A Certain Slant of Light

Please join me, my friends, in a rousing rendition of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” for I have finished James McPherson’s mammoth tome, Battle Cry of Freedom!

Entire volumes have been written devoted entirely to the second day of Gettysburg - entire libraries to Lincoln; so a mere one-volume history (even if that volume be nearly one thousand pages long) could hardly be called exhaustive. But Battle Cry of Freedom covers an enormous breadth of political and military information about the war in an engaging and memorable way. It covers not only elections and battles (including the Union blockade of the Confederacy, which I knew about vaguely but not in any detail) but also the monetary policies that Union and Confederacy used to fund the war, which I had never thought about before and found fascinating.

(You will be shocked to hear that the Confederate states hesitated to raise taxes, and therefore in the beginning funded the war almost entirely by printing money… which led to ruinous inflation.)

It’s particularly good at showing the way that the different parts of the war interlock. For instance, the fall of Atlanta in fall of 1864 probably saved the election for Lincoln: his chances had looked grim after a summer of bloody, inconclusive battles. After Atlanta, the despondent Northern mood swept upward to jubilation (this seems to happen after every major battle, by the way, the winning side decides the war is practically won and the losing side concludes the Cause is DOOMED), which swept Lincoln back into office and won the Republicans a 3/4ths majority in Congress, which allowed the North to continue prosecuting the war and also put the final nails in the coffin for possible recognition of the Confederacy by England and France.

England and France apparently both really longed to recognize the Confederacy, partly for geopolitical reasons - France hoped the Confederacy would recognize France’s claims on Mexico. But also, the English upper classes were still mad about the American democratic experiment and YEARNED to see it fail. The planter class of the Confederacy, in turn, identified with the English upper classes, seeing themselves as sons of the Normans, not craven money-grubbing Anglo-Saxons like those Yankee northerners. The Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons in 1066, and many southerners sincerely believed they were going to run over the northern armies the way that William the Conqueror ran over Harold.

I think this goes some way toward explaining some of the Confederacy’s more bone-headed decisions, not least of which was their decision to secede when the northern states were more populous and richer and had something like 90% of the country’s industrial base (like, you know, the capacity to make gunpowder and cannons and so forth).

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I’m continuing my Civil War journey with Bell Irvin Wiley’s The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union, which I suspect has been superseded by newer research (it was published in 1952), but is probably exactly the book that a college student in 1964 would read in order to better understand his crush the Civil War veteran awakened from a hundred-year’s sleep. (On the same theory, I also intend to read Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac trilogy, but one can only read so much at once.)

I have also decided that for this project I probably need to read about the early years of American involvement in Vietnam, because you just know that a newly awakened Civil War vet would be interested in the wars that America’s fighting now. He is puzzled why the US wants to conquer a country halfway around the globe, and even more puzzled when everyone is offended that he would think the US wants to conquer anything. Isn’t conquest… what the US does?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“Wish eight was for a little box and inside is another box and inside is another box and inside is another box and inside that is an elephant.”

Shirley Jackson’s Nine Magic Wishes is a charming picture book, in which a child receives nine wishes and makes exactly the kind of wishes I would have made when I was eight. Heck, I would probably make these wishes now, although I would feel that I really ought to wish for something that would help people. (Maybe the magician would help me out by insisting the wishes must be charmingly useless.)

I read Kathleen Norris’s The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work” in the hopes that perhaps I might click with Norris if I gave her work a second chance - not so much that I might find that I agree with her, but that our disagreements might prove productive, that they might provide a new and interesting window on the world even if ultimately not one I adopt for myself.

On the whole this did not prove true, but it wasn’t a futile exercise. This one sentence stuck with me as a crystallization of a lot of my fears about human relationships: “In seeking any covenantal relationship we must be willing to say ‘yes’ long before we have a clear idea of what such intimacy will cost us.”

And I finished Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, which remained beautifully written and very sad (McCourt was not kidding about his terrible childhood!) and I feel like I ought to have something to say about it but, in fact, I do not.

What I’m Reading Now

The worst has happened in Armadale! Both Allan Armadales have fallen in love with Lydia Gwilt! Allan Armadale #2 (alias Ozias Midwinter) has nobly bowed out of the competition without, in fact, ever allowing Allan Armadale #1 to guess there is a competition (you’d think AA#1 might have cottoned on when Midwinter clammed up the moment AA#1 burst into the house yelling “I’M IN LOVE WITH MISS GWILT,” but as Miss Gwilt herself notes, AA#1 is a moron), but I strongly suspect that the narrative will not allow him to get away with it. Midwinter WILL get sucked back into the developing love polygon. He cannot escape.

I’m about halfway through the behemoth that is James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. The Union has taken New Orleans and half of Tennessee (and maybe could have taken Richmond if McClellan weren’t so useless); the Confederacy, tottering close to despair, has enacted the first ever American conscription law. But it’s only the spring of 1862, so that despair is premature.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got an interlibrary loan in at the library and I’m pretty sure it’s Joan Lingard’s The File on Fraulein Berg.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

James McPherson’s Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War, which is a collection of short essays about, well, what it says on the tin. I think my favorite is the one where he attempts to explain to academic historians that military history is important because wars, like, change things, which seems so self-evidently obvious that you shouldn’t have to write a whole essay about it, but I once attempted to convince my grad school classmates of the same thing and no one was buying it. Who cares about guns when there’s discourse loose in the world?

I suspect that historians’ discourse obsession grows out of the fact that historians may, if they are very lucky, actually affect the discourse. Don’t we all like to think that we’re doing the most important work in the world? It’s a bit awkward therefore if “changing the discourse” is only the first step, and leads to nothing at all if no one amasses guns or money or votes to make changes to physical reality instead of just the paper universe. Who would remember Thomas Paine if George Washington and the Continental Congress hadn’t acted on “Common Sense?” He would have been nothing but a crank.

I finished Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, which unfortunately I never really warmed to. It’s very much “this happened then this happened then this happened,” and many of the things are happening to men: so-and-so gets sent off on a mission to Hong Kong and we follow him there and back even though he accomplishes nothing and the whole thing has very little to do with the supposed topic of the book, except insofar as plural marriage made it much harder for Mormonism to win converts. Lots of people thought that was just too weird.

The most interesting parts, I thought, where the nuggets of information of how people in nineteenth-century America dealt with marriages that went sour. They didn’t necessarily plod on in misery together forever: legal divorce was hard to get, but partners would nonetheless go their separate ways and often marry other people, technically bigamously, but who’s going to know if your first marriage was in Maine and your second is in Utah?

The Mormon church became popular among women in part because it had a more liberal stance on divorce than much of American society at the time: Brigham Young held that married couples living together without love were committing a kind of adultery. Some of his own wives were woman who legally were married to someone else.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve finally made some progress on Tamora Pierce’s Tempests and Slaughter! But honestly the main impression I have gotten from this book is that I have outgrown Tamora Pierce, or possibly that this book needed a harsh editor, because I’m over a hundred pages in and nothing is happening.

I’ve also begun Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Gates Ajar, which was a runaway bestseller about a girl who lost her brother in the Civil War (this was published in 1868) and is inconsolable with grief until her cousin comes and teaches her a new, cozier vision of heaven, where you get to meet your loved ones again, rather than just standing about stiffly in robes singing eternally with choirs of angels.

I would have made more progress in this, but Mary’s grief is so keen that it keeps making me sort of sniffly and I’m reading it at work so clearly we can’t be having with that. Nineteenth-century writers are truly ruthless when they want to make you cry.

I’ve also begun a reread of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, preparatory to watching the movie. One of my friends loved it and another loathed it, so we’ll just see, I guess. The book is still a delight and a half.

What I Plan to Read Next

“If only there was a book about women in the silent film industry,” I lamented not too long ago. “Not just the actresses but the directors, the screenwriters, the women behind the scenes.”

It exists! It is Pink-slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries and I am going to read it.