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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781945680281 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | White Pine Press |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2019 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 170 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Minneapolis, MinnesotaDate of Birth:
August 23, 1952Place of Birth:
Chicago, IllinoisEducation:
B.A. in Russian Language and Creative Writing, Michigan State University, 1976Read an Excerpt
In graduate school, years ago, a couple of friends and I met once a week at Sonny’s to eat pizza and drink red wine and talk about Shakespeare. Across the street the concrete tower of the English department stood motionless as winter ebbed into spring. One afternoon Gordon talked about the history plays. Gordon had been reading Heidegger, and, so he explained, the histories were a good example of how it is that we meet our past coming to us out of the future. Abe Lincoln, Gordon told us, was an avid reader of Shakespeare’s history plays. In a flash of wine-and-pizza insight, cars gliding by silently beyond the plate glass window, I saw that the soul of Shakespeare’s history plays had transmigrated over four centuries into a TV miniseries. And indeed, just as Shakespeare picked his history carefully (he could please or offend the ruling Tudors, depending on how he framed the wars of succession a century or two before his time), I found myself drifting back to the days of Abe Lincoln’s presidency—brought to you by Chevrolet, the Heartbeat of America. Robert Penn Warren: To begin with, the Civil War offers a gallery of great human images for our contemplation. It affords a dazzling array of figures, noble in proportion yet human, caught out of Time as in a frieze, in stances so profoundly touching or powerfully mythic that they move us in a way no mere consideration of ‘historical importance’ ever could.1 Edmund Wilson: Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861–65 in which so many people were articulate? . . . The drama has already been staged by characters who have written their own parts; and the peculiar fascination of this literature which leads one to go on and on reading it is rather like that of Browning’s The Ring and the Book, in which the same story is told from the points of view of nine different persons.2 Walt Whitman: The War of Attempted Secession has, of course, been the distinguishing event of my time.3 On the small screen of my mind, Union and Confederate generals strut about, declaiming Shakespearean lines as pompously as Mark Twain’s Duke and Dauphin. Night. Another part of the field. Harry and Hotspur somewhere in Virginia, the spring of 1865. Dim and smoky campfires, councils of war. Harsh glances and savage words: The Road to Appomattox, perhaps, a dozen hours of docudrama, a full week of primetime TV. From a thespian point of view, all war—despite the vagaries of chance, despite differences in manpower and resources—comes down to an ultimate contest of will between the two commanding generals. On the Southern side stands Robert E. Lee, fifty-eight years old at Appomattox, former superintendent of West Point. Lee was a longtime career soldier in the U.S. Army, who had fought in the Mexican War and whose father, Light Horse Harry Lee, a compatriot of George Washington, had been a cavalry commander in the Revolutionary War. In 1859, while at home on leave in Arlington, Lee was chosen to go take charge of the situation at Harper’s Ferry, where some crazy man named John Brown and a bunch of Free-Soilers had taken hostages and were holed up in the federal armory threatening to start a slave rebellion in Virginia. Walt Whitman: As the period of the war recedes, I am more than ever convinced that it is important for those of us who were on the scene to put our experiences on record.4 Baltimore, Monday, October 17, 1859 A dispatch just received here from Frederick, and dated this morning, states that an insurrection has broken out at Harper’s Ferry, where an armed band of Abolitionists have full possession of the Government Arsenal. The express train going east was twice fired into, and one of the railroad hands and a negro killed, while they were endeavoring to get the train through the town. The insurrectionists stopped and arrested two men, who had come to town with a load of wheat, and, seizing their wagons, loaded them with rifles, and sent them to Maryland. The insurrectionists number about 250 whites, and are aided by a gang of negroes. At last accounts, fighting was going on.5 Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee—aided by Lieutenant Jeb Stuart and a company of U.S. Marines—made quick work of what in fact turned out to be only twenty-some individuals. The survivors, John Brown and six of his followers, were tried, convicted, and hanged for insurrection. Less than two years later, when the war Brown had anticipated broke out in 1861, Lee was offered command of the Federal armies, but declined. Soon thereafter, he resigned his commission and accepted command of the Virginia forces when, following her sister states of the Deep South, Virginia seceded. Four years later, Lee is in command of all the Southern armies. Walt Whitman: It does not need calling in play the imagination to see that in such a record as this lies folded a perfect poem of the war comprehending all its phases, its passions, the fierce tug of the secessionists, the interminable fibre of the national union, all the special hues & characteristic forms & pictures of the actual battles with colors flying, rifles snapping, cannon thundering, grape whirring, armies struggling, ships at sea or bombarding shore batteries, skirmishes in woods, great pitched battles, & all the profound scenes of individual death, courage, endurance & superbest hardihood, & splendid muscular wrestle of a newer larger race of human giants with all furious passions aroused on one side, & the sternness of an unalterable determination on the other.6 On the Federal side is Ulysses S. Grant, fifteen years younger than Lee. In 1854, Grant had resigned from the army—perhaps in part because of a drinking problem—and later rejoined, a political appointee, at the start of the war. In the interim, after various failed ventures, he had worked in his father’s leather store in Galena, Illinois. By 1864, three years into the war, he has become commanding general of the Union armies. A year later, he is on the verge of victory—a good example of how war takes men who seem to have no particular success in civilian life and makes of them illustrious heroes or killers, depending on your point of view. Walt Whitman: My idea of a book of the time, worthy the time . . . incidents, persons, places, sights . . . a book full enough of mosaic but all fused in one comprehensive theory . . . My idea is a book of handy size and form . . . to cost, including copyright, not more than thirtyfive cents or thereabouts to make; to retail for a dollar. I think an edition, elegantly bound, might be pushed off for books for presents, etc., for the holidays, if advertised for that purpose. It would be very appropriate. I think it is a book that would please women. I should expect it to be popular with the trade.7 Edmund Hatcher: Those who were witnesses and participants in the great struggle can vouch for the correctness of this compilation, while those who have since appeared on the stage may find herein food for the production of an imaginary picture of the closing days of the war, that they will never be able to properly paint.8 America’s bloodiest war. More American soldiers died in the Civil War than in all the wars of the twentieth century combined. Out of a total population of about thirty million, more than three million soldiers served—half of all military-age males—on both sides of the Mason- Dixon line. Two out of three men wore Federal uniforms (and 10 percent of those were African-American volunteers). All told, there were approximately seven hundred thousand battle casualties, with two hundred thousand deaths. Another four hundred thousand men died of disease or “other causes.” Years later, wanderers in the Virginia woods would stumble upon skeletons—soldiers who had crawled away during the heat of battle to die, and who were never found. In all, more than one million men, one in every three soldiers, was a casualty of the war. Throughout the nineteenth century the American people would bear the scars of the Civil War, and the country would be irrevocably changed. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner said. “It’s not even past.” Well over a century after what many still see as the “War to Free the Slaves,” one in four black men in their twenties is in prison or on probation or parole—and, not coincidentally, the percentage of total U.S. population in prison is the highest of any nation in the world. Black unemployment is double that of the white working class. And according to the New York Times, a man from Harlem has less chance of reaching the age of forty than someone from Bangladesh. In an economic sense the war was about slavery, as a system of agricultural production in which plantation owners had different interests than the industrialists of the North. But even many abolitionists had no intention of extending to their black neighbors all the “natural” rights expressed by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence—at least not when it came to living next door and dating your daughter—rights enjoyed, to some degree, by all white male Americans. And there’s still no Lincoln automobile dealer in the city of Charleston (though there is in the poorer, racially mixed northern suburbs)— Charleston, the so-called hotbed of secession, where in the year or so before the war it could be dangerous to one’s personal safety to sound like a fellow who hailed from Boston, the so-called cradle of abolition. Mary Chesnut: I remember feeling a nervous dread & horror of this break with so great a power as U.S.A. but I was ready & willing— S.C. had been so rampant for years. She was the torment of herself & everybody else. Nobody could live in this state unless he were a fire eater—come what would I wanted them to fight & stop talking . . . [they] had exasperated & heated themselves into a fever that only bloodletting could ever cure—it was the inevitable remedy. So I was a Seceder—but I dreaded the future. I bore in mind Pugh’s letter, his description of what he saw in Mexico when he accompanied an invading Army. My companions had their own thoughts & misgivings doubtless, but they breathed fire & defiance.9 By 1860, the year Abe Lincoln is elected president of the “United” States, steam is supplanting horseflesh: railroad mileage in the States has increased fourfold in the decade before the war. The South, however, often by choice, is being left behind as the nation industrializes. Only 20 percent of the nation’s railroads lie below the Mason-Dixon line; the broad rivers of the South serve well enough for the shipping of cotton and other agricultural products. Through birth and immigration, the total U.S. population has just about doubled every twenty years since independence, reaching more than thirty million by 1860. No longer composed only of North and South, the country includes the Northwest as well (or Midwest, as we now refer to it), a new source of political power. The delicate balance of the Senate has been upset. America’s changing. Spiderlike, the railroad is spreading its network of iron across the country. “The cars” move goods and people from city to city at a speed that alarms those used to horse-drawn wagons; crops reach eastern markets in days instead of weeks. The telegraph, moving information even faster, allows nearly instantaneous trading on financial markets (or, in times to come, the manipulation of distant men and armies). The telegraph fosters as well the growth of “national” newspapers, like Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. The Associated Press is formed in 1848, and local events like the Lincoln-Douglas debates receive wide coverage. America’s moving into the age of industry. The McCormick reaper, invented by a Virginian from the Shenandoah Valley, enables an expanding population of farmers in the prairie states to compete for world markets. (This machine, doing the work of many laborers, will soon allow a generation of young American farmers to leave their home fields for the battlefield; Grant later calls the reaper his secret weapon.) America’s changing—and the South is hanging back. Factories are sprouting up across the North, and their owners want a tariff levied on imported manufactured goods. But the South remains an agricultural society, and landowners rely for much of their income on the export of King Cotton: they produce, with slave labor, 80 percent of the world’s crop. They still import most of their manufactured goods from abroad— and hence, Southerners oppose a tax on imports. As Bob Dylan would say a century later, “The times they are achanging.” Walt Whitman: Those hot, sad, wrenching times—the army volunteers, all states, or North or South; the wounded, suffering, dying; the exhausting, sweating summers; marches, battles’ carnage; those trenches hurriedly heaped by the corpses, thousands, mainly unknown—will the America of the future, will this vast, rich Union ever realize what itself cost back there, after all? . . . O far-off reader, this whole book is indeed finally but a reminiscent memorial from thence by me to you.10