"the moral ambiguity of that time": a Conversation with Robert Morgan

FEATURED AUTHOR—ROBERT MORGAN "the moral ambiguity of that time": a Conversation with Robert Morgan______ Resa Crane Bizzaro and Patrick Bizzaro Transcribed by Lynn Novelli IN THE SPRING OF 2004, Robert Morgan was Duke University's Visiting Blackburn Professor, and he lived in Durham, NC, not far from campus. This interview was conducted at the residence he shared with his wife, Nancy, surrounded by books and art. After a cold winter, azaleas and daffodils were blooming, and the sun shone over the hilly neighborhood, not at all reminiscent of the setting of his most recent novel. PB: In the Acknowledgements to Brave Enemies, you say "my father Clyde R. Morgan, first told me the story of the Battle of Cowpens when I was a boy." How about your father as a storyteller? What can you tell us, in particular, about the way that he told this story, the story about the battle, and how your tale differs, maybe, from what he told you? R.M: Well, one of my great resources as a writer has been the fact that I grew up among storytellers. My grandpa was a great storyteller, had all these stories about panthers and snakes and ghosts and mad dogs. My dad loved history. He loved to read history, though he had very little formal education. He had only gone to the sixth grade. But he loved the local and regional history, American history, family history, and he had hundreds of stories about the Revolution, the Civil War, the local history. I don't think my dad had studied that battle in the kind of detail that I studied it. But he had read about it in the history books. He read history of the Revolution, and he knew a good bit about the campaign in the South. He knew a lot more than most Americans do about the Revolution and George Washington. One of the things that I got from him was that sense that the Revolution ended in the South. It may have begun in New England, it may have begun at Lexington and Concord, but it ended in four great battles in the South: Kings Mountain, 11 Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, and Yorktown. One of the reasons I wanted to write Brave Enemies was to call attention to the Revolution in the South, which is not too well known, as well as to this greatbattle. This is one of the greatest victories Americans have ever won. King's Mountain is a very important battle, often called the turning point of the Revolution. And it had great psychological significance because Patrick Ferguson and his militia were defeated. But in military terms, the Battle of Cowpens was much more important because General Daniel Morgan defeated the cream of the British army. It wasn't a militia he was fighting; it was the best the British had. It was the best army in the world, Cornwallis' army. That gave a boost to the American cause. It's almost impossible for us to really estimate it at this point, to prove the American militia, a small American force, could totally defeat the best Cornwallis had, you know? It hastened the end to the Revolution. Cornwallis was crippled by Cowpens. He lost so much of his best army that he never recovered. PB: Recently, I've read some books, historical fiction, but also historical poetry. In particular I'm thinking of William Heyen's Crazy Horse poems, where as a kind of afterword, he acknowledges certain sources. And I think one thing that we don't teach our students is how writers conduct research. And the research is sometimes, in some ways, very different from the kinds of research a literary scholar or an historian would do. Yet, we teach them methods of literary research, in most places, as a required course. Would you mind talking a little bit about the research you did? R.M: I've always loved to read history, particularly American history and regional history. When I moved to Cornell University in 1971, I was living out of the South for the first time in my life. Out of homesickness and nostalgia, I kept going to...