Critic's Corner

Richard Barksdale Harwell’s The Union Reader

By Stephen Davis · Originally published August 2018 · p. 38

“Though historians’ interpretations of the war have changed from generation to generation, shifting according to the emphasis of an outstanding historian or according to the fashionable thinking of the time,” Richard B. Harwell writes in his Introduction to The Union Reader, “the facts of the war have not changed.” On this point I might disagree with the late, great scholar. If the present national discourse teaches us anything, it is that “facts” are subject to dispute, even refutation and denial.

But I will agree with Dr. Harwell when he adds, “Nearly a century after the fighting the closest we can come to those facts is still in the writings of the people of its own time.” “Who can gainsay what they wrote?” Harwell asks, sending me to the dictionary (as he often does) to check on that verb (def.: “deny; speak or act against”).

“What they described was the war as they saw it and lived it.” Harwell’s The Union Reader (1958) was published the year after its companion volume, The Confederate Reader (1957). His collections of writings by participants in and observers of the Civil War were hardly the first. Notable predecessors include Otto Eisenschiml and Ralph Newman, eds., The Civil War: The American Iliad As Told by Those Who Lived it (1947). In my library sits Henry Steele Commager, ed., The Blue and the Gray: The Story of the Civil War as Told by Participants (1950); my copy is signed by Dr. Commager himself! What makes Harwell’s Union Reader so fascinating, aside from the editor’s enormous knowledge of Civil War literature, is that each piece he has chosen for this book was published during the war, 1861–1865. This gives the anthology not just an air of authenticity, but a sense of immediacy as well. Another charming element is its invitation for readers to ponder how the editor chose his selections. “Few familiar pieces are included,” is his only hint. One can almost see Rick giving us a grin and the wink of an eye. Just as fun (as I wrote about Harwell’s In Tall Cotton in this space last March), one can drop into The Union Reader at any point. For instance, many of us had to read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women as kids; far more arresting is her book of Hospital Sketches (1863), a chapter of which Harwell reprints here. She was three days on the job as a hospital steward when an ambulance of wounded arrived from Fredericksburg. Told to begin scrubbing the dirty, bloody unfortunates, “I corked up my feelings,” she writes, and set to work. Her first scrubee was an Irishman, wounded in the head. “May your bed above be aisy, darlin’, for the day’s work ye are doon,” remarked the grateful soldier; “Whoosh! there ye are, and bedad, it’s hard tellin’ which is the dirtiest, the fut or the shoe.”

Other selections are as varied as the gamut of war experience itself. John William DeForest’s recollection of Third Winchester appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in January 1865. DeForest, a captain in the 12th Connecticut, describes “a violent file-firing.” He and his comrades were lying down, exchanging musketry with Jubal Early’s troops. …we had not been in position five minutes before we felt how coolly and surely Lee’s veterans could aim; for, stretched at length as we all were, and completely concealed by tall grass, the bullets searched out our covert with fatal certainty. A groan here, a shriek of agony there, a dying convulsion, a plunge of some wounded wretch to the rear, showed from instant to instant how rapidly our men were being disabled….It seemed impossible that they could strike so many of us, and yet not see us. Of the seventy men and officers whom our regiment lost during the day, at least sixty must have been hit on this line. Before each of his entries, the editor offers a brief introduction and commentary. The account by Englishman Frederick Edge of the fight between the Alabama and Kearsarge is deemed by Harwell “a good antidote for the histrionic sensationalism which marks many of the contemporary accounts of the sea battle.” A U.S. sanitary inspector, Dr. Lewis Steiner, was in Frederick, Md., when Jackson’s infantry marched in on September 6, 1862. He kept a diary and from it recorded incidents of the Rebels’ several days of occupying the town. “A clergyman tells me,” he wrote on September 9, “that he saw an aged crone come out of her house as certain rebels passed by trailing the American flag in the dust. She shook her long, skinny hands at the traitors and screamed at the top of her voice, ‘My curses be upon you and your officers for degrading your country’s flag.’” This is as close to eyewitness reporting as we will ever get regarding the famed Barbara Frietchie incident in Frederick. What really caught my eye in Dr. Steiner’s diary, though, was his description of blacks marching through the city among Jackson’s troops.

Over 3,000 negroes must be included in this number. These were clad in all kinds of uniforms, not only in cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, State buttons, etc. These were shabby, but not shabbier or seedier than those worn by white men in the rebel ranks. Most of the negroes had arms, rifles, muskets, sabres, bowie-knives, dirks, etc. They were supplied, in many instances, with knapsacks, haversacks, canteens, etc., and were manifestly an integral part of the Southern Confederacy Army. They were seen riding on horses and mules, driving wagons, riding on caissons, in ambulances, with the staff of Generals, and promiscuously mixed up with all the rebel horde. The fact was patent, and rather interesting when considered in connection with the horror rebels express at the suggestion of black soldiers being employed for the National defence.

These are just four of the forty selections in Harwell’s Union Reader. They offer a sampling of the fascinating literature which Dr. Harwell colorfully characterized by quoting James Russell Lowell: “Blood ain’t so cool as ink.” Note: Harwell’s Union Reader and Confederate Reader have been reprinted as one volume, The Civil War Reader (Mallard Press, 1991). I bought it at the Scottsdale, Arizona, Civil War Round Table meeting for $3! Stephen Davis of Cumming, Ga., is Book Review Editor for Civil War News. He is currently writing a study of how the Atlanta Intelligencer, the city’s leading daily newspaper, covered the war, 1861–1865. His co-author is Bill Hendrick, veteran journalist of forty years, writing for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Associated Press and many other publications. Their book will be published by the University of Tennessee Press.