, but writers to traveled to the center of events, talked to the people there, and reported back what they discovered.

One example of such an essay is one by John William de Forest (right, 1826-1906) who, 151 years ago, disembarked from a steamer in Charleston to spend ten days in the city, trying to gauge the sentiment of the state that, just a month before, had taken the precipitous step of seceding from the Union. Lincoln would not take the oath of office as president for another six weeks, but de Forest quickly discovered that concerns about the president-elect and his party were the things that werre driving secession, and the standoff over Fort Sumter, out in the harbor:

“Why do you venture on this doubtful future?” I asked of one gentleman. . . . “Your great grievance is the election of Lincoln?”

“Yes”

“Is Lincoln considered here to be a bad or dangerous man?”

“Not personally. I understand that he is a man of excellent private character, and I have nothing to say against him as a ruler, inasmuch as he has never been tried. Mr. lincoln is simply a sign to us that we are in danger, and must provide for our own safety.”

“You secede, then, solely because you think his election proves that the mass ofthe Northern people is adverse to you and your interests?”

“Yes.”

“So Mr. [U.S. Senator Louis T.] Wigfall of Texas hit the nail on the head, when he said substantially that the South cannot be at peace with the North until the latter concedes that slavery is right?”

“Well, — I admit it; that is precisely it.”

I desire the reader to note the loyal frankness, the unshrinking honesty of these avowals, so characteristic of the South Carolina morale. . . . All those Charlestonians whom I talked with I found open-heartened in their secession, and patient of my open-hardheartedness as an advocate of the Union. . . .

“But have you looked at the platform of the Republicans?” I proceeded. “It is not adverse to slavery in the States; it only objects to its entrance into the Territories; it is not an Abolition platform.”

“We don’t trust in the platform; we believe that it is an incomplete expression of the party creed,-that it suppresses more than it utters. The spirit which keeps the Republicans together is enmity to slavery, and that spirit will never be satisfied until the system is extinct”. . . .

When I asked one gentleman what the South expected to gain by going out, he replied, “First, safety. Our slaves have heard of Lincoln, — that he is u black man, or black Republican, or black something, — that he is to become ruler of this country the fourth of March, — that he is a friend of theirs, and will free them. We must establish our independence in order to make them believe that they are beyond his help.”

My impression is, that a prevalent, though not a universal fear, existed lest the negroes [sic.] should rise in partial insurrections on or about the fourth of March. A Northern man, who had lived for several years in the back-country of South Carolina, had married there, and had lately traveled through a considerable portion of the South, informed me that many of the villages were lately forming Home Guards, as a measure of defence against the slave population. . . .

De Forest noted a certain fatalism about the coming conflict, with even those who opposed secession convinced that the agitation for war was so strong there, that it would eventually prevail over calmer minds. “The volunteers were panting for strife,” de Forest’s anti-secessionist acquaintances explained, and “Governor [Francis] Pickens was excessively unpopular because of his peaceful inclinations.” Armed hostilities were seen as a foregone conclusion; the only question was, when. Anticipation of the opening bombardment, even in January, already had people on edge:

During the ten days of my sojourn, Charleston was full of surprising reports and painful expectations. If a door slammed, we stopped talking, and looked at each other; and if the sound was repeated. we went to the window and listened for Fort Sumter. Every strange noise was metamorphosed by the watchful ear into the roar of cannon or the rush of soldiery. Women trembled at the salutes which were fired in honor of the secession of other States, fearing lest the struggle had commenced and the dearly-loved son or brother in volunteer uniform was already under the storm of the columbiads.

De Forest returned to New York, and when hostilities began, organized a company of the 12th Connecticut Volunteers. He mustered out in late 1864, and subsequently served with the Veteran’s Reserve Corps. After the war he returned to South Carolina as Assistant Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau at Greenville. De forest wrote extensively about the war, but his graphic descriptions of the conflict were badly out of step with the romantic and idealistic depictions of his day.
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The other day I mentioned the incident near Chappell Hill, where nooses were hung from a Sons of Confederates Veterans billboard along Highway 290, the main road between Houston and Austin. It seemed like a pretty crude and unfocused sort of protest at the time, and now columnist Bud Kennedy of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, wonders if something else isn’t going on here:

But that was nothing compared with the silliness in Central Texas, where a Confederate heritage society e-mailed reporters early Tuesday with photos of two nooses hanging from a giant Rebel battle flag billboard on U.S. 290.

“It’s racist — a hate crime,” rancher Donnie Roberts said.

Washington County Chief Deputy Mike Herzog laughed.

“They were the first people who saw those nooses, and then they alerted the media,” he said.

I got the feeling he won’t bring in the FBI.

“It’s on a busy highway, and nobody else saw it,” he said.

It would have taken three people with a bucket truck and extension ladder to hang the nooses, he said.

Coincidentally, members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans history and heritage group responded quickly with a bucket truck and extension ladder to take them down.