The Confederate Reader (review)

208CIVIL W AR HISTORY The Confederate Reader. Edited by Richard B. Harwell. (New York: Longmans, Green and Company. 1957. Pp. 389. $7.50.) this is a well-done book. Mr. Harwell does not fall into the open manholes which seem to capture many organizers of anthologies. He has an opportunity, for example, to write a windy personal interpretation of the War as a preface, but he doesn't. He writes instead six remarkably succinct pages which put the book in context for the reader; Mr. Harwell then ducks out of sight and reappears so briefly as to be almost invisible. It must require great strength of character, for example, to preface with only eleven lines the haunted bombast of Jefferson Davis' "Address to the Soldiers" in 1864, but this editor has it. There is not a trace in the entire book of the patronizing with which many experts offer up their pearls to the less knowledgeable. There are no complex structural tricks, no purple section headings, no coyly casual erudition. The books sounds, rather, as if it had somehow been put together by the people of the Confederacy themselves. No builder of an anthology could hope for more. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the collection is the hatred which burns in some of the piece. The popular image of the people who fought the war has become increasingly sentimentalized (and certainly will become more so in the next seven years); it comes as something of a shock, therefore, to be reminded that many Southerners had feelings toward the Northerner invaders which were no less intense than the Hungarian revolutionary's feelings about the Soviets. As an abstract proposition, this is easily understood, but it still is surprising to come upon it, so to speak, face-to-face. There is, for example, the astonishing sermon preached by the regimental chaplain to a brigade of the 54th North Carolina. The brigade had just witnessed the hanging of twenty-two ex-comrades for desertion, and the chaplain's text is hell-fire, the conflict between good and evil, and Old Testament hatred of the wicked. It is a document with considerable impact. And there is a newspaperman-soldier's account of the fall of Vicksburg, full of the disillusionment of the soldier who feels he has been betrayed by his command and his bitterness toward his conquerors (the officers, he explains, are considerate gentlemen; the troops brutish foreigners). There are the "resolutions " adopted by McGowan's Brigade, South Carolina Volunteers, early in 1865: "That the reasons which induced us to take up arms at the beginning have not been impaired. ... If we then judged that the enemy intended to impoverish and oppress us, we now know that they propose to subjugate, enslave, disgrace, and destroy us." There are other kinds of insight provided by the collection as well. There is another sermon, this one blistering the frivolous city of Richmond in general and the institution of the theater in particular; there is a witty, timeless description of that anonymous informant who has haunted battlefields for centuries, the "Reliable Gentleman" of the newspapers; there are fascinating curiosa, such as the mule-meat menu from Vicksburg, an account of amateur theatricals in the C.S.A., and a "circular" describing the valor of Indian troops in the Cherokee Book Reviews207 Nation. It all adds up to a variegated, but surprising symmetrical canvas of the War. There is also a certain amount of dross. Most of the battle accounts are unremarkable , and there are too many samples of the canonization school of biography ; the syrupyportraits of Lee and Polk and Joe Johnston are so remote from real people that the names could be interchanged at random without anyone being the wiser. But these are small deficiencies, and perhaps they only serve to make the considerable virtues of The Confederate Reader more impressive. William E. Porter Iowa City, Iowa Marks of Lincoln on Our Land. By Maurine Whorton Redway and Dorothy Kendall Bracken. (New York: Hastings House. 1957. Pp. 180. $3.75.) this selection of forty-one photographs, with text, offers the reader something of an armchair pilgrimage to places and scenes Abe Lincoln once knew...