by John Jakes
Love and War was not written to demonstrate, again, that war is hell, though it is; or to show slavery, again, as our most heinous national crime, though arguably it is. Both ideas figure in the story, and not in a small way. But this is meant to be a tale about change as a universal force and constant, told in terms of a group of characters living through the greatest redefinition of America, in the shortest time, that we have ever experienced: the Civil War.
In his book Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, Professor James McPherson of Princeton splendidly characterizes the war as “the central event in the American historical consciousness… [It] preserved this nation from destruction and determined, in large measure, what sort of nation it would be. The war settled two fundamental issues … whether [the United States] was to be a nation with a sovereign national government, or a dissoluble confederation of sovereign states; and whether this nation, born of a declaration that all men are created with an equal right to liberty, was to continue to exist as the largest slave-holding country in the world.”
Beyond the essential element of a strong narrative, I felt the book needed three things if it were to do its job.
First, it needed detail. And not the detail of the more familiar events, either. As the book developed from a first draft on my typewriter through the final draft on my IBM PC, a new mental signboard was hung where I couldn’t miss it. (The permanent signboard, very old now, reads: Storytelling first.) The new one said: Not Gettysburg again.
The details I wanted were many from what I call the byways: the fascinating places novels about the Civil War seldom go. To the bottom of Charleston harbor, for instance, where the astonishing and astonishingly small, submersible Hunley forecast a dramatic change in naval warfare. Into the bureaucracy and the cavalry camps. To the work sites of an engineer battalion and a military railroad track crew. Inside Libby Prison, over to Liverpool, and back to the Ordnance Department in Washington, with its permanent parade of inventors, some sane, many mad. I even wanted to go onto a camp stage to show a bit of the Civil War equivalent of a USO show; the skit that Charles and Ab watch is authentic.
Hoping that what interests me would interest readers, I chose a number of these lesser-known byways and began the search, which took a year. There is certainly no shortage of material. Quoting McPherson again, “Perhaps it is simply because the conflict was so astonishingly rich and varied that it is inexhaustible.” Historian Burke Davis observed that “more than 100,000 volumes of [Civil War literature] have failed to tell the tale to the satisfaction of … readers.” Or of writers, for that matter. I could see no way to include a relatively recent, fascinating finding that in England, in the desperate late hours of the Confederacy, operatives may have developed a primitive two-stage guided missile. The device was allegedly shipped to a site in Virginia, then tested and fired at Washington. The burning of records in Richmond consumed whatever report may have been made of the missile’s performance, and we have no evidence that it struck or even came close to its target or, indeed, any evidence that it existed at all. No room for that story. And many more.
But I hope there are enough specifics, for only by means of them is it possible to take a stab at suggesting what it was like to serve in, and live through, the struggle.
Librarian-scholar Richard H. Shryock aptly stated the case for detail fifty years ago: “Political and military traditions, plus the apparent necessity for abstraction, rob historical writings of that realism which alone can convey a sense of the suffering involved in a great war. An historian’s description of the battle of Gettysburg is likely to tell of what occurred to Lee’s right wing, or to Longstreet’s corps, but rarely of what happened to [the bodies of] plain John Jones and the thousands like him… The historians might, however, picture reality and convey a sense of the costs involved if, in describing campaigns, they gave less space to tactics in the field and more to … the camps and hospitals.”
Amen. That is the reason Charles encounters the first land mines on the peninsula, and Cooper experiments with “torpedoes” (confusingly, that term at the time meant naval mines). That is one reason Cooper descends in Hunley, whose full-size replica stands outside the entrance of the Museum of the City of Charleston today. That is why there is less here about generals than about soldiers of lower rank tending their horses, losing company elections, getting ill, feeling homesick, reading tracts and pornography, scrounging food, sewing clothes, scratching lice.
One problem with some of the details of the war is their tendency to strain credulity because we gaze at them through a modern lens flawed by the circumstances and skepticism of our own time. Thus it may be hard to accept the virtual absence of presidential security even in the Executive Mansion, or the fact that Lincoln got his first solid news of the Fredericksburg defeat from an angry field correspondent frustrated by military censors, or that the unsteady General Burnside, in connection with the same engagement, consulted his personal chef for strategic advice. The reader must take particulars like these on faith; they are not invented, no matter how odd they may seem.
Some of the details that are fictional have a sound and reasoned base in possibility. Powell’s scheme, for one—no more unlikely than the real plan to establish a “third nation” by joining the Upper South—the so-called border states—with the Middle West. This idea was afloat in Richmond during the winter of ’62-’63. A Pacific Confederacy, also mentioned in the novel, was widely rumored early in the war.
The assassination plot against Davis is an invention, but it, too, seems logical in view of two givens. One, if Lincoln was constantly considered an assassin’s target, why not his Confederate counterpart? Especially since—two—Davis was just as passionately hated, most notably by some from his own cotton South. I sometimes wonder if the few present-day Southerners who ride around in pickups adorned with crass license plates declaring Hell no I ain’t fergittin’! have ever heard of Messrs. Brown and Vance—the war governors of Georgia and North Carolina respectively—surely two of the most venomous enemies a Chief Executive ever had. Furiously waving the banner of states’ rights, they damned and defied the central government, withheld men, uniforms, and shoes the army desperately needed, and generally did as much, or more, damage as many a Union field commander.
Neither governor is here accused of sinister plotting. But a man such as Powell, whose remedy for grievance is bullets, is not that far removed from those like Brown and Vance who continually screamed “dictator” and “despot” at Jefferson Davis.
The second ingredient I needed, also mentioned in the Afterword of North and South, was accuracy.
I don’t mean infallibility. In a novel this long and complex, it’s impossible to be perfect. But it’s absolutely necessary to try. I had a sharp lesson on the point during the early stages of work.
Always a fan of Errol Flynn films, I taped and watched one I hadn’t seen for years—Santa Fe Trail. It was released by Warner Brothers in 1940 and is still shown frequently on television. It includes the following men as members of the West Point class of 1854. Jeb Stuart, played by Flynn—-that, at least, is correct. There is also Longstreet (class of ’42), Pickett (’46), Hood (’53), and Stuart’s best pal, George Custer (’61). Young Custer is portrayed by young Ronald Reagan.
During the course of the muddled plot—Flynn devotees consider it one of his lesser efforts for Warner’s—we meet a silver-haired actor cast as a familiar character type, the Distinguished Businessman. This Distinguished Businessman possesses a Kansas railroad and a daughter whom Jeb marries. In other words, Jeb doesn’t come anywhere close to doing what he really did: wed the daughter of Philip St. George Cooke, the career officer who became his sworn foe in the war and the man he attempted to humiliate as part of his ride around McClellan.
Stuart’s endlessly grinning sidekick Custer is forced to settle for an insipid blond, the daughter of Jeff Davis. Davis is made up to look like a bargain-basement Lincoln; the girl resembles a chorine from a Betty G
rable musical.
Even worse, it’s a curiously spineless film when dealing with the slave question. The cavalrymen at one point fight John Brown in “bloody”—sic—Kansas, but Stuart and Custer mutually declare that “others” must “decide” about slavery. They just “carry out orders” and presumably have no opinions on national issues.
Well, not many, anyway. At one point Custer makes a mild statement on behalf of the abolitionist position. He is at once reprimanded. The script then requires Reagan to grin sheepishly and say, “Sorry.”
The film is relevant to the matter of accuracy in this way. Since people, not machines, write novels—and screenplays—the re-creation of any chunk of the past will more than likely result in at least a few mistakes. (I made a dandy in connection with coinage in the first book of this trilogy.) But unintentional errors are not quite the same as gross revisions of the record, perpetrated for heaven knows what reason, and obviously tolerated in many novels, but most notoriously in motion pictures. The technique is what I call “History à la Polo Lounge.” I hope readers have found none of it here.
In fairness, it must be said that film producers are not the only individuals guilty of doctoring the past. As a people, we all tend to be mythmakers as the generations pass. Thus our icon version of Lincoln is forever the all-knowing, eternally calm idealist and humanitarian, rather than the doubt-ridden, depressive, and widely hated political pragmatist who was lifted to greatness by necessity and his own conscience. Our Lee is the eternally benign hero seated on Traveller, not a soldier whose ability was suspect, whose decisions were often questioned, and who received the scorn of many fellow Confederates through nicknames such as “Granny” and “Retreating” Lee.
We mythologize not only individuals but also the war itself. Perhaps the Polo Lounge-effect, the remove of most serious historians from the personal elements—there are splendid exceptions, such as the late Bell I. Wiley—and our own quite natural human tendency to prefer the glamorous to the grimy, have combined to put a patina on the war. To render it romantic. It was—for about ninety days. After that came horror. And the horror grew.
Yet the dewy visions persist.
Although Gone With the Wind is a film deserving of all the admiration and honor it has received, the reason is not its faithful re-creation of history; the picture is a romance. Sanitized battles occur—briefly—in montages, or on title cards. Atlanta burning is a grand action spectacle, but says little about personal tragedy. Slavery is never an issue; the house blacks at Tara are happy, cute, and apparently content. And despite a few hospital scenes, genuine suffering is never depicted, except in the famous depot shot with the camera crane rising and rising to reveal, gradually and with devastating power, more and more and more maimed men.
It may be unfair to judge a classic by standards other than those of its own time. On the other hand, most of the social views of Charles Dickens hold up today. Those of GWTW don’t.
In 1939, white Americans considered it all right for Butterfly McQueen and Hattie McDaniel to be cute though enslaved, just as it was all right for Mantan Moreland to play a stereotyped succession of railway porters and other servitors in Charlie Chan pictures; the black actor was usually required to demonstrate Comical Negro Cowardice by trembling, exhibiting saucer eyes, and speaking lines such as the famous “Feet, don’t fail me now!”
My problems with the magisterial GWTW, which I love with shameless emotion despite its clear negative aspects, are two. First, it is the major film representation of the war, thus an implicit validation of its own dubious morality. Second, only one recent picture that I can recall—David L. Wolper’s landmark production of Roots—comes close to matching it for popular stature and impact. Yet that enduring acclaim may be valuable as a continuing reminder of the difference between the standards of the thirties and a newer America; the difference between the myth and the truth.
Occasionally there are works of fiction—Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, the landmark Andersonville, the wonderful The Killer Angels—that cut to the bone and expose the truth about the war. The truth that the legends of perpetual chivalry and decency at all levels, beginning to end, are false. Along with correct detail, I sought this larger sense of truth throughout the book. Whether I found it is not a judgment that is mine to make.
On the trail of accuracy, I rewalked every one of the eastern battle sites and historical parks. I had visited most before, but not all. I saw little Brandy Station on a beautiful spring day in 1982. That same week, I spent the whole of a foggy wet Saturday at Antietam. There were few present beyond those the markers and monuments conjured. It was a dark and moving day.
In passages dealing with battles and campaigns, readers may have noticed that there is little use of the names and numbers of military units. An army table of organization is always complex, but that’s doubly true in the Civil War, since the armies on both sides were restructured several times to suit the ideas of the particular general in command. I believe the alpha-numerical hash of armies and corps, divisions and regiments is chiefly of interest to the specialist. When used, as it is so often, as the backbone of an account of a battle, it leaves me confused and irritated. That is why I avoided it. Nevertheless, I endeavored to put units important to the story in the right place at the right time.
A couple of other points must be mentioned to keep the record straight.
Wade Hampton did have “Iron Scouts,” but the ones whose exploits are described are fictitious.
Remarks of senators taking part in the 1863 debate over H.R. 611—the West Point appropriation bill—are excerpted from the Congressional Globe for January 15, 1863. Although my version of the content and general flow of the floor fight is accurate, the actual debate was far more windy. In transcript it runs ten pages, three columns per page, in miniature type. I have also chosen widely separated sentences from long statements by Ben Wade and other speakers and arranged these into shorter pieces of oratory. Where I’ve taken liberties, I have abridged the factual record, not invented a new one.
To one deliberate long step from the true path, I plead guilty. I voted against trying to duplicate what Douglas Southall Freeman rightly termed the period’s “ornate conversational style.” For a reason. “Even the casual conversation … was, by present-day usage, deliberate and stiff.” Billy’s fellow engineering officer, Farmer, is a character meant to give a flavor of this style, but only a flavor.
The third ingredient I needed was help. Help from experts who knew the answers to specific questions. Help from individuals who assisted in areas not directly connected with research. And help from those who gave support just by being there. I want to thank them all publicly and at the same time absolve them of all responsibility for possible mishandling of any reference material they provided. Nor are they responsible for my interpretations of fact, or the story, in part or in total.
I begin with Ruth Gaul, of the Hilton Head Island Library, who patiently processed and kept track of my long list of requests for interlibrary loan materials. The secondary source books, the diaries, letter collections, monograph and training manual photocopies, maps, and other references consulted approach three hundred. There’s even a slim but fascinating collection of Confederate wartime recipes, many of them food substitutes. Without Ruth and the equally helpful people at the Beaufort County and South Carolina State libraries, the research job would have been all but impossible.
I also owe much, as does every Civil War student, to The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies—the O.R., as it’s commonly called. This monumental and justly famed work was begun in 1864 and completed in 1927: It runs to 128 volumes, not counting the separate atlases. I have a friend who owns one of the very few complete sets in private hands in this country. For invaluable help, I hereby thank him, though not by name, because he prefers to remain anonymous.
In Liverpool, K. J. Williams, honorable secretary of the Merseyside Confederate
Navy History Society, and Cliff Thornton, curator of the Williamson Museum and Art Gallery, Birkenhead, became new friends while proving themselves expert guides to the various sites connected with the Confederacy. To Jerry, my thanks are almost inexpressible. And I shall never forget the windy summer afternoon Cliff and my wife and I received dispensation to enter a fenced patch of land on the bank of the Mersey, where we gazed down, at low tide, on some slipways Cliff himself had never seen before—perhaps the very ways where Alabama was built. No one knows exactly which ways held her, but the abandoned land is the site of Laird’s in the 1860s. That is a thrill of discovery to be remembered always.
Senator Ernest Hollings and Ms. Jan Buvinger and her staff at the Charleston Public Library helped me track down a copy of the fascinating, if prolix, West Point appropriation bill debate.
My friend Jay Mundhenk, whose Civil War expertise is matched only by his skill as chef and host, solved several difficult problems about operations in northern Virginia when I was at a dead end.
Robert E. Schnare, chief, Special Collections Division of the Library at the U.S. Military Academy, was generous and helpful in matters as diverse as the daily whereabouts of the Army of the Potomac’s Battalion of Engineers throughout the war and the contents of the cavalry tactics manual in use at the beginning. As with North and South, the cooperation of the West Point library has been all an author could wish for.
Arnold Graham Smith, M.D., was invaluable on medical matters. Other special questions were answered with the help of Belden Lee Daniels; Peggy Gilmer; Dr. Thomas L. Johnson, of the South Caroliniana Library; Bob Merritt, of the Richmond Times-Dispatch; Donna Payne, president of the Rochester, New York, Civil War Roundtable; John E. Stanchak, editor of Civil War Times; and Dan Starer. Two of my daughters, Dr. Andrea Jakes-Schauer and Victoria Jakes Montgomery, helped with work on special topics.
In addition to the gratitude expressed to my editor in the dedication, I cannot overlook a number of other people in publishing.