"Defending Dixie's Land" by Isaac Bishop

I grew up with relatives who were still fighting the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression, as my grandmother described it). I knew about the Lost Cause, usually referred to simply as “The Cause.” I had watched Gone with the Windcountless times with my mother, and I knew it not as a movie based on a novel but as history. It wasn’t until I was a junior in high school that my American history teaching challenged our class to explore received history and find out what really happened in the Civil War. 

It was an eye-opening exercise. And yet I knew that while my relatives and my received wisdom were largely and mostly wrong, my understanding wasn’t entirely wrong. For example, the abolition movement in America was empowered by a powerful propaganda war, which often exaggerated reality to score points in public opinion (as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, himself a part of that propaganda war, would come to realize and regret). Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin without having set foot on a slave-owning plantation, yet Northern readers accepted it as fact. And the idea of secession by individual states were first advanced and popularized, not by the southern states, but by the New England states, which wanted high tariffs to protect their own manufacturing interests and were willing to entertain leaving the Union to achieve their goals. 

 

Still, it was something of a surprise to read Defending Dixie's Land: What Every American Should Know About the South and the Civil War (2023) by Isaac Bishop, a pen name for writer Jeb Smith. He’s born and raised in Vermont, no less (a Yankee!). 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Captain James Waddell of CSS Shenandoah: “Having Done My Duty” – Dwight Hughes at Emerging Civil War.

 

The Haunting Truth of Dostoyevsky’s Demons – Benjamin Carlson at The Free Press.

 

The Faith of E.E. Cummings – Dwight Longenecker at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

“The Night-Ride,” poem by Kenneth Slessor – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The Royal Banners Forward Go – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

Wages and gifts

After Romans 6:15-23

Slaves of sin

are paid a wage,

a wage whose

end is shame

and death.

Slaves of God

receive a gift,

a gift of life,

of life eternal.

A slave of God

is a slave

of righteousness,

the slavery of life.

The gift is free, 

no strings attached.

The gift is a choice,

freely made.

It is a strange thing

that this slavery 

leads to life. 

Photograph by Ravi Roshan via Unsplash, Used with permission.

The choice of slavery

After Romans 6:15-23

What you follow, who

you follow, becomes

your master, and you

their slave. It is

a choice: you choose

to obey sin, with

its death knell, or

you choose to follow

obedience, with its

sing of life.

You have chosen life,

you are set free from

death, you are now

slaves to life.

Photograph by Zulmaury Saavedra via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Trouble the Water” by Jacqueline Friedland

Seventeen-year-old Abigail Milton arrives in Charleston, South Carolina, from England in 1845. Her father has sent her for a year to stay with his close friend Douglas Elling. The Milton family had hit something of a financial disaster; Mounting debts from losses during a flood had forced them from comfortable middle class to poverty. Abby had been working at a mill and as a servant to her uncle, while fending off the uncle’s lecherous advances. 

She’s determined never to marry; she intends to become a teacher. And what she first sees of 26-year-old Douglas Elling confirms her resolution. He’s remote, rude, and distracted; he dresses without care and his beard makes him look disheveled. Three years before, he lost his wife and young daughter to a fire – a fire deliberately set because people of Elling’s class are not supposed to hold abolitionist views and, it’s rumored, help fugitive slaves escape.

Abby and Douglas seem content with staying out of each other’s way. She’s assigned a governess to give her lessons and teach her how to act in Charleston society. Douglas has little to do with her until he accidentally spooks a horse who rears and almost tramples Abby. And everything begins to change.

Jacqueline Friedland

Trouble the Water by Jacqueline Friedland is the story of Abby and Douglas, and how two people overcome past tragedy and brokenness as they reach toward each other. It’s also the story of slavery, abolition, the Underground Railroad, and the risks people would take to help slaves reach freedom. 

Friedland received a B.A. degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a law degree from New York University Law School, graduating Magna Cum Laude at both schools. She also received a M.F.A. degree from Sarah Lawrence College. She worked as an attorney for New York law firms and switched to teaching legal skills and writing at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law in New York City. She lives with her family in New York. This is her first novel. 

Trouble the Water pulls you fully into the story of Abby and Douglas. Friedland has done her research; she’s captured the sense of Charleston and the slavery system on which the South was constructed extremely well. The novel is a historical romance, but it is also about overcoming the past and listening to one’s conscience.

“The War Before the War” by Andrew Delbanco

Recently I was attending a luncheon and presentation, and the discussion at our table while we were eating turned to the divisiveness of our national politics.

“It’s not unlike the 1850s,” I said, “when any hope of a national consensus ran up against the reality of slavery. The anger and outrage began to mount, fueled by wildly different understandings of slavery in the territories, Bleeding Kansas and Nebraska, the 1857 Dred Scott decision, and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry.”

“We know where that led,” said one man at the table. “I wonder how many people actually saw the Civil War coming until it was there.”

My comment was prompted by a book I’d been reading. The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War by Andrew Delbanco uses the issue of fugitive slaves from 1776 to 1860 to explain a considerable amount of American history and how that history turned to the bloodiest conflict the country has ever experienced. 

Early on, Delbanco acknowledges a significant problem in understanding and interpreting history – that many things are clear only in hindsight. When you’re living through divisive times, it’s rarely clear to see where events are going. It’s also tempting to compare something like the slavery issue to contemporary events, like immigration (legal and otherwise) or gender issues. While the author occasionally slips into that with an offhand comment or two, he largely avoids it. 

Where he focuses his narrative is how various documents, laws, and political debates were shaped by and dealt with the ongoing issue of fugitive slaves. That’s the lens. The issue of fugitive slaves kept the political pot boiling. It was there in the debates about the U.S. Constitution, the compromises of 1820 and 1850, the Mexican War, and various congressional proposals to deal with the slave trade and the practice of slavery. The problem for the abolitionists was that slavery was embedded in the Constitution, and it wasn’t going to be possible to get around that reality with a large block of (Southern and Middle) states dependent upon the use of slave labor.

The author tells a good story and a compelling one. He tracks how the issue grew in intensity, and what role writers did and didn’t play. He goes into great detail of how fugitive slaves became a literary sub-genre, what was happening in northern state courts, and the growth of first-person accounts of slavery. He concentrates on original sources – articles, novels, magazine and newspaper accounts, letters, broadsides, court decisions, and records of congressional debates.

The book also does something unexpected. Abolitionist actions and victories weren’t always unequivocally in the best interests of fugitive slaves; racism existed on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. He tells the story of a 6-year-old Louisiana slave girl named Med, who was brought to Boston in 1836 by a woman visiting her father. The woman became ill, leaving the girl under her father’s protection. A local anti-slavery society heard about the girl and sued, challenging the right of the man top keep her. The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that because slavery was forbidden in the state, the girl had to be released, and she was handed over to the custody of the anti-slavery society. The society promptly turned around and placed her in an orphanage.

Andrew Delbanco

Delbanco is the author numerous works on history and literary studies, including The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope; Melville: His World and Work; The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil; The Puritan Ordeal; The Abolitionist Imagination; Writing New England; and others. He is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University. He’s received a number of awards and recognitions, including the National Humanities Medal in 2012.

Reading a contemporary book about 19^thcentury history can be worrisome, if only because so much history is being reinterpreted to align with today’s political issues. In The War Before the War, Delbanco, by relying so heavily on original sources and taking a largely evenhanded approach, avoids that problem. Yes, he has a perspective, but he allows the people of the time – slaves, fugitive slaves, writers, politicians, judges, slaveowners, and abolitionists – to speak for themselves.

Top illustration: A Ride for Liberty, oil on canvas (1863) by Eastman Johnson; Brooklyn Museum of Art. 

Colson Whitehead’s Mirror: “The Underground Railroad”

Consider the resume of the novel The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The National Book Award for fiction. The Carnegie Medal. The Heartland Prize. The Arthur C. Clarke Award. The Hurston-Wright Award. Longlisted for the Man Book Prize. Finalist for the Kirkus Prize. #1 New York Times Bestseller. Oprah Book Club. Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, GQ, Publisher’s Weekly, Esquire, and Buzzfeed. Translated into 40 languages.

As I looked at and through the book at a Barnes & Noble Bookstore, I asked myself the obvious question. Can any book deliver with a resume like that one? Has it been overhyped, embraced by the critics because it happened to hit the zeitgeistat exactly the right moment? Would it have received all these accolades if it had been published the year before or the year after?

To come to a book like this, two years after its publication, is a challenge. You don’t want to read it to determine if it lives up to the hype. You don’t like the thought lurking in your head that this could be a book that allows our cultural, media, and publishing elites to celebrate because it’s the culturally correct thing to do (I’ve seen that happen with poetry books). I don’t want to feel compelled to like this book because of all the prizes it’s won or its 4200+ reviews on Amazon. 

No, you want to read this book for the story it tells and what the author is trying to say to you, the reader. That’s what I set out to do, and I believe it’s what I largely accomplished.

Whitehead tells a good story. It’s a hard story, a difficult story, a story filled with violent images and events. It’s a historical story deliberately filled with historical anachronisms. The largest anachronism is implied by the title; there was no real underground railroad, with trains, engineers, stations, and station masters. The historical underground railroad was a network or routes and safe houses that helped runaway slaves escape to freedom. It began in the late 1700s and reached its peak in the 1850s; one estimate says more than 100,000 slaves had been helped by 1850. No one knows for sure.

The story turns that network of routes and safe houses into an actual rail network existing underground. It doesn’t run to a regular schedule, but it does regularly run. 

Cora is a young slave living on a Georgia cotton plantation. Her mother Mabel ran away when Cora was a child; Cora cannot forgive her for leaving her behind. The plantation owners are particularly brutal; the violence is daily and often indiscriminate, and no one is going to help you if you’re singled out for special treatment. 

The underground railroad. Source: National Park Service

Another slave, Caesar, approached Cora about running away. At first, she pushed him away. But eventually she agrees to go with him, knowing that slave catchers will be sent after them. They have to make it 30 miles to a safe house which sits atop an underground station. They get to the safe house and aboard a train. Their owner sends Arnold Ridgeway, one of the most notorious and successful slave catchers, after them.

South Carolina is the first of four key settings in the book, and it is here that Caesar and Cora live for a time. Whitehead uses each setting to dramatize particular kinds of white attitudes and efforts concerning slavery. For South Carolina, the white population considers itself advanced in its thinking, and has established factories, schools, dormitories, and other facilities to help escaped slaves. After the brutality of the plantation, Cora finds South Carolina to an almost intoxicating refuge. But over time, she sees that while she is physically better off, this society with all of its well-meaning people and good intentions are keeping her exactly where they want her. It’s better than plantation slavery, but it, too, is a kind of slavery. And then Ridgeway arrives.

North Carolina is the opposite – a society determined to eradicate all vestiges of slavery – including the slaves themselves. The violence is regularized and constant; Cora is hidden away in an attic by a couple not quite sure what to do with her. Ridgeway finds her here, too. And then it’s on to the fire-blackened wilderness of Tennessee, with its plagues of yellow fever. The final setting is Indiana, where Cora seems to have found the ultimate refuge on the Valentine farm. But the growing community of escaped slaves and free people of color are surrounded by an increasingly hostile white population.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead has created settings and situations which did not exist as he explains them but have existed in one form or another, to a greater or lesser degree, in most of American history. Slavery, even in the best of situations, was still a system based on brutality and violence. It was a social, economic, and political structure. Black people were property, to be used and abused by owners. 

In the world of The Underground Railroad, even the best-intentioned of abolitionists, sympathizers, and supporters rarely if ever saw black people like Cora as equals or even as full human beings. Cora finds a very tiny number of exceptions, but it is still her common experience. Many black people can’t be trusted, either, because they will also be keeping their eye on opportunity and reward. Cora will discover that she herself can’t be trusted; she’s often her own worst enemy. Slavery is a plague that infects everything.

What Whitehead has done is unusual. He’s created a historical novel that blends, shapes, and transports history. It is unsettling, challenging, disturbing, and riveting. It’s a journey on a train, an underground train, where the view from the windows is darkness.

It’s also a mirror.

Top photograph by Claudia Soraya via Unsplash. Used with permission. 

“A Year in the South 1865” by Stephen Ash

I found this book because I was interested in an ancestor. It’s not about my ancestor and contains no reference to him, but it gave me insights in what he might have experienced in what was likely the most significant year of his life.

The year 1865 was a year of phenomenal upheaval in the states that comprised the Confederacy. Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant in early April. By the end of the month, all other Confederate forces had surrendered. The region was economically devastated – inflation had already been destroying the value of Confederate money, and now Confederate government bonds (and debts owed) were worthless.

More significantly, the social structure, already changing because of the demands of the war, teetered into collapse. Railroads had been destroyed in war, and roads, never a priority in the pre-war South, had been left to deteriorate. The old society, with larger planters at the top, was swept away. The labor force, largely composed of slaves, had already been melting toward Union lines. Hunger stalked many areas. Law and order was breaking down, with groups of Confederate deserters, people left homeless, and people with old scores to settle roaming the countryside. Livestock, often critical to plant and harvest, had been confiscated by both Confederate government agents and invading Union troops. And after the surrender of Confederate armies, soldiers had to make their way home across a scarred and devastated landscape.

This is the context for a fascinating account of the year 1865 by historian Stephen Ash. Published in 2004, A Year in the South 1865 details the lives of four people in different parts of the South, how they lived, what they experienced, and how they survived. Each of the four kept detailed journals of their experiences and lives before, during, and after the Civil War, and Ash uses those journals and extensive research about the history of the regions where they lived to create a remarkable account.

Louis Hughes was a slave for a plantation owner in northern Mississippi. He occupied a privileged place in the slave hierarchy – the butler at the big house. Late in the war, he and his wife Matilda, the family cook, were “leased” to the Alabama Salt Works some 65 miles north of Mobile. Salt had become the most prized commodity in the South, with the Union blockade having stopped the usual imports. Salt was desperately needed, and the state of Alabama had organized one of the most industrialized operations in North America. He didn’t work in mining operations; his skills were such that he was moved immediately into administration.

Cornelia McDonald was a widow. Her husband Angus, a Confederate officer, had died in late 1864 outside of Richmond. They had lived in Winchester, Virginia, in the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley. But the valley was repeatedly attacked, looted, and devastated by Union troops, and before her husband’s death, Cornelia had moved herself and seven children to Lexington, in the southwest part of the state and away from the main theaters of the war. There she found herself, once the mistress of a plantation, having to live almost hand to mouth and dependent upon the charity of friends and strangers.

John Robertson was a young man from eastern Tennessee, who joined Confederate forces even though his region of the state was strongly pro-Union. He was captured after battel and imprisoned, and released after taking the loyalty oath to the Union. He returned to eastern Tennessee, where received the call to become a minister. But he had also been part of a Confederate group that hunted and terrorized Union sympathizers, and there were former victims looking for payback. That year, he would find himself moving with family members to Iowa.

And Samuel Agnew was a minister who lived with his wife on his father’s plantation in Panola County, Mississippi, some 60 or so miles south of Memphis. His accounts of the year (he wrote journals all of his life, and at his death there were some 45 volumes in all) are filled with rumors of Yankee troop incursions, increasing problems with the slaves working the fields, his Sunday worship services at neighboring farms, and trying to hold family and faith together as conditions in their local society deteriorated.

Stephen Ash

They were four ordinary people, but Ash’s narrative treatment of their lives provides more insight into what was happening in the South than any number of biographies of more famous people. He has a knack for telling an engaging story, and follows each of the four through the seasons of winter, spring, summer and fall of 1865 to illustrate their lives, their fears, and their hopes. After reading the accounts of each, the reader is glad that Ash includes an epilogue that explains what happened to each of the four after 1865 – and they all lived into the first decade of the 20^th century.

Ash is professor emeritus of American history at the University of Tennessee. He received a B.S. in education degree from Gettysburg College and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in American history from the University of Tennessee. He is the author of numerous books about the history of the Civil War period, including Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860-1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (1988); Secessionists and Other Scoundrels: Selections from Parson Brownlow's Book (1999); When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (1999); Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments That Changed the Course of the Civil War (2008); The Black Experience in the Civil War South (2010); and A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year After the Civil War (2013).

A Year in the South 1865 is a wonderful story of four ordinary people who lived in an extraordinary time. My own ancestor, another ordinary person in an extraordinary time, was a messenger boy in the Civil War on the Confederate side. When the war ended, he had to make his way home to Brookhaven, Mississippi. And when he arrived, he found his family gone. He was able to track them down and find them in east Texas.

He would have likely recognized the stories in A Year in the South 1865.

Top photograph: Lexington, Virginia, circa 1865. This scene would have been everyday familiar to Cornelia McDonald.

The Fierce Convictions of Hannah More

She may be the most famous person I never heard of.

Hannah More (1745-1833) wrote plays for the great 18^th century actor David Garrick. She was a friend of Dr. Johnson (yes, Boswell’s Dr. Johnson). She knew the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. And Horace Walpole. And Edmund Burke. She worked closely for decades with William Wilberforce to outlaw slavery, and died a few months after seeing that cause successful. She was a poet, and an educator, an intellectual when women intellectuals were frowned upon.

Karen Swallow Prior brings More to life in Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More, Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist. It’s a biography, yes. But it’s more than that as well, a work of love reflecting a determination to bring to life a human being who should not have been forgotten.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Painting of Hannah More by H.W. Pickersgill (1821).