Critic's Corner

The Bell Irvin Wiley Reader

By Stephen Davis · Originally published March 2017 · p. 30

“I write with a pencil on yellow paper,” Bell Wiley once told an interviewer. And write he did, more than two dozen books on Southern history, including probably the most famous studies of Civil War common soldiers ever, plus classic Confederate titles which he edited.

Bell Wiley worked hard all his life. He was born Jan. 5, 1906 in west Tennessee. His parents were poor, but they sent all their kids to college. Young Bell went to Asbury College in Kentucky, graduating in 1928. The next year, from the University of Kentucky, he earned a master’s in English. But his heart was in history. His thesis was on “Cotton and Slavery in the History of Western Tennessee.” He taught for a while at Mississippi State Teacher’s College, where someone advised that he not stop there: “Bell, you ought to go away and get your Ph.D. degree.” Wiley didn’t have the money, but gamely he trekked to Boston and the meeting of the American Historical Association. He wrote Yale’s Prof. Ulrich B. Phillips ahead of time, and met him there. Phillips read the young Tennessean’s thesis and helped him get into the Yale doctoral program. Wiley then studied under Phillips, already the author of American Negro Slavery (1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929). The mentor suggested that his pupil write his dissertation on the Negro in the Confederacy. He did. “Southern Negroes during the Civil War” brought Wiley his Ph.D. degree. But there was a hitch. “When I got out of Yale in 1933, I couldn’t get a job,” he later recalled. “I devoted the year to converting the dissertation into a publishable book, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Southern Negroes, 1861-1865 was published by Yale University Press in 1938. Wiley then landed a teaching position at the University of Mississippi, where he spent 1938-46 (including military service). Then followed two years at Louisiana State University. Most of us associate Professor Wiley with Emory University, where he began teaching in 1949. During the next quarter-century— he retired in 1974—Dr. Wiley’s Civil War classes filled auditoriums and had waiting lists of students hoping to get in. During my time at Emory I was fortunate to have studied under Dr. Wiley, and to have been befriended by him. (This latter wasn’t hard, as he was cheerfully accessible to all of his students).

I still remember how he stood at the lectern in front of the room, speaking from his outline (which always gave out), and his hands jingling his pocket change. He always kept his office door slightly open, so you could hear him on the telephone. “Wiley heah,” he would answer—I later learned he picked that up at Oxford, where he spent a year in the sixties. All these pleasant memories recently returned, thanks to a wonderful tribute to the great professor, The Bell Irvin Wiley Reader (Louisiana State University Press, 2001). Editors are Hill Jordan, J. H. (“Hank”) Segars and James I. Robertson Jr., the latter one of Wiley’s best-known students. The Reader is an anthology of Wiley’s articles and speeches over the years, including the notorious final exam for History 251, his Civil War course. To glean these twenty gems, the compilers lovingly scoured 176 boxes of Wiley material, which the family bequeathed to Emory after his death in 1980. Dr. Wiley’s signature works are, of course, The Life of Johnny Reb (1943) and The Life of Billy Yank (1952). So the August 1967 speech he gave in Washington on “The Common Soldiers of the Civil War” is no surprise here. The Wiley Reader indicates the professor’s wide-ranging interest. He spoke on Sherman in the general’s Ohio home town in 1964. To New York social studies teachers he offered his ideas on “Why Teach the Civil War?” (The reasons he gave still work, after fifty years.) One of The Reader’s best features is the transcribed interview which Wiley granted Orley B. Caudill in 1976. The professor was retired by then, and reflected on his career as historian. “Writing is something of a disease,” he told Caudill, explaining the joy he felt when holding his first book. “You hold it and fondle it,” he said, which is just the way any author feels - including me. If I’ve had any success in writing, I owe much to Bell Wiley. I still have the paper which I wrote for his History 251 class, with all of the red penciled corrections he made in it—he was that caring, and that conscientious. When Wiley gave his last

Civil War lecture at Emory, students presented him with an appreciation. Of all his endearing qualities, they thanked him for “the true involvement and enthusiasm” which he felt for history, and which he so abundantly conveyed. Leafing through The Bell Irvin Wiley Reader gives me that same sense of appreciation for a great professor, mentor and friend. Steve Davis of Atlanta is a regular contributor to Civil War News and is the Book Review Editor. His new book, A Long and Bloody Task: The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5-July 18, 1864, was published as part of Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War paperback series. The companion volume, carrying the Atlanta Campaign to the city’s surrender on September 2, 1864, will be published early this year.