Chickamauga

Unforgettable writing
about the many faces of war …

“THE BURNING”
by
EUDORA WELTY
Two Southern ladies react to the burning of their home by Yankees with a horrific courage … and an act of fatal desperation.

“CHICKAM ALIGA”
by
THOMAS WOLFE
A ninety-five-year-old Confederate veteran remembers the strange battle of Stone Mountain, the tragedy of Shiloh, and the soul-changing experience of Chickamauga.

“MY GRANDMOTHER MILLARD AND GENERAL BEDFORD FORREST AND THE BATTLE OF HARRYKIN CREEK”
by
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Part farce, part drama, this tale adds an unexpected twist to a wartime romance and an enterprising matriarch determined to save the family’s valuables.

“PILLAR OF FIRE”
by
SHELBY FOOTE
A disfigured Union officer carries out a campaign of retribution along the Mississippi and burns down an old man’s home with chilling results.

“SECOND INAUGURAL”
by
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
This succinct address, written with the same impassioned, pain-filled voice heard in the Gettysburg Address, reminds the nation of the rightness of the Union’s cause.

In the summer of 1862, following McClellan’s mauled retreatfrom the gates of Richmond, James Russell Lowell’s reply to his editor’s request for a poem was that he was “clear down to the bottom of the well, where I see the Truth too near to make verses of.” Similarly, Harriet Beecher Stowe—saluted by Lincoln in person as “the little lady who started this big war”—responded, when asked why she had not written a wartime sequel to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
: “Who could write fiction when life was so imperious and terrible?” Nathaniel Hawthorne, on the other hand, felt “mentally and physically languid” under pressure from the conflict, and though he died while Grant was outmaneuvering Lee down in Virginia, just short of a year before the finish, he did manage to produce an essay titled “Chiefly About War Matters” in which he confessed that “the Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me. It takes away not only my scanty faculty, but even my desire for imaginative composition, and leaves me sadly content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies upon the hurricane that is sweeping us all along with it, possibly, into a Limbo where our nation and its polity may be as literally the fragments of a scattered dream as my unwritten Romance.”

Nor did the end of the war provide any sudden correction of this blockage. Two years after Appomattox, William Dean Howells—assistant editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
at thirty, soon to be editor-in-chief, and for the next forty years the acknowledged dean of American letters—declared that the war “has laid upon our literature a charge under which it has staggered very lamely.” Crane’s
The Red Badge of Courage
, published a generation later in 1895, was the exception that
proved the rule; the sluice gate opened only to close again. Indeed, Howell’s complaint is nearly as valid today as it was when he made it, just over 125 years ago.

In this country, historical fiction has in general been left to second-raters and hired brains, and this is particularly true of those who have chosen the Civil War as a major subject. Aside from Crane, our best fiction writers have given it mere incidental attention or none at all. Hemingway is a case in point; so is Henry James. This is regrettable on several counts, especially to those who would understand our nation by learning just what happened during that blood-drenched era—good and bad things, both in abundance—to make us what we are. Facts we have had and are having in ever greater numbers, perhaps a glut, through the years leading up to and away from the Sumter centennial, when biographies, overall explications, and brochures came pouring in a torrent from the presses and binderies. Yet there is a multifaceted truth outside the facts—beyond them, so to speak, or hidden inside them—and of this we have had all too little, because in this respect our novelists have let us down. “I would rather have
The Iliad,”
a recent translator of Homer has said, “than a whole shelf of Bronze Age war reports.” So too, no doubt, would we; but there is no American
Iliad, John Brown’s Body
notwithstanding.

This collection is an attempt, on a small scale, to examine what has been done to lessen the gap our best creative writers left unfilled in dealing with the four-year segment of history connecting Jefferson Davis’s Provisional Inaugural at Montgomery in mid-February of 1861 and Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural at Washington in early March of 1865. Scarcity made the task of selection difficult in one sense and easy in another. As it turned out—Ambrose Bierce being the earliest
author represented—the writing span was reduced to the near-seventy years (1891-1960) that fell between
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians
and John O’Hara’s
Ourselves to Know
, from which I snipped the single page I sometimes think is perhaps the best single page in the whole collection.

However that may be, the test for inclusion applied in each case was neither the subject nor the event described, no matter how desirable or attractive from a historical point of view, but rather the quality of the writing itself—a criterion that cost me the northern realist John W. De Forest, along with the southern romanticist John Esten Cooke, as well as a good many others on both sides. Only this, it seems to me—the way and tone of the telling—can make a story memorable or true in the real sense. The
Monitor-Merrimac
duel in Hampton Roads, the headlong charge up Missionary Ridge, the death of Pat Cleburne at Franklin, Grant in his rumpled clothes at Appomattox: these and a host of other occurrences, worthy as they are in their own right, are not here because I could not find them measured up to, or even approximated, in the writing.

What we have in their stead is a series of events totally unlike the ones mentioned above: a coachload of whores on a siding during a great battle in Virginia, an old man remembering his particular corner of a bloody field in Georgia, a pioneer being suffocated in the backwash of war in the Mississippi delta, a young slave girl wading into the Big Black River with the gathered bones of the child she bore her dead master’s missing son, a gallant Confederate lieutenant losing the seat of his trousers as he rescues a fair damsel from the wreckage of an outhouse, a spy’s thoughts as his Union captors break his neck below a bridge in Alabama, the baleful welcome-home of a pair of shattered Pennsylvania
veterans, a New York farm boy looking forward to the test of combat and then running when it comes, and Mark Twain on the eve of his skedaddle. (The one exception is Benét’s panoramic view of Fish-Hook Gettysburg; but I had to go to epic poetry to find it.)

These are what remain after the winnowing: a sorry-enough array, on the face of it, out of an era that is supposed to have been, and in large part was, wildly romantic. Yet, such is the power and glory of art, by transmutation they are no less noble, even as events, than the ones that had to be left out because good writers failed to take them up. Of the ten authors represented in these pages, half are Northern, half are Southern, and if any bias favoring the latter is suspected or detected, I can promise you’ll find precious little moonlight and no magnolias at all. As for the inclusion of a story by the compiler, I can only say that, for one thing, I rather think it belongs here, and for another—which gladdened the heart of the publisher—it was free.