Flags on the Bayou - James Lee Burke

 

James Lee Burke has often alluded to the South's Civil War history in the past and has even set whole novels during that period, so this is not new territory for him. Flags on the Bayou, however, has the feel of being Burke's final statement on the impact that slavery and a war to defend slavery still has on America's southern region today. As he so often does, Burke reminds readers again that evil men are capable of just about any level of violence toward others - and he does it here in very explicit prose.

The novel is set in late 1863, a few months after the tides of war have turned against the Confederate states for good. During a period in which Southern commanders are trying to regroup their armies and come up with an effective plan to counter major defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, New Iberia, Louisiana, finds itself plagued by a group of Southern irregulars under the leadership of a man who thrives on murder, rape, and looting.  

Burke tells his story through the eyes of several diverse characters whose fates suddenly seem to be tied together:

• Wade Lufkin - the pacifist nephew of an elderly plantation owner who has taken him in
• Pierre Cauchon - the local sheriff who gets little respect from anyone, including the military, wealthy whites, and slaves, but who doggedly keeps trying to enforce the law
• Hannah Laveau - a slave, and cousin of the famous Marie Laveau, who wants more than anything else to find the young son she lost during the Battle of Shiloh
• Florence Milton - a white woman (she is antislavery) who was raised in the North but still appreciates some attributes of Southern society
• Colonel Carleton Hayes - the vicious leader of a large contingent of irregulars/terrorists who have more control over southwest Louisiana than anyone else
• Darla Babineaux - a slave woman who "jumps the broom" with Pierre Cauchon and has grown to love and depend on him   

The novel reaches its climax at the point in which the fates of all six narrators finally collide in a cloud of utter violence and death.

I have seen elsewhere that Burke considers Flags on the Bayou his "best work." He even confidently makes that remark in the book's Acknowledgments section. I am a longtime fan (I just counted up thirty-six previous Burke novels I've read) of Mr. Burke's work, and I have to disagree with him on that point. Flags on the Bayou is a haunting novel and the narrators are memorable ones, but in my estimation, the narrative was over-the-top on multiple occasions. Some of the craziness involved made the plot less "real" to me, and lessened the effectives of what I think its intended message was. 

Rated at a solid three stars 

Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause - Ty Seidule

Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause was not an easy book for me to read and consider. My reluctance to read the book stemmed from my nervousness that a handful of my boyhood heroes were going to be exposed as frauds. But that’s not exactly what happened. Rather, I learned that those boyhood heroes of mine, while not the men I was taught they were, never pretended that they were. No, the actual frauds turned out to be the historians who for decades after the Civil War pretended that these heroes of mine were people they really never came close to resembling in real life. According to Seidule, the Lost Cause was the fraud, not the Confederate Army generals who fought so long, hard, and bravely to keep millions of black slaves in chains. The generals knew who they were and why they were fighting…and so did their contemporaries. 

Seidule is a man who literally grew up in Robert E. Lee’s shadow. He is a Virginian by birth who spent much of his boyhood in Georgia. He is a military man of decades experience, and he taught history to West Point cadets for a number of years. He is a graduate of Virginia’s Washington and Lee University. You just can’t get much more “deep South” than that. He grew up on myths about the Civil War that, especially following the 2015 violence in Charlottesville, were finally being challenged even in the South. He puts it this way:

“The problem is that the myths I learned were just flat-out, fundamentally wrong. And not just wrong in a moral sense, as if that weren’t significant enough, but wrong factually, whether through deception, denial, or willful ignorance. The myths and lies I learned promoted a form of racial hierarchy and white supremacy.”

Then, at the end of the book’s first chapter, the author begins to make his case with one particularly telling paragraph:

“The Civil War left between 650,000 and 750,000 dead because the Confederates fought to create a slave republic based on a morally bankrupt ideology of white supremacy. White southerners went to war to protect and expand chattel slavery but suffered a catastrophic defeat…Yet the former Confederates succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in changing the narrative of the Civil War. Lee’s biographer Douglas Southall Freeman wrote to the Pulitzer Prize-winning southern novelist Ellen Glasgow, ‘We Southerners had one consolation. If our fathers lost the war, you and Margaret Mitchell…have won the peace.’”

Even the titles of the book’s following six chapters are revealing:

• Chapter 2  My Hometown: A Hidden History of Slavery, Jim Crow, and Integration
• Chapter 3  My Adopted Hometown: A Hidden History as “Lynchtown”
• Chapter 4  My College: The Shrine of the Lost Cause
• Chapter 5  My Military Career: Glorifying Confederates in the U.S. Army
• Chapter 6  My Academic Career: Glorifying Robert E. Lee at West Point
• Chapter 7  My Verdict: Robert E. Lee Committed Treason to Preserve Slavery

Robert E. Lee and Me recounts one man’s journey, but it is a journey that more and more Southerners are embarking upon these days. Seidule’s book, including its thirty pages of footnotes, is a good place to begin that journey. It is a reminder, too, that history books are not to be taken at face value, and this includes the history books being written today as well as the ones written earlier. Readers will do well to keep this in mind because today’s historians are no more trustworthy than those of the past. History is written by the “victor,” and it always will be. 

Ty Seidule 

On Reading Plans and How They Can Change in an Instant

I feel myself all of a sudden going off on a new reading tangent. The trip out West we just completed saw me coming home with five new books that I picked up in a couple of the bookstores I visited in Wyoming and South Dakota. Not too surprisingly, the books that caught my eye all have a western twist to them, and I even spent the afternoon in the library today picking out a few other similar books. 

Only two of the books I bought are novels, but they fit well with the nonfiction titles I picked up on the trip and at the library:

I've read a couple of the Leaphorn and Chee novels, but I've not read one written by Anne Hillerman since she took over the series. I'm hoping that this series, especially if I go back and pretty much start over at the beginning, will take up some of the slack I feel while I'm waiting for the next Longmire novel from Craig Johnson to be published. The settings are similar enough to make that happen, and I'm hoping that Anne's writing comes close to measuring up to Tony Hillerman's.

I'm only vaguely familiar with C.J. Box's work, but I've recognized the name for a long time, which only makes it even stranger that I've never read one of the man's novels. There are over twenty Game Warden Joe Pickett novels now, and this one from 2015 is pretty far down the list. Depending on my reaction to Endangered, this may well end up being a series I will spend more time reading from in the future. Its Wyoming setting is certainly a big plus for me.

Now for the nonfiction I bought:

I've been fascinated by Buffalo Bill Cody for years, especially with his showmanship and the way he managed to bring such a complicated wild west show all over the country - and the world - the way he did. I've often wondered what his personal relationship with the Native Americans in the show was like...and what they felt about being killed off in every show they appeared in. Our day in the Buffalo Bill Center in Cody, Wy, only reinforced my curiosity. I hope that Deanne Stillman's Blood Brothers has some of the answers I want.

I'm a big fan of Tom Clavin's nonfiction, so when I saw his name on the cover of this Chief Red Cloud biography, I jumped on it. Red Cloud is officially the "only American Indian in history to defeat the United States Army in a war." The government actually ended up suing for peace almost entirely on Red Cloud's terms, and for a few years he and his people were allowed to live in peace with very little interference from the army and the settlers wanting fresh starts in the West. 

Those old-time outlaws like the James Gang, the Daltons, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, etc. have intrigued me since I was a kid growing up on black & white westerns on television and in the movies. Butch Cassidy spent a lot of time hiding out in a couple of the states we just visited (if all the road signs are to be believed, anyway), and this biography promises to be "The True Story of an American Outlaw" that I want to know more about. It should be fun.

In addition, this afternoon I came home from the library with these:

• Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides that is billed as "A Magnificent History of How the West Was Really Won - A Sweeping Tale of Shame and Glory."
• A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn: The Last Great Battle of the American West by James Donovan - self-explanatory
• The Comanche by T. Jensen Lacey - this is one book in a 14-book YA series in which each book concentrates on one of fourteen "major Native American tribes."
• The Real West (companion book to the Legends and Lies television series) by David Fisher - this one separates myth from fact in the lives of many of the key figures of the day
• Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule - After initially avoiding this title when it was first published (and even before that), I think I'm finally ready to read this one.

This is not my reading plan for August, but I hope to get at least two or three of these read along with the other books I've already chosen for the month. I love being sidetracked a couple of times a year, and this looks like one of those times.

I Jonathan: A Charleston Tale of the Rebellion - George WB Scott

I’ve been a fan of Civil War historical fiction since I first learned about the bloodiest war in American history as a child more than sixty years ago. Of course, as a true “son of the South,” while watching a movie or reading a book about that war back then, I always rooted for the men in gray despite knowing what the ultimate outcome really had been. Over the years, my interest in the war grew more along the lines of battle strategies and the generals on both sides, and I began to take a deeper interest in the biographies and histories. As it turns out, I had great-great grandfathers on both sides, one a private in a Louisiana infantry unit, the other a sergeant in a Texas calvary unit that fought for the Union. My Texas relative was, in fact, one of less than 800 Texans who fought on that side of the line. It was only later that I developed an interest in diaries of the time and learned about what the war was really like for those Southerners who watched everything around them being destroyed little by little until it was all gone. What they endured was incredible. 

George Scott’s I Jonathan: A Charleston Tale of the Rebellion is very much akin to reading one of those old diaries. The difference is that the “diary” at the heart of I Jonathan is a fictional one supposedly recounted in 1941 to a young man by his 100-year-old great uncle. Needless to say, time is of the essence, and the nephew repeatedly visits his uncle in the old man’s nursing home so that he can capture his story before it is too late. As Ralph Bennett tells us, his uncle was in and around Charleston, South Carolina, for the entire war, having arrived there from Europe shortly before the first shots were fired at nearby Fort Sumpter. 

The odd thing about Jonathan being in South Carolina at all during the Civil War is that he is not a Southerner. Rather, he is a Bostonian who accidentally finds himself landing in Charleston as he is returning to the U.S. from an extended stay in Europe. Unfortunately for Johnathan, upon arrival his personal circumstances continue to worsen even to the point that he cannot afford to make his way back to Boston any time soon even if he wants to - and because his heart has been broken by the one he left behind there, he doesn’t want to. So, not entirely by choice, Johnathan finds himself stranded in South Carolina at the most awkward (and dangerous) time for someone from Boston to be stuck in that city.

For the next four years, Jonathan has to find a way to survive. All the while trying to make a place for himself in a world that is being ripped apart around him, he has to avoid those who cannot understand why a healthy young man like him is not already part of the Confederate Army. He manages to avoid taking up arms by contributing to the cause in a way that allows him to do so without totally feeling that he has betrayed his own country: he transports goods for a local trader, he becomes part of a local fire brigade, and for a short time, he is even a blockade runner. 

Bottom Line: The beauty of I Jonathan is in the evolution of the way its main character sees the fatal mistake that the South has made. While he can never reconcile the idea that professed Christians are willing to die in order to keep other men in bondage, he begins to understand why everything is happening as it is, and in the process, he learns to admire many of the men and women he comes to know. Through Jonathan’s friendships with slaves, free blacks, plantation-owning families, military men, and traders, the reader gets a sense of what it may have been like in one of the South’s major cities and ports as the war progressed. If you are interested in historical fiction of this period, do take a look at the haunting  I Jonathan. 

George WB Scott

Review copy provided by publisher or author

Is Late-Onset ADD a Thing?

I'm starting to wonder if it's possible to develop a case of ADD behavior late in life. I've been finding it difficult to actually sit down and read for more than a few minutes without stopping all of a sudden to do one or two other things that suddenly spring to my mind. If that were not bad enough, at the same time that my reading-pace has slowed way down, my book-acquisition-pace seems to be accelerating. 

Everywhere I turn, people are talking about books, and I'm jotting down their recommendations as fast as I can. Is there more book-chatter out there these days  because of the pandemic? I mean, it's great whatever the cause, but this is getting serious now. Just today, for instance, I watched a livestream from the Carnton house in Franklin, TN, and came away from that with at least half-a-dozen new books on the Civil War that I really, really need to read. And soon.

As of this morning, I was only actively reading two books, both very slowly, as it turns out: Sean Hannity's Live Free or Die, a book that is much better written than I had expected it would be, but is also pretty depressing and scary; and Philip Jose Farmer's science fiction classic To Your Scattered Bodies Go, a book I've read twice before and loved. I am also starting at least two others today by choosing one of the four western novels in the beautiful Library of America volume The Western that arrived in the mail last week. The classic novels are from the 1940s and 50s, but I don't remember ever reading one of them despite remembering three of them well as favorite movies. 

The second one, which I've already started, is Julie Gray's The True Adventures of Gidon Lev: Rascal, Holocaust Survivor, Optimist. I have had an electronic review copy of this one for a few weeks, and now seems like the time to read it. Lev was one of approximately 15,000 children sent to the German concentration camp near Prague called Térézin. He and 91 other children survived the experience. Julie Gray was reluctant to take on this project when Lev first approached her with the idea, but now the two of them are constant companions despite their several-decade difference in age. I am definitely liking what I see in this one through the first three chapters.

Also, coming into my hands in the last few days are several other books I'm itching to get into: a nice hardcover review copy of Jill McCorkle's Hieroglyphics; Russ Thomas's Firewatching, a book I was lucky enough to win in a blogger's random drawing; and Martha Wells's Rogue Protocol, the third book in her fun "Murderbot Diaries" that I just picked up from my library this afternoon. And that doesn't even count the dozens of others that I'm keeping handy because I just know I'm going to read them all someday. Yeah, right. Oh, and the new Civil War books I heard about this morning on that livestream I mentioned. I'm about to begin the search to grab each of those, too. 

Honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Sam Houston Memorial Museum (With Excerpts from Exiled by Ron Rozelle)

Sam Houston portrait (museum)

The Sam Houston Memorial Museum located in Huntsville, Texas, very near the campus of the university named after Houston, is a remarkable place.  I spent much of the day there Saturday taking photographs of the various buildings and stunning Sam Houston artifacts located there.  The rented home in which the Texas hero died in 1863 was moved to its present location there in 1936, and the home in which Houston lived for most of the years he spent in the United States senate and in which his children were raised sits right there where it has always been.

Upstairs room in which funeral was held

Non-Texans will not know how big a hero Sam Houston is to me and my fellow Texans.  Houston was in charge of the Texas army at the time it claimed its independence from Mexico by defeating General Santa Ana's Mexican army in the Battle of San Jacinto, forever changing both Texas and United States history.  Seeing the Mexican general's saddle (taken from him at the battle as a war prize) was almost as thrilling to me as seeing Houston's famous leopard-skin vest, a gift from the Cherokee Indian tribe). 

Below is an excerpt from Exiled: The Last Days of Sam Houston  by Ron Rozelle (published by Texas A&M University Press in 2017) that sets the scene for the attached photos:

His funeral was a small event, held the next day directly above the little room in which he died, in the parlor of the Steamboat House.  Every straight-back chair in the house was placed facing the casket that had been built recently in the prison by the ship's carpenter of the Harriet Lane.  The Baptist preacher was out of town, so Margaret had to make do with the pastor of the Presbyterians, Reverend James Cochran.  

[...]

The death room

After the final prayer the coffin was maneuvered down the steep steps by pallbearers who were Houston's fellow Masons and carried in a steadily falling summer rain across the muddy road to the cemetery.  He was buried at the far end, in a place he had chosen himself just a few feet from the grave of his friend Henderson Yoakam.  

Neither ceremony was attended by many people, possibly because of the small room in which the funeral had been held and the rain that fell on the burial.  But it is unlikely that many more would have shown up in a big church on a sunny day.  In the midst of the war, and given the low regard in which so many held him, many papers wouldn't have wasted space needed for war news and casualty lists on even a tiny notice of his death.

 These last two photos are meant to give some perspective as to the physical proximity of the two rooms pictured above.  This is The Steamboat House that the Houstons were forced to rent after they sold their nearby home to pay off debts incurred during one of Houston's political campaigns.

View directly up the stairs to the funeral room

View of the home showing the death room at ground level and the funeral room above 

The Fateful Lightning

The Fateful Lightning is the fourth and final book in Jeff Shaara’s story of the Civil War as it was fought in the American “west.”  The book, a detailed accounting of Sherman’s “March to the Sea,” follows three previous novels dedicated to the battles of Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, respectively.  As in each of those books, Shaara tells his story by placing his readers into the boots of several key real-life characters from both sides of the tragic struggle.

As it should be, the book’s primary focus is on Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, the chief engineer behind the slash and burn ride that hastened the end of the war.  In addition to seeing the march from Sherman’s point of view, Shaara has his readers do the same from the points of view of two of Sherman’s adversaries: General William Joseph Hardee and Captain James Seeley, a Confederate cavalryman.  And, interestingly, the book’s fourth main character is a slave known throughout only as Franklin because the young man has never known another name to be directed his way.  (When first questioned by the Union officer who befriends him, Franklin is not even sure whether Franklin is a first or a last name – all he knows is that it is his only name.)

The Fateful Lightning begins on November 16, 1864 as Sherman starts to move his army out of Atlanta, a city that has been largely destroyed as a result of his assault on the city.  It ends on April 25, 1865 (seventeen days after Lee has surrendered his own army to Grant) in Raleigh, North Carolina, when Sherman receives the letter that will finally allow him to relax:  Confederate general Johnston’s surrender of the largest segment of the Confederate army still in the field.  From that moment, the American Civil War is effectively over.

Author Jeff Shaara

Sherman was a complicated man, one I have had mixed emotions about for a very long time.  With time, I have come to be an admirer of his military skills and his eventual willingness to wage “total war” on the South in order to end the fighting as quickly as possible.  But as a born and bred Southerner, I have long wished that Southern civilians had not suffered so greatly at his hands.  For that reason, I think that the real beauty of Jeff Shaara’s historical fiction is the way it humanizes historical figures, even to the degree that they become – be they sympathetic characters or more questionable ones – the real people they were, with all the weaknesses and doubts that the rest of us have to contend with in our own lives. 

I have read a lot of Civil War history in the last few decades, much of it associated with Sherman’s “march.”  But I can honestly say that after reading The Fateful Lightning, I have a better understanding of that famous campaign than I had coming in to the book.  At well over 600 pages in length, this one takes a while to absorb, but it is most definitely time well spent. 

Post #2,587

My 2014 Civil War Reading: A Nine-Book Tour

Entering 2014, I planned to do more Civil War history reading than I've managed in the previous couple of years.  As the year draws to a close, I am a little disappointed in the number of Civil War books I've read, but I'm very pleased with the quality of those books - and by how much I enjoyed them and learned from them.

When it comes to reading books, I'm not a nonfiction snob at all - really, I'm almost the opposite. So, because nonfiction titles generally make up only about one-third of my average year's reading, I was surprised to find just the opposite for my CW reads: six nonfiction titles and three novels:  

• Travels to Hallowed Ground - Emory Thomas
• How to Lose the Civil War - Bill Fawcett
• Fierce Patriot - Robert L. O'Connell
• Clouds of Glory - Michael Korda
• Grant and Sherman - Charles B. Flood
• The Marble Man - Thomas L. Connelly

                                 and

• The Secret Trial of Robert E. Lee - Thomas J. Fleming
• I Shall Be Near You - Erin Lindsay McCabe 
• Shiloh: A Novel - Shelby Foote

Travels to Hallowed Ground, The Marble Man, and Shiloh: A Novel were re-reads for me, three books I've been partial too for a long time.  

The Marble Man (first published by LSU Press in 1977) does a good job of deconstructing much of the myth that surrounds General Robert E. Lee.  Thomas Connelly does this by showing exactly how, and when, the myth was constructed, in the first place, and he does his best to separate fact from fiction.  The book, of course, was not very popular in the South, but I actually saw a copy at the wonderful bookstore in the basement of Lee Chapel in Lexington, Va.  Kudos to the shop manager there for including it on her Lee shelves.

In Travels to Hallowed Ground (published by the University of South Carolina Press in 1987), historian Emory Thomas recounts his visits to various Civil War battlegrounds and the lasting impact that those visits had on him. Sites visited include: Harpers Ferry, Petersburg, Shiloh, Fort Pulaski, and the Bennett Place.

Shelby Foote's Shiloh: A Novel (published by The Dial Press in 1952), is a character-driven, fictional look at one of the War's pivotal battles.  The approach that Foote took in this novel became pretty much the blueprint for the immense success that Michael Shaara would later have with his prize winning novel The Killer Angels - and of course it has become the "go-to" approach for Michael's son Jeff and numerous other authors since then.

My two favorites of the nine books, though, were both published this year: Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman (Random House) and Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee (Harper).  These two biographies, one of a Union General and one of a Confederate general, are remarkable in the amount of information (and speculation) that they pack into single volumes.  Although Michael Korda's Lee biography is 785 pages long and Robert L. O'Connell's Sherman book is just over half that length, the books are equally excellent.

Novels The Secret Trial of Robert E. Lee and I Shall Be Near You, are very different pieces of historical fiction.  The first, a nice blending of speculative history with historical facts, fits in a popular genre known as Alternate History.  The second is a novel about a newlywed woman who follows her husband to war and, when she catches up to him, disguises herself as a man and fights alongside him and their childhood friends.  Several women are have known to fight as common soldiers on both sides, so this is not as farfetched as it first sounds.

Grant and Sherman: The Partnership That Won the Civil War is an excellent dual-biography of two of the North's greatest, and certainly most successful, Civil War generals.  The book explores the unique collaboration that was made possible by the distinct personalities of these two men.  Their personalities meshed into the perfect fit, and the decision to have them work together as a unit, was the beginning of the end of the Confederacy.

How to Lose the Civil War was the only disappointment I had in my Civil War reading this year.  It makes good points, and builds good cases for those points, but very little of the information is new or surprising- and, for the most part, it is very dryly written.  

I'm already looking forward to next year's Civil War reading, and I'm in the process of choosing a few books with which to begin the year. Most of them have been on my shelves for a while already - and I added two or three last month - so I think I'm good to go.