The Cotton Road (review)

198CIVIL WAR HISTORY considerable popularity and a measure of critical acclaim, but today his works are almost forgotten. His biographies of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are useful for their first-hand accounts of miUtary operations. His best novels are The Virginia Comedians (1854), a treatment of WilUamsburg before the Revolution, and Surry of Eagle's Nest (1866), a romance of the Civil War. Three months before Jackson's death, Captain Esten Cooke contributed the first of a series of poems and sketches to a Richmond weekly, The Southern Illustrated News. Three articles appeared under the tide "Stonewall Jackson, and the Old Stonewall Brigade." They are addressed to patriotic Confederates and contain "all Ûie dash and passion and hero worship that marked Cooke's wartime reporting," Mr. Harwell asserts. Cooke's sketches of Jackson and his men contain more eulogy than historical reporting. From the opening sentence, "Greatest of Generals is General Stonewall Jackson," to his rhetorical conclusion, Cooke embellishes his subject with language intended to inspire, language suggesting the birth of a legend. The sketches are admittedly by one who has "often pressed [Jackson'sj honest hand," one who treasures every precious anecdote because each is "a thing to tell to children's children." Here are most of the symbols, cultural and legendary, which came to be a part of the Southern cause: the personal approach , the religious overtones, the classical allusions, a love of poetry and a wilUngness to quote it, an assumption that rhetoric is superior to facts and that emotion is higher dian reason, and many more. There are glimpses of batdes and brief notes on otìier generals, but extravagant eulogy predominates. The editor has appended short bibUographical descriptions in two sections entided "Cooke's Lives of Jackson," and "The Chief Early Biographies of Jackson ." Mr. Harwell's notations, sometimes less specific than an historian would desire, include such matters as Cooke's miUtary career, his incorporation of die wartime sketches in his post-war novels, an account of the struggles to produce the first life of Jackson, available information on the missing manuscript of Cooke's first revision of his Jackson, and sparse bibUographical facts on the first seven lives of Jackson. William P. FmLER University, Alabama. The Cotton Road. By Frank Feuille. (New York: William Morrow and Company. 1954. Pp. 320. $3.50.) this is described as a novel about the overland trail from Houston, Texas, to Bagdad, Mexico, by means of which the Confederacy hoped to get its cotton to a neutral port to avoid the Federal blockade. "There was little in die records," the author says in a prefatory note. "In histories, in periodicals, in biographies, even in archives, references are sketchy. . . . The legend and folklore which my grandfather had given me remained the paramount source of material." Grandfather must have been the tritest folklorist of them all. This novel contains a red-haired, mischievous fifteen-year-old named Timmy O'Shea; it has an old plantation, described as a symbol of gracious living, which is burned by Book Reviews199 the Yankees; it has an EngUsh officer who is cashiered from his regiment because he is too honorable to reveal the shortcomings of a brother officer; it has a heroine named Eugenie who is a perfect lady, but who sometimes gets involuntarily disarranged ("the whole of a snowy, pink-tipped, perfectìy rounded breast, rising and falUng with each breath, lay before his eyes. He fought to control his breathing and wrenched his gaze away") ; it has a French sea captain who speaks perfect EngUsh except for Mon Dieu and mon enfant (he does not, however, say tiensl); most of all, it has fights. Its protagonists fight Comanches, thirst, the Federals, Mexican bandits, rapists, northers, wild boars, ratders, and sin. And they do it in prose such as this: "Lance, his face grim, stayed on his knees a few seconds more. He was no stranger to deaüi, but the quickness, the unexpected manner of this first fatality stunned him for a moment. Then the double nature of the calamity smote him and galvanized him into furious action." For those who are interested in side arms, there is also a...