Carrying the Flag: The Story of Charles Whilden, the Confederacy's Most Unlikely Hero (review)

In Carrying the Flag, Gordon Rhea traces the life of Pvt. Charles Whilden, a soldier in Gen. A. P. Hill's corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, to his singular act of heroism in May 1864. Rhea's book is based on the premise that often the actions and the "capacity of insignificant players . . . alter[s] the course of history," a realization long acknowledged by social historians, but still in need of emphasis in the historiography of the American Civil War (3). Charles Whilden's act of heroism in the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania Court House in May 1864, Rhea argues, prolonged the war for another ten months. What made Whilden's exploit so "unlikely" was the fact that it was accomplished by a forty-year-old private who was racked by frequent epileptic seizures and who had failed in virtually every professional and private endeavor he undertook before the war.

Despite the promise to tell the story of Charles Whilden, as the title suggests, this book is as much, if not more, about the sectional crisis and the subsequent Civil War. Therein may lie the book's major weakness. The author vividly recounts the well-known tales of sectionalism, secession, and war, and Charles Whilden, the book's subject, often gets lost in them. In the first part of the book, the reader learns much about the history of Charleston, the Denmark Vesey plot, and the sectional crisis but very little about Charles Whilden. Indeed, the primary material Rhea found reveals only a spotty tale about Charles's first thirty years. Born in 1824 in Charleston as a son of a newspaper publisher, Whilden seemed to have led an undistinguished life marked by private and professional disappointments. Only when he moved to New Mexico in 1854 does his life become more transparent to the reader. In letters to his family, Charles complains about frontier life's lack of refinement and the boorishness of its inhabitants.

Throughout the book, Gordon Rhea gives slavery its due as the central cause for Southern secession and the subsequent Civil War. Charles was born in the shadow of Charleston's workhouse, a place for the torture and punishment of recalcitrant slaves and runaways. He grew up in a Charleston traumatized by fear of slave revolts; and, facing bankruptcy, his family was saved from financial ruin by its domestic slave who hired herself out in order to support the family. For all practical purposes she became the head of the household after Charles's father's death, thereby turning the paternalist "slavery as a positive good" argument on its head. As an adult Charles became an ardent secessionist, and Rhea makes it clear that fighting for a slave-owning republic was one of the major reasons for Charles's wish to join the army. After being turned down time and again because of his epilepsy, Charles Whilden finally manages to sign up in the 1st South Carolina Infantry Regiment.

It is in the second part of the book, dealing with the Wilderness campaign and the battle at Spotsylvania Court House, where Gordon Rhea regains his footing as master narrator of Civil War battles. Rhea treads familiar ground here; as he has published two well-received and award-winning books about these crucial campaigns of 1864. Rhea's detailed and imaginative descriptions of the slaughter in the Wilderness and the Bloody Angle are riveting. This is narrative military history at its best. But here, too, poor Charles Whilden gets lost in the shuffle until the very end. The battles become those of steadfast and heroic generals and valiant troops, told from perspectives other than Whilden's. The heroism of the Confederate troops takes on almost mythical proportions in Rhea's tale and dangerously approaches cliché. There are no deserters, outright cowards, or soldiers crossing over to enemy lines here, incidents that happened with...