With charity for all

At the end of 1862, in the wake the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam, Abraham Lincoln took a bloody and ugly Civil War to a far higher level – he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  In bold and ringing words it was declared;

That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free...

I first heard this recited at the end of one episode of Ken Burn’s excellent TV documentary on the Civil War, contrasting images of brutalised slaves and black Union soldiers, all against a rousing chorus of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.  It was an emotional moment.

Emotional indeed.  The only thing is that the proclamation itself, for all its nobility, was a wartime executive order, one based purely on the authority of the President.  It was not the law of the land and - without the sanction of Congress - it had no abiding legal validity.  In other words, those slaves forever free might just as quickly have been back in chains if the war had been brought to a quick conclusion and the President’s authority challenged by the courts.  Emancipation Proclamation or not, slavery was still the law of the land.

It was the movie Lincoln that brought this simple truth home to me, one that I had previously overlooked.  I’ve always admired Stephen Spielberg as a director, one of the great masters of the cinematic medium.  In Lincoln he has surpassed himself, just as Daniel Day-Lewis has in his depiction of the sixteenth President of the United States, at once full of folksy wisdom and political shrewdness of an unparalleled order.  The screenplay by Tony Kushner is a commendable reduction of Doris Kearns Godwin’s monumental The Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln down to manageable cinematic size.

Lincoln is not a biopic, not a log cabin to White House odyssey.  It is, rather, a bold focus on a narrow window of Lincoln's  political life – the attempt in January, 1865 to get the House of Representatives to pass a Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, already approved by the Senate, abolishing slavery altogether. 

This is real touch and go stuff; for the House has previously rejected the measure and the War is drawing to a close.  It’s quite conceivable that the struggle could have ended with the status quo ante bellum, settling nothing at all but the Southern States continuing membership of the Union. 

Even without the Southern representatives in Congress the matter is not clear cut.  Even within the President’s own Republican Party the matter is not clear cut.  The Radical Republicans, headed by Thaddeus Stevens – a scorching performance by a bewigged Tommy Lee Jones – believe in the equality of all.  But the Conservative Republicans, headed by Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook), are content to leave slavery in place, if only the war can be brought to an end. 

Sniping from the sidelines is the Democratic opposition, headed by George H. Pendleton (Pete McRobbie) and Fernando Wood (Lee Pace).  Many of them are Confederate sympathisers; some of them are outright racists.  But so, too, are many on the Republican side, which forces Stevens to hold his oratorical fire on the issue of equality of the races during one crucial debate, simply to ensure that the Amendment stands a chance of passing. 

Overseeing it all is the President, the consummate ringmaster, well able to resort to high-minded rhetoric, political intrigue and wheeler-dealing as the occasion demands, even if it demands paying off opponents with promises of office.  All the balls are in the air.  Not only does he have to manage his party, his cabinet and Congress, he also has to manage his wife!  Here we have another great performance, Sally Field as the highly strung and borderline crazy Mary Todd Lincoln.  The scene between her and Stevens, whom she hated, at a White House reception positively sparks! 

Lincoln is my sort of move, an intelligent, well-crafted and highly literate depiction of one of the great crossroads in American history.  Although the President, to gain the support of the Conservative Republicans, has had to invite a Southern peace delegation north, unbeknown to Secretary of State William H. Seward (David Strathairn), he does his best to make sure that little progress is made, either in travels or in talks.  The truth is - something I had not previously considered -, until such time as the Fourteenth Amendment is passed, for the President the war had to go on.

I don’t want to give you the impression that Lincoln is a high school history lesson; it’s not. Despite the narrowness of focus it’s as exciting a piece of political drama and intrigue as I have ever seen.  There are also some wonderful comic moments, particularly those involving a team of none too scrupulous lobbyists, headed by James Spader as William Bilbo, on a mission to approach wavering Democrats with offers they can’t refuse!   

I really can’t praise Day-Lewis’ performance too highly, a statement I suspect is in danger of turning into a cliché.  I will be amazed if he is not recognised at the forthcoming Academy Awards, but the Academy has a track record of amazing me.  This is Lincoln as I imagine Lincoln, full of unaffected charm and cracker barrel wisdom, backed up by shrewdness, by an intellect as sharp as flint and by a natural ability to read and manage people. 

It should also be stressed that both director and actor have done an excellent job in chipping away at the legend to give us a wholly plausible human being.  Lincoln does not walk on water; he is shown as a tough political operator, as canny as they come; Honest Abe at one moment, Machiavellian Abe at the next.  The actor carries the man to perfection, even in the quiet, unassuming tones of his voice, quite a leap, since nobody alive has ever heard the real voice!

To manage a war, to manage a government, to manage a cabinet, to manage Congress, to manage all of this and the pressures of domestic life is the task of a Titan.  Lincoln captures something of the scale and sweep here, the narrowness of focus notwithstanding.  Spielberg handles his subject with masterful ease, eschewing some of the showmanship that he is noted for in past movies.  Even when we fast forward to April 1865 the end comes not, as one might have expected, in Ford’s Theatre, but another theatre altogether, where a show attended by Lincoln’s youngest son Tad (Gulliver McGrath) is interrupted with news of the President’s assassination.

The movie finishes with a flash back to the second inaugural address, those wonderful words by a man who really did have malice towards none and charity for all.  At this point my tears are liberally flowing.  I had to wait until the end of the credits before risking a public appearance.   

Firing the First Shot

Liberty and no Union

Secession is in the air.  I’ve been keeping an eye on the rapidly evolving situation in the States.  The latest information I have is that the Texas petition now has well over 110,000 signatures, almost four times over the threshold for an official response on the White House’s We the People website. 

The 25,000 signature threshold has also been exceeded in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee, with some other states not far behind.  Nationally the petitions lodged in all fifty states have collected close on a million signatures.  America wants to leave America! 

This is all great fun.  I don’t take it seriously and I’m certain that the vast majority of signatories do not take it seriously either.  But it’s most certainly boosted spirits on the American right, deflated by Romney’s defeat.  It shows how agile Americans are at bouncing back.  The people are using We the People in a way that Obama could never have anticipated when the site was set up.  The comment in the Washington Post was spot on; there is indeed something empowering about putting your name on a document that sticks it to the establishment.

I’m a secessionist.  Oh, not so far as the United States is concerned.  That’s a Union best preserved.  It’s the European Union I want my country to leave.  I have little doubt that a secession petition here would gather hundreds of thousands of signatures in a very short time.  But it Americans have some form of empowerment, even if only in online petitions, we have none at all.  All of the main parties are committed to membership of Europe.  David Cameron, the Prime Minister, may blow a little anti-European wind from time to time, but that’s all it is – wind. 

Day by day the European monster eats away at English freedom, imposing upon us foreign laws and foreign customs.  It’s taking liberties, liberties that were once ours.  What I resent most of all is that we have become the victims of France’s fear of Germany and Germany’s fear of itself.  We have become the victims of a history that is not ours, of a political and dictatorial style that is most assuredly not ours.  Secession is the only way of rediscovering ourselves, of reclaiming our own past and our own traditions. 

I call to mind Edmund Ruffin.  If you’ve never heard the name he was a political activist in the Old South, a Virginian and a strong believer in states' rights and secession.  He was in South Carolina when it became the first state to leave the Union in December, 1860.  He is also reputed to have fired the first shot on the Federal garrison at Fort Sumter, thereby beginning the Civil War. 

Well, now, I hate the European Union as much as Ruffin hated the Federal Union.  I hope in my lifetime to see my country take the road to secession.  If we ever have a referendum on membership I would be delighted to fire the first shot.  

The War of Northern Greed

It’s October, 1861. In American the Civil War has been underway for some months, really just the overture to what was to become a tragedy of epic proportions. That same month a German exile living in London summed up the situation as he saw it – “The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty,”

A few months later similar sentiments were to be found in the words of another writer, an Englishman of impeccable liberal credentials – “The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.” He goes on to say "...Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils... The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel."

Who were these men? Karl Marx was the first and Charles Dickens the second, not people one would expect to have very much in common, the prophet of world revolution and the prophet of moral reform, the one a hard-nosed theorist and the other a bourgeois sentimentalist. But they were both, in their individual ways, absolutely right: the War Between the States had nothing to with slavery or any other great issue of principle.

But myths die hard if they die at all. I open the latest issue of the BBC History Magazine. There is an article by Paul Cartledge, professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge, on slavery in Classical Athens (Democrats and Slaves). He offers this view in his preamble – “One hundred and fifty years ago…the northern and southern States of the (dis)United States went to war in large part over these very issues.”

I think that’s the answer one would get from most people, even those who are only vaguely aware of the details - that it was all about human bondage, all about the virtuous North and the wicked South.

I watched, and enjoyed, Ken Burns' television documentary about the Civil War a while ago. I remember the episode, soon after the Battle of Antietam, when parts of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation were read, all very moving, cut with images of a black people as slaves and then black people as soldiers in the Union Army, all against a rousing chorus of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Yes, it was great television…and wholly misleading history.

It was good to see a corrective to the mythology in History Today, where Tim Stanley writes on the North-South Divide in the Contrarian section of the magazine. It’s a return to first principles, a return to the Victorian view of Marx and Dickens. This was not a war about morality; it was a war about naked self-interest. Slavery was certainly an issue between the States but it was far from being the most significant; no, that rested on the altogether more mundane issue of revenues and taxes, which had been poisoning relations for years.

We are dealing with two economies – the rural economy of the South and the nascent industrial economy of the North. But it’s more than that. Northern industrialisation was effectively built on Southern backs; built, it also has to be said, on the backs of Southern slaves. To protect domestic industry from foreign competition, Congress imposed crippling import taxes, which hit the South particular hard because it had to buy the machinery it needed from abroad.

In the 1850s, in the wake of an economic downturn, Congress increased duties from fifteen to thirty-seven percent. In a mood of outrage Southerners began to consider the virtues of secession. An alarmist editorial then appeared in the Chicago Daily Times. If the South left the Union;

…in one single blow, our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than half of what it is now. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all its immense profits.

Not a word about the morality of trading with the Slave Empire, not a word about the morality of slavery. Secession meant war, but war less for the preservation of the Union as a great political principle, more for the preservation of the economic dominance of the North.

For the South the election of Lincoln in 1860 was the final confirmation of all of its fears, not because the Great Liberator was a threat to their ‘peculiar institution’ – he wasn’t – but because the ‘black’ Republicans represented a coalition of interests inimical to the whole Southern way of life. That year the outcome of the presidential election, as Stanley puts it, was interpreted in the South as a Northern coup d'état.

For almost two years the North fought to reimpose its hegemony without giving any thought to the question of slavery. The Republican Party was opposed to slavery but it was not abolitionist; and, yes, there is a very big difference. When Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the mawkish Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as “the little lady who started this big war” it was nothing but the worst kind of political hyperbole and cant.

The Emancipation Proclamation, for all its high-minded rhetoric, was even more hyperbole and cant. It only freed slaves in areas beyond Union control. It did not free them in the Border States or those areas under Northern occupation. Even William H. Steward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, remarked on the obvious hypocrisy – “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

Slavery is a great moral evil but let’s not be confused about the issues here: the Civil War was about Northern greed more than Southern iniquity.

The Lost Cause

In Edinburgh there is a memorial to the Scots who fought in the Union Army during the American Civil War. You will find it in the Old Calton Burial Ground, just across from the spot where David Hume, the leading thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment, happens to be interred.

It’s quite an impressive piece of work. There, at the top of a plinth, stands Abraham Lincoln in splendid isolation. At the bottom there is another statue, that of a freed slave, holding up his hands in supplication and gratitude, now a rather unfashionable nineteenth century motif. On the east face the monument carries the following inscription – “In memory of Scottish American soldiers. To preserve the jewel of liberty in the framework of peace – Abraham Lincoln.” Yes, it’s impressive, an impressive contribution to a post-bellum mythology.

We have not long passed the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, with the attack in April 1861 on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour. To mark the occasion there was an article in one of my history periodicals by Doctor Thomas E Sebrell, a specialist on the subject.

It was particularly good because it corrected several misconceptions that I had, the chief among which was that the residual sympathy for the Confederacy amongst the British manufacturing and ruling class was finally eclipsed by Lincoln’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, which made intervention on behalf of the South all but impossible. The fact is that this was another ‘wrong move’ on the part of Lincoln, one in a series.

Let me begin by saying that Britain had long been in the front of the campaign against international slavery. The slave trade was abolished by Parliament in the early part of the century and slavery itself abolished throughout the Empire in the late 1830s. During the secession crisis following Lincoln’s election as President in November, 1860 any latent sympathy for the emerging Confederacy was effectively submerged by its adherence to the ‘peculiar institution.’ This changed when Lincoln announced that his chief objective was to preserve the Union, not to end slavery.

There were excellent domestic reasons for this: he did not want to alienate the border slave states, particularly Kentucky, of vital strategic importance to the Union cause, but in doing so he lost the moral high ground in Europe. In a letter to Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, the Foreign Secretary, said that the North aimed not at liberation but at conquest. Suspicion of Lincoln was compounded after the introduction of a naval blockade against the South, which starved British manufactures of vital cotton supplies.

It was tricky time. Lincoln may have gained Kentucky but he risked the intervention of a powerful naval adversary on behalf of the South, an intervention that was likely to carry widespread popular appeal in Britain after the Trent, a British mail packet sailing from Southampton to Cuba, was intercepted by a Union vessel on the high seas and two Confederate diplomats effectively kidnapped. Queen Victoria was even moved to write in her diary of the Yankees that “They are such ruffians.” When Prince Albert saw Palmerston and Russell’s letter demanding the release of the diplomats he remarked that this means war.

It was thanks to the Prince’s diplomatic rewording of this bristling missive, and the prompt action of Washington in releasing the Confederates, that there was no war. But sympathy for the South continued on the upswing. By December 1863 the Southern Independence Association, formed in Manchester with the intention of forcing Parliament to recognise the government of Jefferson Davis, had chapters in almost fifty cities and towns across Britain and Ireland. In Parliament over seventy MPs were known to favour the South in contrast with only seventeen for the North.

Palmerston was only waiting for the right moment, either to offering mediation with a view to recognising the Confederacy, or taking such action unilaterally. Robert E. Lee’s retreat from Maryland after the Battle of Antietam in September, 1862 stayed his hand, but then came another dangerous moment for the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by Lincoln in the wake of Antietam, was widely condemned in Britain, not celebrated.

Remember, Lincoln had not abolished slavery, merely ‘freed’ the slaves who were held in those states beyond Union control. That is to say, in both the Border States and those areas of the Confederacy under the occupation of Union troops slavery remained firmly in place. Russell branded the act as a hypocritical and an illegal violation of the American constitution, which turned slavery itself into a “reward for loyalty.”

So slavery and declining sympathy for the Southern cause had nothing to do with the British reluctance to intervene. The real reason was, as Sebrell argues, quite simple; technical innovations in naval warfare, the introduction of both sides in the conflict of ironclads, had, by the summer of 1863, made the British Navy, hitherto the most powerful in the world, obsolete. A test was carried out on HMS Warrior, the most technically advanced the Royal Navy had, a huge ship itself partially ironclad, to see if it could withstand an onslaught by the squat and ugly little vessels whose prototype was the Monitor. Palmerston was told that every round from the sea monsters had penetrated the Warrior’s iron plates with ease. At that moment it was the Union, not the British, who ruled the waves. At that moment the Confederate cause in Britain was lost.

In the end all that survived was a certain nostalgia, evidenced by the free-standing statue of General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, put up in Capitol Square in Richmond, Virginia in 1875, with funds provided by his English admirers, a reminder the politics were not quite as simple as the Lincoln statue in Edinburgh would suggest.

Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag!

We are now close to the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the events that led to the outbreak of the American Civil War. Southerners are getting ready to commemorate the secession on 20 December, 1860 of South Carolina, the first state the leave the Union, following the election in the previous November of Abraham Lincoln as president.

The event is to be marked by a ball, with guests expected to appear in formal wear, black tie or of the period itself, or even in pre-war militia uniform. There will also be a re-enactment of the signing of the Ordinance of Secession, with Glenn McConnell, acting president of the South Carolina Senate, playing the part of David Jamison, who chaired the 1860 convention that agreed on secession.

Other events are to follow in the course of the coming year, including a re-enactment of the swearing in of Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama on February 11, 1861, an occasion to be heralded by rifle and cannon salutes.

According to a press report that I read at the weekend, civil rights groups are greeting these commemorations in a mood of outrage. Dr Lonnie Randolph, president of the South Carolina branch of the NACCP, the black civil rights group, has gone so far as to liken the coming Charleston ball to a ‘Holocaust gala.’ His organisation is planning protests, accusing the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, the body behind many of the planned commemorations, of trying to ‘rewrite history.’

Replay history, I would have thought, rather than rewrite it. There seems to be such nonsense here, a reminder of the pressure to have the Confederate stars and bars removed from state flags in the South. Yes, of course, slavery is an issue, one I dare say that still leaves a sense of grievance with some people, but the Civil War was about so much more. If anything it’s the key event not just in the history of the South but the whole of the United States, one that deserves to be remembered without rancour.

Still, when it comes to rancour, the South has its own justifiable grievances, things that are not often displayed in the way that slavery is displayed. I personally cannot perceive William Tecumseh Sherman, whatever military necessity he pursued, other than as a callous man, one who led a campaign of rapine through Georgia. If his was a war against the capacity to make war it was also a war against women and children. He may not have been directly responsible for the excesses of his troops both during and after the siege of Atlanta but he set a mood that saw wilful destruction, looting and rape, of black women as well as white.

OK, you have me; I’m biased; my sympathies are all for the South, not really a secret because I’ve made this perfectly plain in related blogs, most recently in Daughter of the Confederacy. I will repeat, though, that I think slavery was an abomination and secession an error but I simply cannot rid myself of an abiding affection for the residual romance of the Old South, based on my love, from long experience, of the New South in general and Georgia in particular. The old Confederacy has every right to remember and celebrate its past, with affection as well as regret. So, here’s to the memory of the Bonnie Blue Flag, to the memory of Mars Robert, Stonewall Jackson and Old Pete. Let’s hear it boys!

The valley of death

Dedicated to Ike Jakson

Try to imagine a place worse than Dachau. It’s impossible, you say. Then imagine, if you will, Dachau just as overcrowded but without the huts, without a clean water supply, without any kind of sanitation; just a palisade with watchtowers around an open field. Imagine people, thousands of people, suffering in confined conditions under an open sky, winter and summer, the only source of water being a marshy stream which rapidly turns into a sewer, a breeding ground for maggots and disease. This is not Germany; this is not Dachau. This is America; this is Andersonville.

Thanks to Ike Jakson, a fellow blogger, I’ve read Andersonville, the 1955 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by MacKinlay Kantor. It’s set during the American Civil War, for the most part in and around Andersonville, a prisoner of war camp near the town of Anderson in Georgia, which opened in February 1864. In just over twenty-six acres thousands of Union prisoners were penned as in a zoo, with no shelter other than their own rough shebangs, holes dug in the ground, covered with blankets or coats propped up with sticks. In the year or so it was open an estimated 45 thousand men passed through its gates; almost 13 thousand never passed out again, other than to the grave, dead of malnutrition, neglect, malaria, diarrhoea, scurvy and gangrene.

Andersonville is a powerful novel, one of the most powerful I’ve ever read, and I say that without a trace of exaggeration. Kantor spent years on background research, evidenced in his writing, material he handles with ease, fully digested, unlike so many other historical novels. It could, given the subject, have been an angry book, a bleak book, but it’s not; it’s a book full of gentle understanding and humanity. There are parts that are difficult to read, there is real horror, but there is nothing lurid, nothing overstated in Kantor’s treatment.


It’s a mixture of fact and fiction, a mixture of real people and wholly believable characters: unforgettable characters like Ira Claffey and his daughter Lucy, who live on a plantation close to the camp, and Nathan Dreyfoos, a cultured man, a Union prisoner, carried to Andersonville by chance and fate. There are others, large and small, people the author takes from their homes and guides them through his pages, sometimes invisible, other times not. It’s a story, in so many ways, of intersected lives and intersected destinies.

In Dachau the Nazis imposed a brutish order, with guards in the camp and designated block orderlies. In Andersonville, or Camp Sumter, to give its official name, there was no order or policing. The authorities stayed outside for the most part, allowing the prisoners to manage the best they could. The worst was a kind of jungle, a Darwinian struggle of the strong against the weak.

For me this was the most depressing part of the story, that predatory gangs known as Raiders organised themselves to steal from their already impoverished comrades, not stopping short of murder. This is not fiction; this really happened and it continued to happen until other prisoners formed their own police force, the Regulators, imposing a kind of order in the midst of misery. The order went so far as trying and condemning the leaders of the Raiders, a process carried out with the cooperation of the camp authorities.

The authority, the person with immediate responsibility for Andersonville, was one Captain Henry Wirz, of Swiss German origin, the only person convicted and executed after the Civil War of what we now refer to as war crimes. Kantor does not condemn him, no; he merely presents him as a self-pitying, ineffectual and rather wretched little man, an obvious scapegoat. His greater culprit is General John H Winder,responsible for the whole of the Confederate prison system, depicted as a callous and brutish individual who, along with his son, is alleged to have deliberately engineered death by neglect.

It’s as well to remember, though, that Andersonville is a novel, not a history. In the spirit of poetic licence some liberties are taken with the facts. There is not the least doubt about the callous indifference with which many of the Confederate authorities perceived the Union prisoners, but the camp opened at a time when the Southern state itself was dying; at a time when supply was breaking down, when shortages were commonplace; a time when even soldiers in the field went hungry. This is not to excuse what happened at Andersonville, to excuse the dehumanisation, merely to offer a wider understanding.

Of the dozens of novels I’ve read this year Andersonville is by far the best, only equalled by Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, by coincidence another account set against a background of war. Kantor writes in a lucid and compelling fashion, a narrative that quickly engages and carries one along. He writes in a wholly believable way about wholly believable people. Some books are instantly forgettable, no matter how enjoyable. This is a book that cannot be forgotten, one destined to leave a perpetual afterimage in my mind.

Daughter of the Confederacy

I have a fascination with all things connected with the American Civil War. My recent blog on Gone with the Wind was a hint on how much this period intrigues me, in many ways the defining stage of American history, the terrible furnace in which the nation was melted down and reformed in its modern shape. I have an interest in all aspects of the struggle, the political, the social and the military. I know, girls are not supposed to like tales of soldiers and tactics and strategy, but I do!

My interest originates in being taken to some of the sites associated with the conflict when I was quite young. I’ve read quite a lot now, both fiction and nonfiction, including Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, the tales of Ambrose Bierce and Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels. I watched every episode of Ken Burns TV documentary, some of which made me cry, particularly the episode that concluded with Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife, written before his death at the First Battle of Bull Run. I’ve enjoyed some of the Civil War movies I’ve seen, Gone with the Wind, obviously, and more recent offerings like Gettysburg, Glory, Cold Mountain and Ride with the Devil.

The best historical treatment I’ve read to date is The Battle Cry of Freedom by James Macpherson. Although written some years ago it has yet to be surpassed. I was going to buy Amanda Foreman’s recently published The World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided. This interested me because it explores the question of British peripheral involvement. The problem is the reviews have been quite mixed, some glowing, others quite damning. It’s worth having a look at some of the polar positions on Amazon UK. I do so hope I’m not missing something significant here, but when I’m told that the author gets some very elementary facts wrong and that her book does not even contain a bibliography – a major oversight – then I do think this is probably best avoided.

Thanks to Ike Jakson, another blogger, my bedtime reading at present is Andersonville by McKinlay Kantor, a novel which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956. I’m now about a quarter of the way through, two hundred pages down, another six hundred to go! It tells the story of the notorious Camp Sumter, a Confederate prisoner of war camp near the town of Anderson in Georgia. Because of this the camp was more generally known to the inmates as Andersonville. I intend to review it in due course so I don’t want to say too much at present but I’m completely beguiled, horrified and fascinated at one and the same time.

Last year I read Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, a grossly overrated novel set largely in the Eastern Front during the Second World War. It carried one blurb comparing it to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, no more than stupid hyperbole. There is only one novel that I have read so far that could stand this comparison – Vassily Grossman’s superlative Life and Fate. But Kantor is looking really promising, a tremendous panorama of people and events, a great ebb and flow.

Looking at the war as an event in history I ask myself if it is it wise to take sides? No, of course it’s not, but I’ve never been wise! My sympathies have always been with lost causes; my sympathies are with the men and women of the Confederacy. You see I have a very selective imagination: I can abstract out the degradation of humans as chattel, the horror of Andersonville and the other tragedies of an epic and tragic struggle. My romantic vision allows me to embrace the idea of the Confederacy, if not all aspects of the reality. So, in Dixie Land I’ll make my stand. :-)

Tomorrow is another day

Knowing full well the danger in defining anything as the ‘greatest’ I’m still prepared to take the risk: Gone with the Wind is the greatest movie ever made! Not only is it a splendid piece of cinema, which won ten Oscars, an achievement rarely passed, but it went a long way to reshaping perceptions of the past. It created history by recreating the Old South as a vanished civilization, as a land of cavaliers and grand ladies. It’s a myth, I know, but it’s captivating and beautiful notwithstanding.

Based on Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling novel of the same name, Gone with the Wind, released in 1939 in the early months of another conflict, is the defining epic of the American Civil War, one that helped give Southerners a new sense of pride, still reflected today in the Confederate heritage and memento industry. I know the South, Georgia in particular, and I’ve long had my own romantic attraction to things past;

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South…Here in this pretty world Gallantry took it’s last bow…Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave…Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered…A Civilization gone with the wind…

The objections arise at once, do they not? A land of slaves- this was no idyll, how could it be? Although widely praised at the time, the movie was still criticised by some for its whitewashed depictions of slavery, though generally people were a lot less sensitive to these issues in the 1930s than they are now. But slavery and the politics of slavery actually play a very small part in the movie, unlike Mitchell’s book, where the racism is blatant.

David Selznik, the movie’s producer, asked Sidney Howard, the principal screenwriter, to remove all reference to the Ku Klux Klan –though it features in a key scene in the novel -, because he was determined not to produce “an unintentional advertisement for intolerant societies in these fascist-ridden times.” It’s true that the black actors had to conform to the stereotypes of the day, but they are still depicted in a positive if patronising light. Even within these circumscribed limits there are some outstanding performances. Hattie McDaniel, who plays the larger than life figure of Mammy, was the first black actor to win an Oscar, that for best supporting actress.

If Gone with the Wind is not about slavery, in a deeper sense it’s not even about the Civil War, which only features as a background to the first half: it’s about survival; it’s about a determination to survive. It’s the story of Scarlett O’ Hara, played by Vivian Leigh, and her struggle to surmount the twin disasters of war and personal loss, to preserve her beloved Tara, the plantation home in which she grew up. She begins, before the war has had a chance to make its presence felt, as a rather shallow, self-centred individual. But as time and chance take over she finds new depths within herself, finds new strength, becoming an icon of renewal. For me the symbolism is obvious: Scarlett, a figure I love, is the South, for whom tomorrow was to be another day.

Georgia on my mind

What follows is a piece I wrote over a year ago when I had Georgia on my mind. I’m reviving it here, slightly adapted, for Jeremy Janson, a student at Georgia Tech, a friend, a scholar, a fellow blogger, and a Southern Gentleman, by adoption if not by origin. :-)

I’ve mentioned before that mother and father have very good friends in Georgia, a place called Moultrie, really nice people, Old South, I suppose. We have been visiting them and they have been visiting us on and off for as long as I can remember. I was told that with a name like mine I really should have been born in the antebellum period, of grand ladies and even grander houses. Yes, I think I could envisage myself as the mistress of Tara.

I love Moultrie and I love rural Georgia. The town itself is really pleasant, a survival, I suspect, of a gentler and older America. It’s where I learned to shoot, amongst other things. The people in question own a lot of land around the town, some of it cotton-growing country. I was taken out one Sunday afternoon with a .22 rifle to a place where there is a large body of water. A little water was put in the some balloons which were tied and then set off to float. Our task was to hit these targets in motion. What fun it truly was. I was also given the opportunity to try a .30 hand gun, but that was beyond me. It seemed to come alive in my hand; I could not hit a thing!

What surprised and interested me in getting to know the local people as I have is how strong respect and reverence for the Confederacy still is. Oh, not for slavery and everything that culture represented, just respect for simple courage and settled tradition. I’ve continually heard the struggle of the 1860s referred to the ‘war of northern aggression’. We once went to a function, with lots of people in attendance, where the band played Dixie. Everyone, but everyone, stood up without being prompted. We did too, carried off by the force of the moment. Oh, yes, I wish I was in Dixie. :-)

I shall always be near you

There is a letter that seems to me to unite the tragedy of war with feelings of transcendent love. It was not written by a poet, a novelist or a philosopher, but by an ordinary man, a soldier on the eve of battle. His name was Sullivan Ballou, writing in the summer of 1861 to his wife, Sarah. I was in my teens when I heard it recited on a documentary series shown by BBC Television in England about the American Civil War. It's too long to reproduce in its entirety, but here are the parts that moved me the most;

I cannot describe to you my feelings on this calm summer night, when two thousand men are sleeping around me, many of them enjoying the last, perhaps, before that of death--and I, suspicious that Death is creeping behind me with his fatal dart, am communing with God, my country and thee...

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.

The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most grateful to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And hard as it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our sons grow up to honorable manhood around us. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me...that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name...

But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth to flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and in the darkest night --amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours--always, always; and if there is a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

A week after writing this letter Sullivan Ballou was killed at the Battle of Bull Run. The recital on TV chased me off to my bedroom, where I wept buckets!

There Stands Jackson Like A Stonewall

It would be almost impossible to understand the great Stonewall Jackson, either as a man or as a soldier, without some appreciation of his views on religion. In a letter of 1863, Daniel Harvey Hill, a fellow Confederate general officer, wrote of Jackson, "The striking characteristic of his mind was his profound reverence for divine and human authority. I never knew of any one whose reverence for Deity was so all pervasive, and who felt so completely his entire dependence upon God." Moses Hoge, a Presbyterian cleric, was even more direct, "To attempt to portray the life of Jackson while leaving out the religious element would be like undertaking to describe Switzerland without mentioning the Alps."

There are, I believe, strong parallels between the lives of Oliver Cromwell and Jackson. Both men shared the same Calvinist ethic; both underwent a kind of spiritual crisis; and both emerged with a single-minded determination that they were following a path prescribed by God. It was this conviction, as well as natural ability, that made them both such formidable soldiers. Jackson's search for commitment in faith took him through various church denominations in the period after the Mexican War in 1847, till he eventually alighted on Presbyterianism, with its stress on individual morality and personal salvation. Like all Calvinists he loved God with all of the fervour of his singular character, and hoped that God loved him in return. Belief in predestination was the natural corollary of this commitment. With the approach of the Civil War, he told a minister that dissolution of the Union, which he personally opposed, 'can come only with God's permission.' His first political loyalty, though, was to Virginia, the Old Dominion; and it was Virginia he followed in April 1861.

Once in arms faith and soldiering walked side by side. The great catastrophe that descended on the country was, in Jackson's view, a judgement from God. The Civil War was, therefore, in his mind, akin to a religious crusade to regain the favour of the Almighty. Christian faith and the Confederate cause were thus one and the same thing. In pursuit of this belief he was to become utterly ruthless in the field, driving his men as hard as he drove himself. After one of his victories he said to an aid 'He who does not see the hand of God in this is blind, sir, blind!' Confident of God's grace, he became a soldier of extraordinary brilliance, and the Valley Campaign of 1862 still counts as one of the supreme achievements in all of military history. Afterwards, in his official report, he wrote, 'God has been our shield, and to His name be all the glory.' After the Valley, the 'Army of the Living God', as he himself expressed it, marched east to drive the Union forces away from Richmond in the Seven Days Campaign, where he established his unique partnership with Robert E. Lee. Jackson's accidental death in 1863, after the great flanking march at the Battle of Chancellorsville was probably the most serious single blow ever suffered by the Confederacy.