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... the bloody promenade of the Wilderness....
--Walt Whitman, Memoranda during the War (1875)
Reading
thousands of pages of Civil War memoirs could teach
someone plenty not only about the war but also about the state of letters
in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. Beginning soon after the war--Jubal Early’s Memoir
of the Last Year of the War for Independence first appeared as a pamphlet
published in Canada late in 1866--the flash flood of personal reminiscences
washed the country for a good sixty years, lasting at least until the
publication of John Gibbon’s Personal Recollections of the Civil War
(1928). To help put these sixty years
in the perspective of literary history, we need only remember that they span
the careers of both Mark Twain and Henry James, the publication of T. S.
Eliot’s Waste Land, and the early novels of William Faulkner, Ernest
Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In
other words, during the convulsive stretch that literary histories describe as
running from the emergence of realism to the flourishing of high modernism, a
stretch that included the Spanish-American War and World War I, Americans
steadily wrote and read personal narratives of the Civil War.
Not
all of these narratives reached wide audiences, and few will be read during the
twenty-first century, except by people especially interested in the Civil
War. Two exceptions could prove to be
the memoirs of Sherman (1875) and Grant (1885-86), both of which, with their
publication in the Library of America series, enter the new century carrying
passports stamped “literature.” Thanks to the publicity it received from Ken
Burns’s documentary, Sam Watkins’s “Co. Aytch” (1881-82) may also enjoy
a healthy shelf life for some time yet.
Meanwhile, some new memoir may be discovered and published at anytime,
and the 150th anniversary celebrations between 2011 and 2015 undoubtedly will
generate yet another wave of interest, perhaps causing a few more non-specialists
to sample the writings of Edward Porter Alexander, Benjamin Butler, Joshua
Lawrence Chamberlain, Abner Doubleday, John B. Gordon, John Bell Hood, Oliver
Otis Howard, David Hunter, Joseph Johnston, James Longstreet, George McClellan,
John S. Mosby, Philip Sheridan, Lew Wallace, and others. In sampling what appears to be the genre of
generals (Mosby was a colonel), some may even discover that in fact neither
generals nor men have a monopoly on the Civil War memoir. Examples by Louisa May Alcott, Belle Boyd,
Sara Emma Edmundson, Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Mary Livermore, Susie King Taylor,
and Loreta Janeta Velazquez represent wartime roles and experiences that
include laundering, nursing, spying, and passing as male soldiers in the ranks.
But
for the sixty years directly following the war, generals’ memoirs received the
most attention. For one thing,
publishers were much more willing to invest in narratives by men whose names
the war had made famous. In our own
time, this purely commercial instinct helps explain in part the canonization of
Sherman and Grant by the Library of America.
Whatever the literary merits of the memoirs themselves, and those merits
are not always unambiguous, most educated Americans can recognize the names of
these two Union generals, one of whom went on to become president and the other
of whom probably could have if he had wanted to. Some might argue that Sherman and Grant appear in the Library of
America because the North won the war, and literature necessarily reflects the tastes
of the victors. True perhaps, but that
argument is a little too easy in this case, since Lee never wrote his own
memoirs and Jackson died before he could have.
My guess is that if either of those Confederate generals had written a
narrative as readable as Sherman’s or Grant’s, the ongoing national romance
with the South would ensure even greater sales for the vanquished than for the
victors.
Another
reason for the dominance of generals’ memoirs may be that nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century readers were less likely than we are today to believe
that the story of a private soldier might be just as compelling as that of an
officer, or more so. General officers,
after all, had the big picture and could describe the movements of large armies
authoritatively, whereas private soldiers and their line officers knew only
what they saw in front of them, as Ambrose Bierce showed so convincingly in the
passage from “The Crime at Pickett’s Mill.” Never mind that Sam Watkins, for
all the stylistic excesses he sometimes permits himself, has ten pages on the
battle of the Dead Angle at Kennesaw Mountain (June 27, 1864) that convey the
massive horror of that encounter much more fully than Sherman’s half paragraph, which includes the indigestible
understatement, “By 11.30 the assault was in fact over, and had failed.” Never
mind that Morris Schaff’s virtually unknown memoir The Battle of the
Wilderness (1910) runs circles around Phil Sheridan’s account of the
battle, which confines itself to Sheridan’s disagreements with Meade about the
proper role of the cavalry and an uninspired description of the uninspired part
played by that cavalry on May 5 and 6, 1864.
Sheridan was a general and Schaff a lieutenant (albeit one attached to
Warren’s staff), and so Sheridan’s picture must come closer to omniscience.
The
implicit assumption that a Civil War memoir gets better the closer it
approximates omniscience raises some complex questions about the genre and
helps account for some of its conventions, quirks, and characteristic
features. In his glossary of literary
terms, M. H. Abrams usefully distinguishes between autobiography, in which
emphasis falls on the author’s developing self, and memoir, in which emphasis
falls on people the author has known and events the author has witnessed. Of course, this distinction doesn’t always
hold fast. Grant’s memoirs, for
example, begin with his ancestry, birth, and boyhood, then follow him through
West Point and the Mexican War, before turning to the Civil War. Even though this early development occupies
only about one-sixth of his narrative, Grant clearly uses it to frame his
self-presentation. In fact, in view of
what every reader knows is coming, it’s hard not to hear the great first sentence
of the memoir as prophetic: “My family is American, and has been for
generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.” The very antithesis
of Melville’s “Call me Ishmael,” which establishes the narrator of Moby-Dick
as a wandering outcast, Grant’s opening sentence, which amounts to “Call me
American,” identifies the narrator with a nation that is more than the sum of
its parts, not merely with a particular state among a collection of
states. That one can imagine Lee’s
memoir beginning, “My family is Virginian, and has been for generations, in all
its branches, direct and collateral,” throws into sharper relief Grant’s
relentless Unionism.
If
we accept as a starting point the description of memoirs as narratives in which
authors describe people they have known and events they have witnessed, we can
begin to understand some of the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the
genre of the Civil War memoir. Since by
definition memoirs, unlike histories, supposedly confine themselves to the
limitations of one point of view--the word “memoir” establishes personal memory
as the legitimate source of the narrative-- readers of memoirs should value
them not for an approximation of omniscience in relation to an intricate maze
of complex events but for the expression of powerful memories of those events,
however incomplete, inaccurate, and limited those memories may be. In a post-Freudian world, some readers may
even feel that memoirs become more interesting and significant the farther they
stray from objective omniscience into the vagaries and idiosyncracies of
recollections shaped by impulses the author doesn’t try to correct or
censor. Certainly at least one
pre-Freudian, Stephen Crane, felt strongly that Civil War memoirs would have
benefited greatly from the inclusion of more emotion recollected in
tranquility.
But
writers, publishers, and readers of Civil War memoirs valued, and probably in
most cases continue to value, those memoirs not for their individualized
expressions of personal memory but for the contribution those memoirs make to
the establishment of an official record and the writing of history. In his chapter on the Battle of the
Wilderness, for example, Longstreet reveals his self-consciousness as a
memoirist whose narration is not an end in itself but a contribution to a
larger project.
As
the purpose of this writing is to convey ideas of personal observations and experience, it will be
confined, as far as practicable, to campaigns or parts of them with which I was
directly or indirectly connected. So,
when participants and partisans have passed away, I shall have contributed my
share towards putting the historian in possession of evidence which he can
weigh with that of other actors in the great drama.
For the moment let’s take Longstreet at
his word and assume that this disinterested purpose--to enable historians to
write more fully informed histories--motivates not just the writing of his
memoir but also the reading of that memoir by others. Actually, Civil War memoirists wrote for different reasons. Grant, for example, badly needed the money
Mark Twain offered him, and many memoirists wrote to justify their own actions
or to settle old scores, especially with men who had already written other
memoirs, so that the genre tended to perpetuate itself as memoirs bred more
memoirs. Then there are the old
soldiers who couldn’t just fade away quietly and wanted instead to recapture
some of the public attention they enjoyed during the war. Obviously, a particular writer could write
for all these motives, as well as many others.
Longstreet’s
assumption that the memoirist serves the historian, not to mention the
historian’s willing acceptance of that assumption, placed and places
constraints on both the writing and the reading of Civil War memoirs. Some might argue that we can’t help reading
the memoirs of public figures who played significant parts in significant
events much differently from the way we read the memoirs of private citizens,
and their argument has validity. But the
question is, is reading a memoir for its contribution to the historical record
the only way to read it? For that
matter, is writing a memoir for its historical contribution the only way to
write it? If the answer to each of
these questions is yes, then literate Americans who aren’t particularly
interested in Civil War history can’t be expected to have much use for the
sixty years’ worth of memoirs that close the nineteenth century and open the
twentieth. But if the answer is no,
then there’s a chance that during the twenty-first century a few people may be
tempted to sift through this huge body of work in order to discover some of the
gems it contains.
Before
turning to consideration of three other memoirs, let’s look briefly at the case
of John B. Gordon’s Reminiscences of the Civil War, published in New
York by Scribner’s in 1903. At the
Battle of the Wilderness, Gordon (1832-1904) was a brigadier general commanding
a brigade in Early’s Division of Ewell’s Second Corps, and during Spotsylvania
(May 14, 1864) he was promoted to major general, Early having succeeded Ewell
as corps commander after a fall from his horse at the Bloody Angle left Ewell
unfit for further field service.
Gordon’s memoir, which provides an early example of a Confederate referring
to the war by its Northern name (after the war Gordon served in the United
States Senate), embodies many of the characteristics that typify the
genre. As one would expect of a set of
personal reminiscences, it confines itself to one point of view, a point of
view still warm with “the impetuous ardor of youth” that Douglas Southall
Freeman, in his biography of Lee (1934-35) attributes to the not yet
thirty-two-year-old general in the Wilderness.
Gordon spends the twenty-seven pages of his narrative of May 5 and 6,
1864, talking almost exclusively about himself, first in relation to the way he
saved the day south of the Orange Turnpike on May 5 and then in relation to his
flank attack on the Union right north of the Orange Turnpike on May 6. Some may find the exaggerations and egotism
of Gordon’s account too much to take, but the heady exuberance and unabashed
pride in what he takes to be his stupendous accomplishments are so ingenuous
that, if one can forget for a moment that he is describing events in which
thousands of men killed and wounded each other, his enthusiasm can become
infectious.
In
such a crisis, when moments count for hours, when the fate of a command hangs
upon instantaneous decision, the responsibility of the commander is almost
overwhelming; but the very extremity of the danger electrifies his brain to
abnormal activity. In such peril he
does more thinking in one second than he would ordinarily do in a day. No man ever realized more fully than I did
at that dreadful moment the truth of the adage: “Necessity is the mother of
invention.”
Gordon
includes two diagrams to help his reader understand “the unprecedented
movement” he ordered his brigade to perform and sums up this episode in no
uncertain terms.
The
situation was both unique and alarming.
I know of no case like it in military history; nor has there come to my
knowledge from military text-books or the accounts of the world’s battles any
precedent for the movement which extricated my command from its perilous
environment and changed the threatened capture or annihilation of my troops
into victory.
If Gordon had been a bully or had
puffed himself up at the expense of other men, passages like this would be
unbearable. But what’s so disarming
about his narrative is that it lavishes praise on everyone, friend and foe alike. A. P. Hill is “that brilliant soldier”;
Clement A. Evans is “that intrepid leader”; Robert Johnson is “a brilliant
young officer”; Generals Seymour and Shaler, captured during Gordon’s May 6
flank attack, are “gallant Union leaders”; John W. Daniel, who wrote an account
that largely contradicts Gordon’s, is “brave and brilliant”; Grant is “so able
a commander”; Longstreet’s corps is “superb,” as is the Texas brigade that
ordered Lee to the rear in the Widow Tapp’s field. No wonder Gordon became a successful politician. It’s hard to grudge so generous a spirit its
share of the accolades.
On
the one hand, then, Gordon’s memoir scores high marks as an individualized
expression of personal memory. It makes
good reading--better than most generals’ memoirs, in fact--and it also scores
high on the Stephen Crane test, since it brims with unembarrassed statements of
how Gordon actually felt, statements such as “my brain was throbbing with the
tremendous possibilities to which such a situation invited us.” On the other
hand, the author of Reminiscences of the Civil War isn’t content simply
to put his point of view on record and let it go at that. He also wants to serve history, to establish
as a matter of fact who was responsible for delaying his flank attack on May 6
(the culprit, he says, was Early), and to align his memoir with the emerging
official record. Gordon’s case is
particularly interesting because his narrative appeared after the government
finished publishing the Official Records in 1901. In fact, Gordon quotes extensively from the OR,
specifically from the reports of Federal officers, to demonstrate conclusively
that, contrary to what Early claimed, Burnside’s Ninth Corps was not placed on
the Union right in support of Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps and its exposed
flank. Unfortunately for Gordon,
although his appeal to the records confirms his observation that Burnside was
nowhere near the Union right at the time Early claimed it was, historians have
largely rejected the service he offers to perform for them. In the disagreement about what happened
south of the Orange Turnpike on May 5, for example, Rhea follows Daniel rather
than Gordon, and in assessing the contrary claims made by Early and Gordon
about the significance of the May 6 flank attack, Steere likewise sides with
Early against Gordon. With the
historians’ verdict in, Gordon’s memoir goes back on the shelf, discredited as
history and condemned to be ignored by those who judge Civil War memoirs by an
ideal standard of objective omniscience.
As
the case of Gordon’s Reminiscences makes clear, the Civil War memoir has
led a double life, trying to function as both a witness to subjective
individual experience and a servant to objective historical narrative. For this reason, the memoir occupies a
middle ground between the eyewitness letter or diary, on the one hand, and
conventional historical narrative, on the other. This middle ground, for all its difficult tangles and uneven
terrain, can nevertheless prove fertile for the reader willing to waive the
requirement that a memoir always justify itself as official history. The memoirs of Longstreet, Grant, and Morris
Schaff reveal other important features of this complicated genre.
The
first edition of James Longstreet’s From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of
the Civil War in America was published in Philadelphia in 1896 and the
second in 1903, the same year that Gordon’s memoir appeared and the year before
Longstreet’s death. Like Gordon,
Longstreet refers to the war by its Northern name, his choice of epithets
reflecting his reconciliation with the government of the United States after
the war (for a time he served as Minister Resident to Turkey), a reconciliation
for which many in the South never forgave him.
Like Gordon, Longstreet refers explicitly to the OR, though still
incomplete at the time of his first edition, noting in the preface that “the
official War Records supply in a measure the place of lost papers.” And like Gordon yet again, Longstreet
produced a narrative that many historians view with misgivings. In Lee’s Lieutenants (1942-46), for
example, Freeman comments that the inaccuracies of Longstreet’s account result
in a book that is “even more unjust” to him than it is to any of the people he
criticizes.
Despite
the reservations of historians, however, From Manassas to Appomattox had
at least one important sympathetic reader during the later twentieth
century. In Killer Angels,
Michael Shaara draws heavily on Longstreet’s account of Gettysburg as he
fashions the character of the Confederate First Corps commander into a military
visionary who understands the emerging conditions of modern warfare and their
implications, both strategic and tactical, much better than his superior,
Robert E. Lee. As a result, millions of
Americans who have either read Killer Angels or seen the film Gettysburg
have been strongly influenced by Longstreet’s memoir, whether they know it or
not. In addition to the sections that
Shaara uses, sometimes almost verbatim, Longstreet’s account of Gettysburg
contains many other memorable moments, such as the controversial
characterization of Lee as “excited and off his balance” and laboring “under
that oppression until enough blood was shed to appease him.” But even this
damning judgment sounds tame beside the thundering denouncement of Jubal Early,
a verbal thrashing administered in the grand diction and implacable rhythms of
Victorian English.
There
was a man on the left of the line who did not care to make the battle win. He knew where it was, had viewed it from its
earliest formation, had orders for his part in it, but so withheld part of his
command from it as to make co-operative concert of action impracticable. He had a pruriency for the honors of the
field of Mars, was eloquent, before the fires of the bivouac and his chief, of
the glory of war’s gory shield; but when its envied laurels were dipping to the
grasp, when the heavy field called for bloody work, he found the placid
horizon, far and away beyond the cavalry, more lovely and inviting. He wanted command of the Second Corps, and,
succeeding to it, held the honored position until General Lee found, at last,
that he must dismiss him from field service.
Whatever historians have decided or
will decide about responsibility for the failure of the Second Corps to take
Culp’s Hill on July 2, 1863, the rhetoric of invective doesn’t get much better
than this, at least not in the stately idiom of “pruriency for the honors of
the field of Mars” and “the glory of war’s gory shield” that Longstreet wields
throughout his memoir.
The
elevation of Longstreet’s language no doubt will alienate many contemporary
readers, partly because it doesn’t make for easy reading and partly because it
muffles the realities of lead or iron missiles traveling at high speeds into
human flesh. In his chapter on the
Battle of the Wilderness, for example, Longstreet mentions blood exactly twice,
both times with reference to his own wounding on May 6 along the Orange Plank
Road. The second time he quotes another
officer’s description of “the bloody foam” that he, Longstreet, blew from his
mouth. Here is the first.
The
blow lifted me from the saddle, and my right arm dropped to my side, but I
settled back to my seat, and started to ride on, when in a minute the flow of
blood admonished me that my work for the day was done.
Although one can admire the
understatement here, the refusal to indulge some readers’ taste for the graphic
details of violence, it is also possible to feel uncomfortable with a
rhetorical chilliness that sometimes sounds like admirable coolness under fire
but at others like monstrous cold-bloodedness.
Whatever
one thinks of Longstreet’s narrative coolness, his chapter on the Battle of the
Wilderness is weaker and less memorable than the chapters on Gettysburg. Admittedly, Longstreet missed the fighting
on May 5 altogether and had to leave the battle before its conclusion on May
6. Still, he witnessed and must have
felt much that he could have conveyed forcefully. Despite its shortcomings, however, the chapter does have its
moments. One of these is the eulogy for
Micah Jenkins, brigade commander in Charles W. Field’s division of Longstreet’s
corps, who was mortally wounded by the same burst of friendly fire that hit
Longstreet.
He
was one of the most estimable characters of the army. His taste and talent were for military service. He was intelligent, quick, untiring,
attentive, zealous in discharge of duty, truly faithful to official obligations,
abreast with the foremost in battle, and withal a humble, noble Christian. In a moment of highest earthly hope he was
transported to serenest heavenly joy; to that life beyond that knows no bugle
call, beat of drum, or clash of steel.
May his beautiful spirit, through the mercy of God, rest in peace! Amen!
Sam Watkins punctuates his memoir with
many such passages, and the combination of stock martial imagery with
conventional expressions of Christian piety may not grip every reader
forcefully. But in the context of
Longstreet’s coolness, exclamation marks stand out and signify an eruption of
feeling that registers distinctly on the Stephen Crane test scale. Of the more than twenty-eight thousand
casualties in the Wilderness, Jenkins is the only one Longstreet pauses over,
reminding us that not even the coolest of commanders can remain impervious to
his losses, in this case the loss of a fellow general officer and South
Carolinian. The eulogy for Jenkins
marks an inescapably personal moment and, as such, distinguishes Longstreet’s
memoir, at least here, from the emotionless records that Crane deplored.
Another
feature that humanizes From Manassas to Appomattox, a feature that
typifies many memoirs, especially those by generals, is one we could call the What
if? moment. What if moments
abound in both popular and professional reflections on the Civil War, the most
famous of them being, "What if Jackson hadn’t been wounded at
Chancellorsville?" Many people
understand this particular what if to invite the response, “Then Jackson would
have been on the left at Gettysburg, he would have taken Culp’s Hill, Lee would
have won the battle, and the South would have gained its independence.” Since the bigger what ifs tend to
originate from the Southern point of view- (What if the Confederates had chased
the Federals back into Washington after First Manassas-Bull Run?); some people
tend to forget that what ifs work both ways: What if McClellan
hadn’t been so timid during the Peninsula Campaign or Sharpsburg-Antietam? What
if Joe Hooker hadn’t lost his nerve and pulled back at Chancellorsville? What
if John Reynolds hadn’t been killed the first day of Gettysburg? What if James
Wilson’s Union Cavalry Division had watched the Orange Turnpike long enough to
see Ewell’s Second Corps arriving at Locust Grove on May 4, 1864, on its way to
the Wilderness.
The
fact that What ifs imply a simplemindedly naive view of cause and
effect, a view that assumes one change among many causes will necessarily lead
to specific predictable effects, doesn’t really matter. What matters is that what ifs reflect
the all-too-human desire to comprehend and control contingencies beyond
comprehension and control. In
Longstreet’s case, the big What if of the Battle of the Wilderness
involves the poor preparation of Hill’s Third Corps on the Orange Plank Road
during the night of May 5.
Under
that plan events support the claim that the Third Corps, intrenched in their
advanced position, with fresh supplies and orders to hold their ground, could
have received and held against Hancock’s early battle until my command could
have come in on his left rear and completed our strongly organized battle by
which we could have carried the Wilderness, even down and into the classic
Rapidan.
Could have . . . could have . . . could
have. Although Longstreet doesn’t spell
it out, this conditional fantasy presumably continued: And the defeat of the
Army of the Potomac in the Wilderness during the election year, when Lincoln
had resorted to his last general, could have led to McClellan’s presidential
victory and independence for the South.
At this moment Longstreet’s memoir has departed from the path of
objective historical narrative and become a wishful meditation on his own
powerlessness to change the outcome of events; and no amount of stoic
reconciliation can wholly efface his regret and remorse. Questionable history writing perhaps, but a
memorable moment full of the pathos that gives memoirs one of their defining
qualities.
Longstreet’s
memoir is made up of more than elevated language, cool understatement, What
ifs, and--as in the final pages of the chapter on the
Wilderness--self-defense, in this case against the charge that he arrived on
the Plank Road twenty-four hours late.
One of the more attractive features of From Manassas to Appomattox
is Longstreet’s sympathetic portrait of Grant, who graduated a year behind him
at West Point, served with him in the Fourth United States Infantry
Regiment before the war with Mexico, and, in the Appomattox chapter of the
memoir, “looked up, recognized me, rose, and with his old-time cheerful
greeting gave me his hand, and after passing a few remarks offered a cigar,
which was gratefully received.” In the Wilderness chapter, Longstreet includes
a short paragraph comparing Grant and Lee, a paragraph that concludes, “They
were equally pugnacious and plucky,--Grant the more deliberate.” Few students
of the war could take issue with this characterization, but it is in the
preceding sentence that Longstreet suddenly drops his reserve to offer a
remarkable--some might say sentimental--description of the man so many in both
the North and South vilified as a butcher.
. . . but the biggest part of him was
his heart.
Although Longstreet doesn’t quote from Grant’s Personal
Memoirs, which preceded both the publication of the OR and his own
book, the simple, straightforward language of this statement reflects the
writing of the man it describes. In
many ways Grant’s writing embodies the style that Whitman admires in the
“Soldiers and Talks” paragraph of his Memoranda, “the superfluous flesh
of talking” having long been worked off Grant not only by the rigors of war but
also by the cancer in his soft palate, cancer that he was fighting during the
writing of his memoirs. The clarity and
concision of his style have received extensive praise, including the admiration
of Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, whose modernism Grant, in some ways,
influenced. To hear the difference
between the old idiom and the new, one has only to compare the last sentences
of the opening paragraphs of Longstreet’s and Grant’s chapters on the
Wilderness. Both writers are setting
the stage for the devastating campaign to come, but Longstreet does so in a
lengthy sentence composed of several subordinate clauses connected by semi-colons,
the last of which runs, “that we should first show that the power of battle is
in generalship more than in the number of soldiers, which, properly
illustrated, would make the weaker numbers of the contention the stronger
force.” Grant puts matters more
succinctly.
The
two armies had been confronting each other so long, without any decisive
result, that they hardly knew which could whip.
But it is easy to overpraise Grant’s style,
especially for readers who have become so suspicious of rhetorical
embellishment that they no longer hear the plain style as a style at all. At its best Grant’s writing makes
complicated events and movements easily accessible to the contemporary
reader. At its worst it is, in the
words of his own description of the country between the Rapidan and the James,
“rather flat.” In the Wilderness chapter, for example, we hear that “The
country roads were narrow and poor,” an unremarkable sentence repeated almost
verbatim a few pages later: “The roads were narrow and bad.” When such
sentences alternate with longer ones, their brevity provides refreshing
variation, but when they occur in unrelieved succession, they sound dull
and somewhat undercooked.
For
all their stylistic differences, Grant’s account of The Wilderness has much in common
with that of Longstreet, whom Grant describes, at the end of a chapter on
Chattanooga, as “brave, honest, intelligent, a very capable soldier,
subordinate to his superiors, just and kind to his subordinates, but jealous of
his own rights, which he had the courage to maintain.” Like his former comrade, Grant does little
to make the individual sufferings of soldiers real for his reader--in his
account the word “blood” doesn’t appear at all--but, like Longstreet, he does
permit himself to eulogize a single soldier, whose loss must stand in the
reader’s mind for all other losses. As
in Longstreet’s narrative, the eulogized soldier, Alexander Hays, is a brigade
commander, one who served in Birney’s division of Hancock’s Second Corps.
I
had been at West Point with Hays for three years, and had served with him
through the Mexican war, a portion of the time in the same regiment. He was a most gallant officer, ready to lead
his command wherever ordered. With him
it was “Come, boys,” not “Go.”
For
all the terse precision and matter-of-fact sobriety that characterize this
short paragraph, especially when we compare it with Longstreet’s on Micah
Jenkins, Grant cannot resist indulging elsewhere in his own version of What
if any more successfully than his enemies, Gordon and Longstreet, each of
whom believed that if his respective flank attack could have realized its full
potential, he could have won the Battle of the Wilderness.
I believed then, and see no reason to change that
opinion now, that if the country had been such that Hancock and his command
could have seen the confusion and panic in the lines of the enemy, it would
have been taken advantage of so effectually that Lee would not have made
another stand outside of his Richmond defences.
Like his Confederate counterparts,
Grant believes that if things had been different, they would have been so
different that the rest of the spring 1864 campaign would never have
happened. Unlike them, however, he
doesn’t base his What if on criticism of an individual, as Gordon blamed
Early and Longstreet blamed Hill (and by implication Lee, who presumably told
Hill not to entrench because Longstreet would be up early enough to relieve
him). Instead, Grant blames the
Wilderness itself. In fact, Grant
rarely blames anyone at all for anything, and not for a lack of
opportunities. He doesn’t censure
Wilson for failing to keep his cavalry across the Orange Turnpike or Burnside
for being slow in moving toward the left or Gibbon for not supporting the rest
of the Second Corps as quickly and strongly as he should have.
The
choice, conscious or unconscious, to blame everything on the dense forest
invites a closer look. On the one hand,
it reflects extraordinary tolerance of other people’s costly ineptitude, a
tolerance that contrasts favorably with the nearly pathological blame-fixing of
some other memoirists. On the other
hand, shifting the blame to the nature of the ground, which, after all, also
affected the Army of Northern Virginia adversely, neatly shields from censure
all ineptitude, Grant’s included. That
terrible mistakes were made, some by the Union high command, some by
subordinate officers, becomes apparent only in a muted acknowledgment that
Grant connects with the wounding of Longstreet.
Longstreet
had to leave the field, not to resume his command for many weeks. His loss was a severe one to Lee, and
compensated in a great measure for the mishap, or misapprehensions, which had
fallen to our lot during the day.
For someone so highly praised as a
straight talker, this is an oddly devious moment, for basically it claims that
Longstreet’s wounding leveled the playing field, which had tilted in favor of
the Confederates not because the Union leadership on various levels made
serious mistakes and miscalculations, but because “mishap, or misapprehensions”--the
subtle and uncharacteristic wordplay sounds suspicious--fell to the Union
“lot.” It is as though the Army of the Potomac had been dealt a bad hand of cards or
gotten a poor roll of the dice, and the
implication is that Confederate bad luck simply offsets Union bad luck, not
Union blunders.
It
is also revealing that the supposedly plain spoken Grant, who scores so well on
Walt Whitman’s test, doesn’t score higher on Stephen Crane’s. At one point he does admit, “I was anxious
that the rebels should not take the initiative in the morning” of May 6; and
yet, even though he also admits that “More desperate fighting has not been
witnessed on this continent than that of the 5th and 6th of May,” a judgment
that the rest of the nineteenth and all of the twentieth centuries have done
nothing to shake, Grant gives us no access to his interior world, a world that
other witnesses represent as tumultuous.
It is from James Wilson’s Life of John A. Rawlins (1916), a
narrative two steps removed from Grant himself, that we get the harrowing
account of Grant breaking down in his tent on the night of May 6, and from
Horace Porter’s Campaigning with Grant (1897) the telling detail of
Grant smoking twenty large, strong cigars during the same day. This last detail so impressed Gordon that he
includes it in his Reminiscences.
In
after years, when it was my privilege to know General Grant well, he was still
a great smoker; but if the nervous strain under which he labored is to be
measured by the number of cigars consumed, it must have been greater on the 6th
of May than at any period of his life, for he is said never to have equalled
that record.
It’s
hard to argue with Gordon’s interpretation, and yet where are the signs of “the
nervous strain under which he labored” in Grant’s Personal Memoirs? Depending on individual predispositions,
readers can applaud or deplore or not care much about Grant’s tight-lipped
refusal to give us any indication of how he felt during what he himself later
viewed as the most desperate fighting ever to take place on the North American
continent, fighting for which in many ways he both was directly and indirectly
responsible. Elsewhere in his book
Grant does give us slight inklings of what was happening in the heart that
Longstreet thought his biggest part. In
the chapter on Cold Harbor, for example, he admits, “I have always regretted
that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made,” a confession somewhat
diluted by his noncommittal use of the passive voice but still much more than
Sherman ever said about the disastrous attack on the Dead Angle at Kennesaw
Mountain. Then there is the great
detail, perfectly delivered in a single sentence, about Grant’s reaction upon
reading the message in which Lee requests an interview to discuss the terms of surrender
at Appomattox.
When
the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache; but the
instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.
The scarcity of moments such as these, moments completely
absent from the account of the Wilderness, makes me wonder how both Grant and
his earliest readers understood the first word of his title. To my ear the word sounds as though it
should have quotation marks around it, since Grant’s memoirs aren’t much more
personal than those of Sherman, who avoids the word altogether. More than a hundred years after the
publication of Grant’s book, many Americans assume that “personal” must mean
“intimate,” but I for one am not questioning the absence of details about
Grant’s drinking or how much he missed his wife. I’m questioning the absence, or scarcity, of material that is
private in the sense that it differs significantly from what is a matter of
public record, material that could come only from the person writing the
memoir. In other words, as writers and
readers of Civil War memoirs understood them, should a typical example of the
genre consist mostly of battle reports sewn together in a readable narrative,
with some eulogies, What ifs, and self-defense thrown in for
variety? If so, do Civil War memoirs
still deserve the attention of a few general readers a hundred or so years
after their publication, readers who could just as easily pick up a
well-written history instead?
I
still say yes, but with two qualifications.
First, not all Civil War memoirs have an equal claim on precious time
and eyesight, anymore than all examples of any other genre do. In the Library of Congress subject headings,
Civil War memoirs appear under “United States History Civil War 1861-1865
Personal Narratives,” and when I last checked, I found 824 entries under that
heading, a number that comes into perspective with the discovery that a search
for personal narratives by Americans about World War II, the second most
written-about war involving the United States, generated 429 entries. Anyone who sifted through the 824 entries
would soon discover that “personal narrative” is a large, baggy category, one
that also includes diaries, journals, biographies, and collections of letters,
not to mention duplicates of works, some in multiple editions. But even with these items weeded out, there
are still many, many memoirs to read, and most are only average because average
is, by definition, what most things are.
Confronted by this mass, general readers should treat themselves to the
best examples of the genre, and here Grant’s book serves well.
But
my second qualification is that twenty-first-century general readers shouldn’t
choose a memoir that does only what a well-written version of the OR
would do better. Instead, they should choose
memoirs that do something different, that offer something missing from most
memoirs written by people who think of themselves primarily as servants of
accurate historical records. Sam
Watkins’s “Co. Aytch” is one good example. Watkins makes it clear at the beginning of his narrative, and
frequently reminds his readers throughout it, that he writes “only from memory”
and that if they want details that his memory can’t deliver, they should see
“the histories.” Another good example is one that I came across reading
histories of the Battle of the Wilderness, a memoir reduced in those histories
to a few quotations that make it look unexceptional.
Morris
Schaff’s strangely rich memoir The Battle of the Wilderness contains
much that contributes nothing to the historical record. As an ordnance officer, Schaff helped supply
the Army of the Potomac before the Wilderness campaign and records that between
April 4 and May 2, 1864, he ordered 2,325,000 rounds of musket and pistol
cartridges for Meade’s soldiers, or approximately three for every Confederate
who served during the four years of war, if we accept E. B. Long’s estimate of
750,000 for the number of Confederate soldiers. Historians who make use of Schaff rely on him primarily for his
account of being assigned to lead the dilatory Burnside down the Parker’s Store
Road to the Chewning Farm on May 6 and for his description of meeting the Iron
Brigade’s Lysander Cutler in the woods and learning from him of Wadsworth’s
collapse along the Orange Plank Road, a collapse he subsequently reported to
the high command at the Lacy House, only to find himself disbelieved. But using Schaff’s memoir to supply only
these meager details is, as Emerson would say, like using a volcano to cook
eggs.
Like
Watkins, Schaff makes it clear early on that he doesn’t aim to serve the
historical record.
I
am free to confess that the strategy, grand tactics, and military movements of
the Civil War, stirring as they were, are not the features which engage my
deepest interest, but rather the spirit which animated the armies of North and
South. That, that is what I see.
With this disclaimer Schaff should
attract many like-minded readers to his memoir, but those who think they will
find there a careful examination of the psychological motivations of individual
soldiers are in for a surprise. When
Schaff refers to “the spirit which animated the armies,” he means something
large and even supernatural.
Reader,
if the Spirit of the Wilderness be unreal to you, not so is it to me. Bear in mind that the native realm of the
spirit of man is nature’s kingdom, that there he has made all of his
discoveries, and yet what a vast region is unexplored, that region along whose
misty coast Imagination wings her way bringing one suggestion after another of
miraculous transformations, each drawing new light and each proclaiming that
nature’s heart beats with our own.
If Emerson had brought his brand of transcendentalism to
the Battle of the Wilderness and survived to write about it, his account might
have sounded something like this. For
Schaff, the natural world, in this case the dense Wilderness itself, reflects
and symbolizes human spirit. Whereas
for Grant the dense forest amounts to a topographic impediment on which he can
blame the mishaps or misapprehensions that fell to the Union lot there, for
Schaff it constitutes a sublimely terrifying realm that not only shapes local
events but also serves as the agent of national fate, which Schaff understands
to be the destruction of slavery.
And
was there a Spirit of the Wilderness, that, as tears gathered in eyes of
fathers and mothers over separation from children and home, recorded an oath to
avenge the wrong? Else why did the
Wilderness strike twice at the Confederacy in its moments of victory? Who knows!
As an interpretation of the fighting in
the Wilderness that included, during Chancellorsville, the wounding of Jackson
and a year later the wounding of Longstreet, this passage may strike the more
historically inclined as little short of lunacy. The standard interpretation of the Wilderness terrain reads it as
an ally of the smaller Army of Northern Virginia because it hobbled the
gigantic and unwieldy Army of the Potomac.
But in Schaff’s spiritual world, the Wilderness transforms itself into
an ally not only of the Federal forces but also of abolition itself.
In
a weird and extraordinary passage, Schaff raises the ghost of Jackson and
confronts him with both a personification of Slavery and the Spirit of the
Wilderness. Placed at the close of
Schaff’s narrative of May 4, the first day of the campaign, the passage extends
over several pages, but three short excerpts outline its contours.
I wonder, Reader, if the ghost of
Stonewall did not really come back? You
see, it was about the anniversary of the night on which he received his mortal
wound, and the old armies that he knew so well were on the eve of meeting
again. What should be more natural than
that he should come to this side of the river, that river whose beckoning trees
offered such sweet shade to the dying soldier?
. . .
Abruptly, and with almost a gasp, he
fastens his astonished gaze on a cowled figure that has emerged from the trees
and is looking at him. Is it the Spirit
of the Wilderness, whose relentless eyes met his as he fell, and does he read
in their cold depths the doom awaiting Longstreet? . . .
Hark! he hears something. It draws nearer, and now we can distinguish
footsteps; they sound as if they were dragging chains after them through the
dead rustling leaves. Presently, off
from the roadside where two oaks press back the tangle, admitting a bit of
starlight, Stonewall sees a gaunt, hollow-breasted, wicked-eyed, sunken-cheeked
being. Behold, she is addressing
him! “Stonewall, I am Slavery and
sorely wounded. Can you do nothing to
stay the Spirit of the Wilderness that, in striking at me, struck you down?”
This
scene, in which military history meets Macbeth, may provoke nothing but
scorn in many readers, especially military historians. In the first chapter of The Face of
Battle (1976), for example, John Keegan asserts that, like a play, a
“battle must obey the dramatic unities of time, place, and action,” but a few
pages later he also warns that “Imagination and sentiment, which quite properly
delimit the dimensions of the novelist’s realm, are a dangerous medium,
however, through which to approach the subject of battle.” From Keegan’s point
of view, the danger of approaching battle through sentiment and imagination,
which Schaff explicitly invokes in a passage quoted earlier, is that they can
produce “some very nasty stuff indeed,” stuff that indulges in the “pornography
of violence.”
Whatever
else Schaff is--mystic, romantic, eccentric--he is no pornographer. If he views the Wilderness as a fateful
region in which larger forces operate in ways we can neither completely
understand nor completely explain, he is hardly alone. In “The Bear” in Go Down, Moses
(1942), Faulkner has his main character, Ike McCaslin, list a series of events
from the war in order to question the proposition, advanced by another
character, that God has turned his face toward the South.
‘.
. . and that same Longstreet shot out of saddle by his own men in the dark by
mistake just as Jackson was. His face
to us? His face to us?’
If using imagination to read the
Wilderness as more than a topographic impediment makes questionable sense to
the military historian, it nevertheless makes good psychological, emotional, or
spiritual sense, not only to many of the men who fought there--the effects of
religious revivals among soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia are well
documented, and many soldiers of the Army of the Potomac recorded their
impressions of being haunted by the region--but also possibly to many of the
people who visit the area today.
It
is the holding of the secrets of butchering happenings like these, and its air
of surprised and wild curiosity in whosoever penetrates the solitude and breaks
its grim, immeasurable silence, that gives the Wilderness, I think, its deep and
evoking interest.
This
is Schaff again, now narrating battle in and around Saunders’ Field on May
5. I can’t speak for every visitor to
the Wilderness battlefield, and I certainly can’t speak for military
historians, but I find nothing to argue with in this explanation of the “deep
and evoking interest” of the woods between Route 20 and the Mill Branch. In fact, it’s the best explanation, in any
memoir I’ve read, of the palpable uncanniness of the Wilderness. Of course, Schaff realizes, and so do I, that
some will object to this kind of talk.
“And is this history?” comes a peevish voice from the general level of those who are as yet only dimly conscious of the essence and final embodiment of History. Yes, it is a little sheaf out of a field lying in one of its high and beautifully remote valleys.
No matter how many Civil War memoirs I
read, and no matter how many other people I get to read them, I don’t think
I’ll ever feel that I’m in a position to identify, let alone dismiss, all
“those who are as yet only dimly conscious of the essence and final embodiment
of History,” although I take pleasure in Schaff’s confident bravado. Still, I do feel quite strongly that
Schaff’s memoir, even at its most extravagant, along with other memoirs that
stray unconventionally from generic norms, finally does teach me history, or at
least a kind of history. If nothing
else, it teaches me a little more about the history of how people looked back
on May 1864, and for whatever reasons, I need to know that, too.
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