Category: Reviews

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance …

No, that is not a snippet plucked from a Shelby Foote anecdote delivered with mellifluous voice in his signature cadence on the Ken Burns docuseries, The Civil War, but a passage from William Faulkner’s 1948 novel, Intruder in the Dust. Foote, writer and raconteur, who masqueraded as historian, is celebrated as much in some circles for his three volume narrative history of the Civil War as he is by a much wider audience for his extensive on-camera commentary on the docuseries that articulates the southern perspective in thinly disguised “Lost Cause” soundbites that deftly excised slavery from any conversation about the war. Faulkner also was no historian, nor did he pretend to be, but he certainly understood that slavery was the central cause of the war as well as its tragic aftermath for the denizens of the south, for blacks as well as for whites, even if he had difficulty saying that out loud, although we do hear it quite loud and clear through his carefully crafted characters in the drama and poetry that decorated the prose of his magnificent fiction. Slavery and its Jim Crow offspring poisoned the south, and the toxin was no less potent in Faulkner’s day than it was on that July afternoon in 1863.

The excerpt above references the moment just prior to the doomed Confederate assault known as Pickett’s Charge on the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, seen by many then and now as the turning point of the Civil War, although careful students of the conflict would tell you that another far more consequential Union victory, the fall of Vicksburg, which cut the Confederacy in half, took place just one day later, more than a thousand miles distant in Faulkner’s native Mississippi. Faulkner aficionados glean that too, not least because its significance is subtly underlined in the short story “Ambuscade” (1934) that later serves as the opening installment of The Unvanquished (1938), when Colonel Sartoris’ young son Bayard and his enslaved companion Ringo eavesdrop on the colonel’s revelation that Vicksburg is gone just as the family’s silver, packed in a trunk, is shuttled out to be buried in the orchard.

But the point here, for the purposes of Faulkner’s fiction—as well as the real-life tragedy of the south that still prevails today, well beyond the sesquicentennial of the Civil War—is that the “what-if” of the war’s outcome persistently echoes across far too much of the southern landscape in 2024: if not as loudly as it did in 1865 or in 1962, the year of Faulkner’s death, it yet remains all too perceptible socio-economically and politically. Nothing ever spoke to that  phenomenon better than a more famous Faulkner quotation found in another novel, Requiem for a Nun (1951): “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And possibly nothing proves its endurance better than the fact that this election year has seen at once bans against teaching about slavery and race in some southern states and, more remarkably, pro-secession candidates vying for office in Texas, perhaps grown men still fantasizing about that instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863.

The past and present together underscore the relevance of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, a brilliant and extremely well-written blend of history, biography, literary criticism, and travel writing by Michael Gorra, professor of literature at Smith College. After years of reading, studying, and teaching Faulkner, Gorra decided to take it to the next level, and he set out to visit the various geographies where Faulkner walked the earth, battlefields where southern blood was shed, and the likely environs of the fictional characters—Compsons, Sutpens, Snopes, and a host of memorable African Americans—that inhabited the author’s imaginary Yoknapatawpha County. Had he stopped there, the end result might have been another academic biography peppered with literary analysis. But instead, Gorra—who correctly identifies the Civil War and its repercussions as existential to Faulkner’s literary themes—assigned himself a rigorous self-study of the war and its wider implications. In the process, the author discovered what today’s historians have long recognized, that there was and remains more than one war: the actual war as it occurred, with all of its ramifications, and the way the war is remembered, especially in the south. There are multiple versions of the latter, both conflicting and overlapping, informed at once by truth and by imagination.

The most twisted and most stubborn of these is known as the “Myth of the Lost Cause,” that has the south waging a righteous if hopeless quest for liberty against a rapacious north intent on domination. Eventually, the heroic south is overwhelmed by sheers numbers of men and materiel, and goes down to an honorable defeat, only to fall victim to northern plunderers in the Reconstruction days that follow. Here it is solely a white man’s war, brother against brother, forged by incompatible forces arrayed in opposition: states’ rights vs. federalism, agriculture vs. industry, rural vs. urban, free trade vs. tariffs. In this version, slavery is almost beside the point, and blacks are essentially expunged from history.  African Americans appear in cameo roles when they show up at all, as harmless servants in the south’s peculiar institution, which is presented as something benign, even benevolent, that would have simply faded away on its own had Lincoln not launched what is still known in some circles as the “War of Northern Aggression.” More recently, blacks make an awkward reappearance in some odd strands of Lost Cause, now recast as comprising legions of imaginary uniformed “Black Confederates” who eagerly stand guard with their masters to defend southern sovereignty. Otherwise, blacks disappear almost without a trace. Gone are the millions held in chattel slavery, the half million  that self-emancipated by fleeing to the Union lines, the nearly two hundred thousand that fought for Union in the United States Colored Troops (USCT)—and most thoroughly erased are the many, many thousands of camp slaves that accompanied Confederate armies throughout the war, including Lee’s infantry at Gettysburg, a fact likely unknown to that fourteen year old dreaming of southern victory.

The Lost Cause is a vile lie, but like all effective lies it is infused with elements of truth. Of course, slavery was not the only cause of the Civil War—just ninety-five percent of it! The key is to focus on the other five percent, and that effort was so successful that this fictitious story became America’s story. So successful that the United States became the only nation in the world to host hundreds of monuments to traitors and rebels across its landscape, many that still preside over public squares today. So successful that it was integrated into the historiography that dominated American education for a century to follow. And ingredients of that distorted curriculum even touched me, growing up in New England in the 1960s, dramatically reinforced on our family’s console TV as the networks commonly replayed Gone with the Wind, the histrionic paean to Lost Cause: an endless loop of the hapless enslaved Prissy incongruously shrieking the “De Yankees is comin!” in terror rather than celebration. I was a Connecticut boy, a state that saw thousands of lives sacrificed in the cause of Union, but I pretended to be a Confederate soldier when I played war, so deeply sympathetic was I to the southern cause. There was only one black child in my elementary school, so I did not find it odd that blacks made few appearances in my textbooks.

But I was a voracious reader, even as a young teen, and books shaped me. I read deeply in American history, fell in love with the Civil War era, and began to discover that what I had learned in school was not only superficial but woefully incomplete and conspicuously misleading. I also read a good deal of fiction in those days, across multiple genres. I think I was fifteen when I discovered Faulkner, and the first novel I read is one of his most challenging to follow or comprehend, The Sound and the Fury (1929). The first section consists of nearly sixty pages propelled solely by a vehicle manufactured from disjointed bits of the stream of consciousness of Benjy Compson, a severely intellectually disabled adult—tagged as an “idiot” in Faulkner’s day—who experiences time as directionless in an interior monologue that speeds along a twisting road of sharp turns from 1928 to 1912 to 1902 and swerves back again repeatedly, with no signs or guard rails to assist the reader, a marvelous journey motif in nonlinear time instead of distance. I found myself reading and re-reading paragraphs and pages, again and again, often lost but relishing the long, strange trip, a dictionary habitually at my elbow as I struggled against an onslaught of vocabulary both unfamiliar and intimidating. I loved every minute of it! And, in that early 1970s acid-infused era, Faulkner’s style here, verging on the phantasmagoric, seemed the perfect companion to the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd.

In my teens, I did not connect Faulkner to the Civil War, but literature and history were then, and today remain, my two great passions. I would read many more Faulkner novels and short stories in the years to come, and my fascination with the Civil War was a part of my motivation, decades later, to return to school to obtain a master’s degree in history. By then the connection between Faulknerian themes and the tortured legacy of the war was apparent.

But it was not until I read The Saddest Words that I came to understand how inextricable that link truly was. Faulkner (and Foote for that matter) grew up indoctrinated in a version of Lost Cause more virulent than that which touched my northern classroom, a memory of the war and Reconstruction so far removed from reality that it amounted to a greater fiction than any of Faulkner’s novels—a fairy tale mandatory to explain to later generations why the weird world they inhabited existed as it did, lest they be crushed by cognitive dissonance. But, as Gorra detects in his superb analysis, it is Faulkner’s characters who speak to truth, even if the living, breathing William Faulkner could not articulate those contradictions. The violence, the rape, the incest, the guilt, the despair that are part and parcel of the body of Faulkner’s works are a kind of subliminal confession that the author is well aware of the actual horror that disfigures southern life that real life pretends away. His white protagonists voice this. His black characters—who speak in dialect now judged offensive—bear authentic witness in what is left unsaid.

In The Sound and the Fury and its cousin, the even more daunting Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner dwells upon “miscegenation,” a term anachronistic today that once served in the white south as an epithet for race-mixing. Gorra notes that the neologism itself only dates to 1863 (and I recall it still wielded as a cudgel in Dixiecrat rhetoric in the 1960s), although it certainly reflected a fear deeply rooted in the antebellum. But what could never be uttered aloud in the south was that the kind of race-mixing deemed revolting was strictly limited to that which might occur consensually between a white woman and a black man. Because the reality was that the institution of slavery sponsored a vast mixing of the races, but that was primarily the product of the white men of the planter aristocracy coupling with black girls and black women held as chattel property, and it was almost always nonconsensual.

They preached against a dread of a “racial amalgamation” while essentially engineering it; the enslaved population on any given plantation frequently included those who were children of those who owned and worked them. There were contemporary observations at Monticello that among the enslaved were light-skinned blacks with red hair and freckles who bore more than a passing resemblance to Jefferson. Gorra cites the familiar observation from southern diarist Mary Chestnut that: “The mulattos one sees in every family … resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.” Of course, we now know that none of this is strictly hypothetical: genome-wide analysis reveals that the DNA of African Americans contains on average about twenty-five percent European ancestry. We can make an educated guess that there are few traces of consent in those numbers.

Blacks and whites were always together in those days, although in clearly defined roles. Gorra refers to an episode in The Sound and the Fury when Harvard-bound Quentin Compson has cause to reflect on race when he sits next to a black man on a bus in 1910, something that was common to the north then but taboo in Jim Crow Mississippi. But that was not always the case; segregation was invented in the north. At one time, free Boston blacks, subject to discrimination on rail travel, while hardly envying their enslaved brethren marveled that southern railroads did not separate the races. (Massachusetts finally desegregated railcars in the 1840s.) It was not until the 1880s that segregation was characteristic to southern life, and that was only obtained by the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of “Redemption.” No longer enslaved, blacks were terrorized and murdered as former Confederate officers and officials returned to power and cowed the southern black population into second class status, stripped of rights granted by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, while the rest of the nation collectively averted its eyes. This is, by the way, not ancient history; I was seven years old when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Of course, “separate but equal” always translated into separate and unequal, but southern whites and blacks could not ever really be separate—and that’s the rub! Faulkner saw that through the eyes of his white characters who lived in terror of incest and race-mixing only to turn around and see a world outlined inescapably by these implications. It is likely that the enslaved Sally Hemings, who bore Jefferson several children, was the half-sister of his late wife, Martha.

It is said Foote and Faulkner met, and even developed a sort of friendship. Foote was a stubborn defender of southern culture. Deep down, many of Faulkner’s characters seem to hate the south. I can’t help but wonder if the two ever talked about that. The Sound and the Fury’s Quentin Compson was certainly consumed by it, by the purity of southern women, by the conundrum of race, by a devotion to honor, so much so that he discovers that he cannot leave the ill-fated south behind him even at Harvard, more than a thousand miles from Mississippi, and in his anguish he takes his own life. But first he conjures a memory of something his father once said to him:

every man is the arbiter of his own virtues but let no man prescribe for another mans well-being and i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was

Gorra’s synthesis of Faulkner’s fiction, Civil War memory, and the echo of systematic racism that yet stains America is nothing short of superlative. That he achieves this while probing sometime arcane avenues of literature, history, and historiography—while ever maintaining the reader’s interest—is especially impressive. If I was to find fault, it is only that towards the end of the volume, the author seems to drift away from the connective tissue in his thesis and wander off into what is clearly his first love, a detailed literary analysis of Faulkner’s prose. But that is a quibble. And truth be told, I now feel inspired to turn to my own shelves and once more dig deeply into my Faulkner collection. In this arena, I must confess that Gorra has truly humbled me: I have read The Sound and the Fury no less than three times, but his commentary on it makes it clear that I still did not entirely understand what Faulkner was trying to say, after all. I suppose I must go back and get to know Benjy again, one more time!

 

 

In 1904, the notorious Apache warrior Geronimo, now in his mid-seventies, was a federal prisoner of war on loan to the St. Louis World’s Fair, which belongs to our nation’s uncomfortable collective memory for its numerous ethnographic exhibits of so-called “primitive” humans which included, in addition to Native Americans, the Tlingit, indigenous to Alaska, and the Igorot, an aboriginal population from the Philippines who were billed as “headhunters,” as well as Congolese pygmies. Geronimo developed rapport with one of latter, an amiable nineteen year old Mbuti tribesman named Ota Benga, imaginatively advertised as a “cannibal,” who stood four foot eleven inches and whose smile showcased teeth ceremonially sharpened to fine points. The old medicine man presented him with an arrowhead as a gift; they were, of course, all in this kind of zoo together.

But only two years later that very metaphor materialized for Ota, whom after a brief stay at New York’s American Museum of Natural History found himself on display in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo, where he hung his hammock, wearing a loincloth and carrying a bow and arrow, or wandering the zoo grounds accompanied by an orangutan he had grown attached to—a captivating if unpaid attraction for amused onlookers. Just after the turn of century, fresh from the imperialist adventure that was the Spanish-American War, which had compelled Filipinos to trade one colonial power for another, “civilized” Americans delighted in the spectacle of gawking at “savages” in various contrived natural habitats—especially, it turned out, in of all places, New York City!

The hapless Ota’s surprising story, from his birth in central Africa through his unlikely travels across the United States, is the subject of Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo [1992], an entertaining if occasionally uneven account by dual authors Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume. It is also, actually, a dual biography, as Ota shares much space in the narrative with Samual Phillips Verner—the grandfather of one of the authors—an eccentric missionary who visited the Congo on a “specimen-gathering mission” for the Fair, and “collected” Ota Benga as one of those “specimens.” There are grander themes to parse, as well, that this set of authors may not have been up to. These run the gamut from the oppression that reigned in the Jim Crow south to the cruelty that characterized the Congo, and—especially—to this particular moment in time when an America now equipped with automobiles and electricity and even manned flight could yet shamelessly put human beings on display to at once juxtapose with and champion their alleged superiors shouldering their “white man’s burden.”

Bradford, an engineer who was inspired to write a biography of his colorful grandfather, recognized that Ota Benga was the hook that would attract readers, and set out to do the research. Blume was brought in to polish the manuscript. Neither were trained historians, which perhaps makes the finished product more readable, if less reliable; more on that later.

This storied grandfather, the aforementioned Samual Phillips Verner, was born in post-Civil War South Carolina to a former slaveholding family and grew up furnished with the deep-seated racism typical to his class and his time. Verner emerges here as an intense, academic prodigy who lingers upon troubling moral quandaries of right and wrong, while suffering from alternating episodes of mental illness—he once insisted he was the Hapsburg Emperor—and religious fervor. Throughout, he takes comfort in the Daniel Defoe novel Robinson Crusoe, as well as the real life adventures of Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone in distant, exotic Africa. The sum total of all this was to coalesce in Verner’s calling as a missionary to what was then commonly referred to as the “Dark Continent.” It is in Africa that he demonstrates his intelligence, his charm, his many capabilities, and his propensity for both earning enemies and cementing friendships. He also wrestles with the inherent prejudices he carries from the deep south that come to be challenged by the realities of the human experience. And, as in his boyhood, there are disturbing moral dilemmas to resolve. But what becomes increasingly clear as the pages are turned is that Verner is first and foremost a narcissist, and resolutions for any paradox of morality are always obtained by what suits Verner’s own circumstances most comfortably and most conveniently.

By his own account, Verner’s time in the Congo consisted of remarkable exploits that saw him establish rapport with various native peoples, including pygmies, as well as form an unlikely kind of alliance with a dangerous, otherwise unapproachable tribal king, and a near-fatal episode when he impaled his leg on a poisoned stake set for an animal trap. Along the way, he distinguishes himself by his courage, quick-thinking, and ingenuity—like a character out of Defoe, perhaps. Did it all really happen? Bradford reports Verner’s saga as history, although it is based almost entirely on his grandfather’s own recollections. As such, the reader cannot help but question the reliability of a fellow who once believed himself to be the Hapsburg Emperor!

African pygmies, much like the Khoisan peoples, have an ancient indigenous lineage that are genetically divergent from all other human populations. They may or may not be descendants of paleolithic hunter-gatherers of the central African rainforest. In Ota Benga’s time, the Mbuti, nomadic hunters, ranged within the artificially drawn borders of the Congo Free State, a vast territory that was for a time the personal fiefdom of Belgium’s King Leopold II, a land infamous for the widespread atrocities committed by Leopold’s private army, the dreaded Force Publique, that enforced strict rubber collection quotas through extreme methods of murder and mutilation. A human hand had to be turned in for every bullet issued to prove these were not wasted, so baskets of hands—including children’s hands—became symbolic of Leopold’s “Free State,” a realm of horrors that inspired Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For those who have read Adam Hochschild’s magnificent work, King Leopold’s Ghost, there is nothing new here, but two of its protagonists, black missionary William Sheppard and Irish activist Roger Casement, who campaigned against Leopold’s reign of terror, turn up in this book, as well. Verner, it seems, was surprisingly unmoved by the carnage about him.

Verner contracted malaria. That illness, his leg injury, and the overall dissatisfaction of mission officials with his performance conspired to send him back to America, where he became famous for his reported feats and, based upon his background, won the assignment of procuring pygmies for The Louisiana Purchase Exposition (also known as the St. Louis World’s Fair). So, eight years later he returned on expedition, with the blessings of King Leopold himself, and in an accidental encounter with the Baschilele tribe stumbled upon Ota Benga at a slave market. Apparently Ota, away from his camp on a solo elephant hunt, as pygmies were wont to do, had returned to find piles of corpses, including his wife and children—victims of the Force Publique. He and other survivors were sold into slavery. Verner could not believe his good fortune: he purchased Ota for “a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth.” [p103] He later recruited other more willing volunteers, and set sail for home. The Thirteenth Amendment forbidding chattel slavery was ratified nearly four decades prior, but that proved not to be a barrier to Verner’s transport of Ota to the United States.

That is just the beginning of this fascinating story! There is much more to come, which makes this book, although flawed on some levels, well worth the read. Those who have studied the American Civil War and the antebellum south are familiar with the nuanced relationships that can develop between the enslaved and those who hold them as property. A bond developed between Verner and Ota that was even more complicated than that. Verner may have purchased Ota and dutifully turned him over to the World’s Fair, but he later freely returned him to Africa. Yet, after a time, Ota, widowed once more after losing a second wife to snakebite, found himself with little to hold him there and a taste for the excitement he had found in America. Thus, he made an enthusiastic return to the US with Verner. But things were not destined to go well for either of them.

Verner had visions of grandeur that did not translate into either the wealth or recognition he sought. He seemed to genuinely care about Ota’s welfare, but that fell to neglect as his own fortunes dwindled, and Ota wound up in that degrading display at the Bronx Zoo. He was not there very long. His rescue came from unlikely quarters: African American clergymen, chafing at their own second-class status, were rightly appalled at the humiliating spectacle of Ota at the zoo, which they likewise perceived as advancing Darwinism, an abomination for their Christian faith. Ota went first to an orphanage in the Bronx, and later to Lynchburg, Virginia, where a kindly patron arranged to have his sharpened teeth capped, fitted him out in suitable clothing, sent him to school, and found him work at a tobacco factory, where he was known as Otto Bingo. But Ota, who in his heyday with Verner had been a celebrity of sorts on travels that had once even taken him to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, found himself lonely and alienated. One day in 1916, he pried the caps off his teeth and shot himself. He was about thirty-three years old.

In the end, I longed for more information about Ota and less about Verner. This volume, while enhanced by both wonderful photographs and a thick appendix of press clippings from the day, is conspicuously absent of endnotes—which would be useful for the reader anxious to separate fact from fiction in Verner’s likely embellishments. Still, despite its limitations, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it.

My Review of: King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terrorism and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild

Ota Benga is referenced, with much relevance, in Angela Saini’s fine work, reviewed here:  Superior: The Return of Race Science

 

In 399 BCE, Socrates was condemned to death, a tragic punctuation mark to the celebrated fifth century that had Athens and Sparta and the multitude of other poleis witness first the repulse of the mighty Persian Empire, the flourish that was the Age of Pericles, and then the carnage of the Peloponnesian War that for nearly three decades battered Greek civilization and culminated in Athenian defeat. In that same era, hardly anyone had heard of Rome, humiliated just shortly thereafter when sacked by Gauls in 390 BCE. A mere century and a half later, the Greeks were themselves subjects of a Rome that had become master of the Mediterranean. But in victory or defeat, sovereign or not, the pulse never failed to beat in the poleis—or beyond it. The life of Socrates, likely embellished, was told most famously by Plato, who founded his Academy in Athens in 387 BCE. Plato’s pupil Aristotle later established his own school, the Lyceum, and served as tutor to Alexander the Great, who in his vast conquest spread Hellenism across the east. By the time that Egypt, the last parcel of territory once claimed by Alexander, fell to Roman rule in 31 BCE, Greek thought prevailed more than a thousand miles from Attica and the Peloponnesus, and it was to dominate Roman intellectual life for centuries to come. As Roman poet Horace once observed: “Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought the arts to rustic Latium.”

That story is subject to a superlative treatment in The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome:150 BC-400 AD [2023], a fascinating and engaging work that is the latest to spring from the extremely talented pen of acclaimed classicist Charles Freeman. In a departure from the thick tomes and deep dives into intellectual history that have made his reputation, such as The Closing of the Western Mind¹ [2003], and its sequel of sorts, The Reopening of the Western Mind² [2020], this delightful survey sacrifices none of the scholarship Freeman is known for while expanding his appeal to both an academic and a popular audience. Even better, the volume is structured such that it can just as suitably be approached as a random perusal of out of sequence episodes as a cover-to-cover read.

Books of history often have a slow build, but not this one. The reader is instantly hooked by the “Prologue,” which features an adaptation of The Banquet, a hilarious satirical work by Lucian of Samosata, a second-century CE Hellenized Syrian who wrote in Greek, that has representatives of virtually every school of philosophy attending a wedding feast that degenerates from debate and dispute to debauchery—and even a full scale brawl! Attendees include Stoics, Platonists, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Cynics, and various hangers-on. The point, of courses, for the purpose of Freeman’s work, is both the considerable diversity that was manifested in Greek thought, as well as how prevalent that proved to be in the immensity of an empire that stretched from Mauretania to Armenia.

To animate this compelling cultural history, Freeman has chosen a select group of representative figures. Those grounded in the classics will recognize most if perhaps not all of them, which only serves as underscore to the sheer numbers of Greeks who took leading roles in Roman life over the many hundreds of years that spanned the time when Greece succumbed to Roman conquest in the second century BCE to the fall of Rome in the west in the fifth century CE. There are philosophers, of course, such as Epictetus and Plotinus, but there is also the historian Polybius, the biographer Plutarch, the geographer Strabo, the traveler Pausanias, the astronomer Ptolemy, the surgeon Galen, and a dozen others. Chapters for each are comprised of biographical sketches with an exploration of their significance, as well as the imprint their legacies left upon later Western Civilization. Included too are a number of interludes that explore wider themes to better place these individuals in context to their times.

Rome’s was a martial society not known for organic cultural achievements, at least not until much later in the course of its history. Greek art and epic, already deeply influential on the Etruscans that Rome supplanted in their geography, came to fill that vacuum. The syncretism that gradually integrated Greek mythology into equivalent Roman gods and goddesses, with appropriate name changes, similarly saw Greek culture increasingly borrowed and incorporated over time, even as this latter process met with a sometimes fierce resistance by conservative Roman elites. Philosophy proved especially unwelcome at first, as perhaps best highlighted in a report by Plutarch of an Athenian delegation to Rome in 155 BCE that saw a certain Carneades, a philosopher associated with antidogmatic skepticism, argue convincingly to an audience in favor of one proposition the first day, only to return the next and masterfully rebut his own position—to the horror of Cato the Elder! But such attitudes were not to prevail; Greek philosophy was to dominate Roman intellectual life, even as Christianity gained traction—and some of Freeman’s Greeks are in fact Christian—until repressed by the Church in the last decades prior to the fall of Rome. This was especially facilitated by the Pax Romana that characterized the first two centuries of empire, a period of relative peace and stability that allowed ideas, including spirited philosophical debate, to spread freely across long distances. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161 to 180 CE) was himself a Stoic philosopher!

Freeman’s book demonstrates the vitality of Greek thought in Roman life not merely through the various schools of philosophy, but even more importantly in the realms of science, medicine, and scholarship. Long ago, in my own studies of ancient Greece, I read both Polybius (c.200–c.118 BCE) and Plutarch (46-119 CE) while carelessly overlooking the implications in that these were Greeks who resided in Rome. Plutarch himself even became a Roman citizen. It is a telling reminder that Greeks remained a critical influence upon Western Civilization—long after their city-states ceased to be anything other than place names on Roman maps.

I once ran across a claim of Christian triumphalism in the literature that argued that the rise of Christianity was enabled by a paganism that had so run its course that it had doomed itself to obsolescence, leaving a gaping spiritual hole that begged for a new, more fulfilling religious experience for the masses. It’s a nice fairy tale for the faithful, but lacks support in the scholarship. Even as the “catastrophic” notion of the demise of polytheism (associated with Gibbon) has given way to the more realistic “long and slow” view by historians, it is often surprising to discover how vibrant paganism remained, well into late antiquity. And the best evidence for that is the flourishing of Greek philosophy, and the paganism associated with it, in the Roman world—both which finally fell victim to the totalitarianism of the early Christian Church that at first discouraged and later prohibited anything that strayed from established doctrine. With that in mind, The Children of Athena serves as a kind of prequel to Freeman’s magnificent The Closing of the Western Mind, which chronicled the course of events that came to crush independent inquiry for a millennium to follow in the Western world.

There is possibly no more chilling metaphor for this than in one of the final chapters of The Children of Athena that is given to Hypatia (c.350-415 CE), a Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt in the twilight of the empire. Hypatia, the rare female of her times who was a philosophical and scientific thinker, fell afoul of a local bishop and was murdered by a Christian mob that stripped her naked and scraped her to death with shards of roof tiles. And so the Western mind indeed did close.

For the record, I have come to know Charles Freeman over the years, and we correspond via email from time to time. I read portions of drafts of The Children of Athena as it was coming together, and offered my ideas, for whatever those might be worth, to help polish the narrative. As such, I was honored to see my name appear in the book’s “Acknowledgements.” But I am not a paid reviewer, and I would never praise a title that did not warrant it, regardless of my connection to the author. I genuinely enjoyed it, and would highly recommend it.

This is, in fact, one of those works that is difficult to fault, despite my glaring critical eye. Freeman’s depth in the field is on display and impressive, as is his ability to articulate a wide range of sometimes arcane concepts in a comprehensible fashion. I suppose if I were to find a flaw, it would be for the lack of much needed back matter. Readers may bemoan the absence of a “cast of characters” to catalog the names of the major and minor individuals that occur in the text, a key to philosophical schools and unfamiliar terminology, as well as maps of ancient cities and towns. Still, that is a minor quibble that should best be taken up with the publisher rather than the author, and hardly diminishes the overall achievement of this book, which does include copious notes and a fine concluding chapter that for my part found me motivated to go back to my own shelves and read more about the men and women that people The Children of Athena.

 

¹ A link to my review of: Review of: The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman

² A link to my review of: The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment, by Charles Freeman

 

Decades before J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI connived for a pretext to deport a wealthy British ex-pat suspected of communist connections who also happened to be an influential, world-famous artist—that person was John Lennon and that attempt ultimately failed—a much younger Hoover and his then-cronies mounted a similar but far more effective crusade against an individual who in his time was even more consequential. That man was British-born Charlie Chaplin, Hollywood’s first truly global phenomenon, who while not deported was yet driven into permanent exile.

Author and film historian Scott Eyman sets out to tell that story and more in Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided [2023], an informative and entertaining if uneven portrait of a celebrated figure as devoted to his art as he was indifferent to the enemies he spawned along the way. Seizing upon Chaplin’s clash with the authorities over his politics as the focal point of the narrative, the author seeks to distinguish this work from numerous previous chroniclers of its prominent subject, with mixed results.

Chaplin, both a genius and a giant in the days when cinema was in its infancy, left an indelible mark upon the nascent motion picture industry. In the process, he attracted both critical acclaim and legions of adoring fans, as well as, with equal fervor, the scorn of moralists and the disfavor of those who viewed his brand of social consciousness as a threat to the American way of life. Like the later John Lennon, he was an outsize talent who eschewed convention, dared to take unpopular positions, flaunted a somewhat sybaritic lifestyle, accumulated enormous wealth, and was a legend in his own time—the very ingredients that stoked in alternate audiences parallel passions of adulation and abhorrence.

Anticommunism runs deep in the United States, from the “Red Scare” of the 1920’s to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)—a creature of the Depression era that was reborn with a fury in the postwar period—and the related excesses of McCarthyism, a nearly continuous stream of panic and paranoia that characterized American culture for decades that ostensibly aimed to identify enemies foreign and domestic but instead extra-constitutionally branded certain political thought as a crime. In the process, thousands of Americans and foreign nationals suffered persecution, ostracism and even imprisonment. A weaker dynamic by Lennon’s time, it nevertheless remained a force to be reckoned with for those so victimized. Something of anachronism, anticommunism yet still echoes into today’s politics. One of the faults in Eyman’s treatment is his failure to place Chaplin’s harassment for his alleged political sympathies into this wider context for the reader unfamiliar with its deeper historical roots.

Neither Chaplin nor Lennon were members of the Communist Party, but that was almost beside the point for authorities who deemed each as unwelcome, if only for their respective advocacies for a greater social and economic equality, which was seen as sympathetic to communist ideology. And there was a whiff of perceived disloyalty in their demeanors. Lennon was ardently anti-war. Chaplin, who styled himself a “peace monger,” was regarded as especially suspect because he never sought US citizenship; instead he railed against nationalism as a root cause of war, and imagined himself as a kind of citizen of the world. Alas, Chaplin had the bad fortune to find himself targeted in tumultuous times characterized by a populace both less sophisticated and more docile than in Lennon’s day. And he paid for it. Of course, as Eyman’s book underscores, objections to Chaplin’s way of life proved far more damning to him than his actual politics.

Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in London in 1889 into abject poverty much like a character out of Dickens. Orphaned by circumstances if not literally, in his childhood he endured the dehumanizing struggle of the workhouse and for a time lived alone on the streets. His older brother Sydney was to rescue him and helped foster his budding stage presence in sketch comedy that eventually took him across the pond, first to vaudeville and later to Los Angeles, where he made his silent film debut. A master of the art of physical comedy, it was there that he invented the trademark character that would define his career and later cement his celebrity—the “Little Tramp,” a good-natured, childlike, sometime vagrant costumed in baggy pants, oversize shoes, and a tiny mustache—that would evolve into an endearing screen icon endowed with a blend of humor and pathos. The Tramp would later serve as the central protagonist for the very first dramatic comedies.

Chaplin was a wildly popular overnight sensation, which by 1915 made him, at only twenty-six years old, one of the highest paid individuals in the world. Just four years later, he joined forces with other leading lights to form United Artists, a revolutionary film distribution company that permitted him to fund and maintain complete creative control over his own productions. UA served as the critical vehicle that enabled Chaplin to write, produce, direct, star in, and even compose the music for a series of films that would make him a legend, including The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), and Modern Times (1936), all featuring the Tramp character. Favoring the subtle artistry of silent films over the “talkies” that came to dominate motion pictures, Chaplin stubbornly continued to produce silent (or mostly silent) movies long after that format had been largely abandoned by others. Eventually he moved to talkies with The Great Dictator (1940), a political satire that starred Chaplin in a dual role as a Tramp-like character and a farcical persona based upon Hitler. Later, he abandoned the Tramp in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and comedy altogether in the semi-autobiographical Limelight (1952).

In his personal life, Chaplin was a bundle of contradictions. An extremely wealthy but socially conscious man, he was capable of great generosity towards those he favored, but like many who grew up in extreme poverty he could be stingy, as well. It was that childhood abandoned to the streets, according to Eyman and other biographers, that informed every aspect of the mature Charlie Chaplin, in his screen persona as well as his private life. A dominating perfectionist on the set who could be maddening for cast and crew alike with his demands for multiple re-takes of the same scene day after day, and productions that could go on for months or even a year, off camera he was moved by the inequalities of unbridled capitalism, and the plight of the disadvantaged. He advocated for greater economic equity and against the rise of fascism both on screen and off, which made him seem suspect to the powers-that-be, which was further exacerbated by clashes with puritanical movie censors that regarded him as openly flirting with immoral themes. That he was friendly with known communists and campaigned to open a second front to benefit the USSR in the wartime alliance against Hitler only heightened those suspicions and led to accusations that Chaplin himself was a communist or “fellow traveler.”  He once received a subpoena to appear before HUAC, but he was never actually called to testify.

Physically tiny but handsome and charming, Chaplin was something of a womanizer who was frequently unfaithful and had a string of liaisons, sometimes with leading ladies, as well as a total of four marriages. He favored young women: his first two wives were each only sixteen years old when he married them, his fourth wife was eighteen and he was fifty-four when they wed. Other than his infidelities, he seems to have been kind and considerate to his various partners, and he often remained friends and sometimes a financial benefactor to former lovers. His third marriage to actress Paulette Goddard ended in divorce, but she then starred in his next film, and they got along amicably for years to come. The notable exception to that rule was his affair circa 1941-42 with the unstable and vindictive Joan Berry, which led to a career-damaging paternity suit for Chaplin. But he was a devoted and faithful husband to his final wife, Oona O’Neill, with whom he fathered eight children; they stayed together for thirty-four years until his death in Switzerland in 1977 at the age of eighty-eight. Still, the romantic scandals that dogged him—especially the poisonous courtroom drama that played out publicly in his disputes with Joan Berry—tarnished his reputation and bred a whole coterie of enemies in and out of Hollywood willing to work against him when the FBI set its sights on him as an undesirable alien.

As it was, while he championed social justice, Chaplin himself was remarkably apolitical. As the very archetype of the rags-to-riches story, he cited the inherent incongruity of accusing a man who made his fortune via American capitalism of being a communist. But already castigated for his alleged moral turpitude by the doyens of “respectable” society, as the Cold War dawned and the Soviet Union turned from former ally into existential threat, he was widely denounced by detractors and calls grew for him to be deported. Chaplin’s greatest weakness turned out to be his own naivety. When he left for London for the world premiere of Limelight, his re-entry permit was revoked. The grounds for this action were quite tenuous; had he contested it, it is likely he would have been readmitted. But he was so embittered by this affront that he remained in exile from the United States for the rest of his life, returning only once very briefly in 1972 to accept an honorary Academy Award for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century.”

The problem with Charlie Chaplin vs. America is that despite what may have been his original intentions, it is not completely clear what kind of book Scott Eyman ultimately sent to press after he rested his pen. The subtitle presumes it to be a chronicle of Chaplin’s dual with the established order to avoid banishment, but that theme hardly dominates the plot. On the other hand, there is a wealth of material that hints at what could have been. Much print is devoted to Charlie’s childhood struggles on the streets of London, as well his grand success with the production of The Kid, but there is little connective tissue of points in between, leaving the formative Chaplin mostly conspicuous in its absence. So it cannot be termed an authoritative biography. Likewise, there are sometimes lengthy excursions to focus on a particular movie or a specific film technique, while others are glossed over or ignored. So it cannot be a critical study of Chaplin’s filmmaking. It is as if Eyman bit off far more than he wanted to chew and ended up uncertain what should be spit out, with some chunks of the account too fat and others too lean.

The result is a narrative that is sometimes choppy, with a tendency at times to clumsily slip in and out of chronology, and a penchant in places to fall into extended digressions—including an awkward multipage interview excerpt with a Chaplin associate that might better have been relegated to the back matter of notes or appendix. Still, warts and all, the book never grows dull. The reader may be left unsatisfied, but ever remains engaged. And, to his credit, Eyman succeeds superbly in capturing Chaplin’s personality, by far the most significant challenge for any biographer. That is in itself a notable achievement, especially with a subject as nuanced as this one.

J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, some twenty years after Chaplin’s re-entry permit was denied. John Lennon was ordered out of the country in 1973, but a New York judge reversed the deportation order in 1975. Earlier that same year, HUAC was formally terminated. After some quiet years, Lennon was making a musical comeback when he was murdered by a deranged fan in 1980. He was only forty years old. By then Chaplin had been dead for three years, at a ripe old age, but his creative juices had never really flowed the same way in exile. He made two additional films abroad, but neither lived up to his earlier triumphs.

Charlie Chaplin could be the most famous movie star in history whose films most Americans alive today have never seen, largely because even in my 1960s boyhood, when Chaplin still walked the earth, and when most broadcasts outside of prime time were devoted to old movies, silent films were already long passé, and most of his greatest films were silents.  With that in mind, along with reading Eyman’s book I screened several Chaplin films: The Kid, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator. I am neither film critic nor film historian, but I consider myself something of a film geek, and I confess that I was blown away by Chaplin’s brilliance in both The Kid and City Lights. While I can understand and appreciate its message and its impact upon release, I found The Great Dictator dated, overly long, and less entertaining. But I would judge Modern Times as not only magnificent, but so extraordinarily timely with its themes of technological oppression, automation, corporate capitalism, threats to individuality, and loss of privacy that it belongs as much to 2023 as it did to 1936. If there is a fault to be found in any of these efforts, it is that Chaplin’s absolute creative control denied him the editorial input that was warranted on occasion. There are slapstick bits, for instance, that while hilarious yet go on interminably. Someone needed to yell “Cut!” Even a genius, as Chaplin indubitably was, needs an editor.

So too, in my opinion, does Scott Eyman. A talented and prolific writer who has authored numerous biographies of stars who once peopled the “Golden Age” of Hollywood, Eyman’s prior accolades could very well be the reason that someone with a sharp red pen did not have the authority to carve out the potentially great book that lay within that sheaf of pages that went to print.

 

[Note: This ARC edition came to me through an early reviewers’ program.]

The term “bloody” is so frequently attached as qualifier to the American Civil War that we tend to accept it without question. But how bloody was it? According to some estimates, in excess of 620,000 soldiers died on both sides, perhaps another 50,000 civilians, and total casualties including those wounded and missing are said to exceed 1.5 million. We have been told that the trenches around Petersburg and Sherman’s “hard war” anticipated World War I, but Civil War casualties are dwarfed by that carnage that claimed some 20 million lives, almost evenly split between military and civilian, not including another 21 million wounded, just a half century later. China’s Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) left 20 million dead, as well. That is not to minimize the suffering and death that characterized what was indeed America’s bloodiest war, but rather to put it in its appropriate context. Which then begs asking: why was it yet not bloodier still?

Acclaimed historian Aaron Sheehan-Dean ponders just that in his magnificent, ground-breaking work, The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War [2018], an engaging and extremely well-written analysis of a long-overlooked topic hiding in plain sight.  More than 60,000 books have been written about the American Civil War, and each time I crack the cover of another I cannot help but wonder if there yet exists anything new to say about it. In this case, Sheehan-Dean one-ups hopes for fresh perspective with something akin to epiphany! The very definition of war implies violence, of course, and historians have a fairly good sense of how much violence was contained in the totality of those four years of armed conflict, but what was it that set those decidedly finite parameters? Were there certain guardrails in place, and if so, why? Confronted with something so conspicuous yet so generally ignored in the literature can be startling—and highly rewarding.

In the ancient world, survival of the conquered on and off the battlefield was subject to whims of kings or commanders, and the outcome was typically grim. The Assyrians were known to be especially sanguinary, the Greeks less so, but despite his disapproving tone we know from Thucydides’ account of the siege of Melos—which ended with the Athenians putting all the men to the sword—that massacre was far more often the rule than the exception. In the contemporary world, there are a whole host of international agreements specifically structured to protect noncombatants, but look only to the streets of Ukraine or across the landscape of the Middle East to observe how meaningless these turn out to be for those casually and euphemistically dismissed as “collateral damage.” The rest of Europe was appalled when German zeppelins bombed London in 1915, but whatever may be solemnly sworn to on parchment, such tactics are today nothing less than standard operating procedure. Yet, sandwiched between these ancient and modern extremes was an era in the West when rules of engagement among warring nations were less fuzzy and more generally respected. This was the milieu that hosted the American Civil War.

Throughout history, while levels of violence in war have often been arbitrary, restraint in warfare was governed by law and custom. At the outbreak of the Civil War, what we understand today as international law was nonexistent. The behavior of belligerents was instead governed by unwritten codes that evolved over centuries of European conflicts that looked to rules of engagement on the battlefield, secured the lives of prisoners of war, and made clear distinctions between soldiers and non-combatants. Those operating on behalf of the enemy out of uniform were treated as spies or saboteurs and subject to execution. Civilians were not to be targeted. This is not to say that abuses never occurred, nor that hapless inhabitants caught up in the path of invading armies did not suffer, but these customs of war were commonly observed by those engaged in hostilities.

The United States regarded the seceded states as in rebellion and refused to recognize the Confederate States of America as a rival nation, although it was nevertheless compelled to treat it as such in certain situations, as during a truce or in a prisoner exchange. This was similar to the dynamic during the Revolutionary War, when the British came to treat captured Continentals as prisoners of war, rather than as rebels subject to hanging. Still, circumstances sometimes made for some awkward posturing by the Lincoln administration, such as when it imposed a naval blockade of southern ports, since it is impossible to blockade your own country. Foreign recognition, especially by European powers such as Great Britain and France, was a cherished hope of the Confederacy.  While it was ultimately not to be, the dream never really died, which, the author emphasizes, motivated the CSA to act within the confines of established European traditions of war in order to assert their legitimacy as a member of the family of nations. For its part, the United States not only abided by these identical customs but was careful to do nothing which might strain those boundaries and provoke foreign sympathy for the Confederacy that might lead to recognition, a stumble certain to jeopardize the cause of Union. The matter was further complicated by the curious reality of adversaries each governed by representative democracies, with public opinion and the support of the electorate vital to their respective conduct of the war.

It was a mutual respect for these customs of war that defined the state of affairs as belligerency commenced, but unanticipated factors threatened to upset that uneasy balance almost from the outset. The first was when Jefferson Davis quietly sanctioned guerrilla warfare by failing to discourage it, over the objection of soldiers of the regular army such as Robert E. Lee. Historically, there was a distinction between officially organized “partisans” and gangs of guerrillas, but here lines were very blurred. Bands of raiders responsible for so much bloodshed in competing causes in the pre-war era in places like Kansas were embraced as worthy irregulars by the Confederate cause across the southern geography. These loosely organized marauders operated out of uniform to harass, sabotage, and pick off Union ranks. There was uncertainty as to what to do with these “bushwhackers” when captured. Many were executed, as the customs of war would dictate. This was branded as murder by the Confederacy, even as their protest was muted. But not every irregular captured by the north was put to death.

The second was the status of the human property that the Confederate cause held so dear.  Despite loud cries to the contrary in the postwar period that still echo into today’s politics, the southern states seceded principally in order to champion human chattel slavery in their “proud slave Republic,” with hopes of one day expanding it beyond their borders. Historians distinguish between societies with slaves and slave societies; the CSA was a slave society. The labor of enslaved African Americans was a critical piece of the southern war effort that freed up a larger percentage of white southerners to fight. And we now know that tens of thousands of “camp slaves” routinely accompanied Confederate forces on campaign, providing the essential support for an army in the field performed by the typical soldier in blue on the other side. When Union armies moved onto southern soil, escaped members of the local enslaved population sought refuge behind their lines. Initially, southern masters demanded their return in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act, and some northern officers complied. Others refused. Lincoln dithered at first. The northern cause was preservation of the Union; emancipation would not become a war aim until some time later. There was, too, a need for a delicate balancing act to avoid alienating the coalition of border slave states still loyal to the United States. Still, it was clearly in the north’s interest to deprive Richmond of what after all amounted to a human component of the enemy’s materiel. With that in mind, the decision was made not to return “contrabands,” which enraged the south by an act they deemed dishonorable.

But anger turned to outrage in the third instance, when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation not only declared free all the enslaved in the rebellious states but also called for recruiting black men into uniform. For the south, this was a violation of civilizational norms, which was furiously denounced and accompanied by threats to return to slavery or even execute captured black troops, and severely punish their white officers. Lincoln countered with his own warnings of reprisals, which led to an official standoff. But it was different in the field. Confederates frequently murdered black soldiers seeking surrender. There were well-publicized massacres of large numbers of United States Colored Troops (USCT) at places like Fort Pillow and the Battle of the Crater, but such atrocities on a smaller scale were more common over the course of the war than were once acknowledged. Still, as in the case of southern guerrillas who fell into the hands of Union forces, not all suffered this terrible fate; despite uncertain status, both groups ended up as well in respective prisoner of war camps. Likewise, after Fort Pillow, some African Americans, swearing revenge, summarily executed captured Confederates, but not every black soldier resorted to such measures. In the end, restraint ruled the day more often than we would expect.

The author has a lot to say about restraint, which is key to his thesis that under the circumstances we might have expected the Civil War to be far more brutal than it turned out to be. One salient aspect that generally escapes consideration is the conspicuous absence of slave insurrections during the war years: a noteworthy example of self-restraint by the enslaved population. The plantation elite long lived in terror of uprisings such as the 1831 Nat Turner revolt that saw the slaughter of whites by their chattel property, but these incidents were not only exceedingly rare in the antebellum, but despite increased vulnerabilities on the southern home front never occurred during the Civil War.  More than 500,000 enslaved individuals fled to northern lines as refugees during the Civil War; very few resorted to acts of violence against their former masters. By the end of the war, USCT made up about ten percent of the Union army, where the overwhelming majority served with bravery and distinction as part of a regular uniformed fighting force. Given the inhumanity that was part and parcel of the African American experience in chattel slavery, it is indeed remarkable that episodes of retaliation against those who held them in cruel bondage were not more prevalent.

Overall, civilians fared far better in the Civil War than in most ancient or modern wars. Much has been made of northern so-called “hard war” policies that the south viewed as barbaric, but under scrutiny it seems that “Lost Cause” hyperbole has distorted historical memory. The infamous 1863 Union Army directive General Order No. 11, which banished 20,000 residents of four counties in western Missouri, is frequently cited as an especially heinous act. But this was a direct response to the slaughter of about 150 men and boys at Lawrence, Kansas at the hands of Confederate guerrillas led by William Quantrill and, as the author underscores, this tactic of mass relocation likely reduced the number of vigilante reprisals that might otherwise have occurred. Likewise, Sherman’s march has long been characterized as unduly harsh, although the truth is that few noncombatants were killed along the way. On the other hand, Sheehan-Dean is clear that there is no doubt that even when not targeted by bullets, civilians suffered through lack of access to food, shelter, and medical care when caught in the path of armies, and the majority of this took place on southern soil.

As for the behavior of the regular armies on both sides, the author notes that the customs of war were generally respected, and neither combatants nor civilians were subjected to the kind of unrestrained brutality that might have been visited upon Native Americans with little hesitation. This brings to mind British horror when Germans introduced machine guns to World War I battlefields, although the Brits themselves had slaughtered some 1,500 African Ndebele warriors in 1893 with similar firepower. There were supposed to be rules for how “civilized” white men waged war; these rules did not apply to those deemed the “other.” Of course, that is likely how some Confederates reconciled the murder of black troops seeking surrender. But it is also, as the author reminds us, how Union officers justified executing captured guerrillas, another group of “outsiders.” Despite this, episodes of restraint on both sides were far more common than we might expect. As Sheehan-Dean eloquently argues:

The wartime calculus created by the Civil War’s participants sanctioned episodes of grim destruction and instances where the inertia of violence weakened … Moments of charity occurred wherever Union commanders and Confederate commanders or Southern politicians negotiated surrenders—of forts, armies, and towns—without violence. They happened when soldiers surrendered on battlefields and became prisoners of war. They even happened when officers used threats of retaliation to demand an end to unjust practices. In most cases, a retaliatory order de-escalated the situation. The most pivotal moment of de-escalation was the decision by enslaved people to pursue freedom rather than revenge … [p355]

At the outset of the Civil War, the closest thing to a manual of conduct for war was a wordy treatise based upon European history and tradition by Henry Halleck, who later became Lincoln’s General-in-Chief. But, as chronicled in some detail in The Calculus of Violence, formal rules of warfare were officially established on the Union side through the Herculean efforts of German-born Francis Lieber, who based what came to be known as the Lieber Code upon a “just war” theory. This first modern codification of the laws of war has had a lasting legacy, deeply influencing the later Hague Conventions and Geneva Conventions that established the existing tenets of international law and determined what acts of war can be considered tantamount to a war crime. Of course, there’s no shortage of irony to the awful truth that civilian populations often fared far better in Lieber’s day than they have in the days since. Structured, codified, hallowed international law has done little to mitigate the harsh reality found in the mass murder of populations who happen to get in the way of belligerents.

No review, no matter how detailed, could possibly do justice to the breadth and depth of ideas explored in this book, but it is a testament to the author’s brilliance as a thinker and talents as a writer that a tome so weighty with concepts of political philosophy and legal theory never once turns to slog. In truth, I could not put it down! Moreover, it is an important work of Civil War history that manages to cut its own indelible groove in the historiography. And, finally, by highlighting how restraint was pivotal to checking the potential for even greater bloodletting, Sheehan-Dean has managed to achieve something perhaps once deemed impossible by casting a glow of unexpected optimism around the tragedy that was the American Civil War. It is no wonder that The Calculus of Violence has been selected as the book of the Civil War Institute’s Summer Conference 2024. I not only highly recommend this superb work, but I would urge it as  an essential read for any student of Civil War history.

More information on the Civil War Institute’s Summer Conference 2024 can be found here: Civil War Institute at Gettysburg Summer Conference 2024

 

For several days we traversed a region, which had been deserted by the occupants—being no longer worth culture—and immense thickets of young red cedars, now occupied the fields, in digging of which, thousands of wretched slaves had worn out their lives in the service of merciless masters … It had originally been highly fertile and productive, and had it been properly treated, would doubtlessly have continued to yield abundant and prolific crops; but the gentlemen who became the early proprietors of this fine region, supplied themselves with slaves from Africa, cleared large plantations of many thousands of acres—cultivated tobacco—and became suddenly wealthy … they valued their lands less than their slaves, exhausted the kindly soil by unremitting crops of tobacco, declined in their circumstances, and finally grew poor, upon the very fields that had formerly made their possessors rich; abandoned one portion after another, as not worth planting any longer, and, pinched by necessity, at last sold their slaves to Georgian planters, to procure a subsistence … and when all was gone, took refuge in the wilds of Kentucky, again to act the same melancholy drama, leaving their native land to desolation and poverty … Virginia has become poor by the folly and wickedness of slavery, and dearly has she paid for the anguish and sufferings she has inflicted upon our injured, degraded, and fallen race.¹

Those are the recollections of Charles Ball, an enslaved man in his mid-twenties from Maryland who was sold away from his wife and child and—wearing an iron collar shackled to a coffle with other unfortunates—was driven on foot to his new owner in Georgia in 1805. As he was marched through Virginia, the perspicacious Ball observed not only the ruin of what had once been fertile lands, but the practices that had brought these to devastation. Ball serves as a prominent witness in the extraordinary, ground-breaking work, Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South [2022], by David Silkenat, professor of history at the University of Edinburgh, which probes yet one more critical yet largely ignored component of Civil War studies.

Excerpts like this one from Ball’s memoir—an invaluable primary source written many years later once he had won his freedom—also well articulate the triple themes that combine to form the thesis of Silkenet’s book: southern planters perceived land as a disposable resource and had little regard for it beyond its potential for short-term profitability; slave labor directed on a colossal scale across the wider geography dramatically and permanently altered every environment it touched; and, the masses of the enslaved were far better attuned and adapted to their respective ecosystems, which they frequently turned to for privacy, nourishment, survival—and even escape. And there is too a darker ingredient that clings to all of these themes, and that was the almost unimaginable cruelty that defined the lives of the enslaved.

The men who force-marched Ball’s coffle as if they were cattle no doubt viewed him with contempt, yet though held as chattel, the African American Charles Ball was more familiar with the past, present, and likely future of the ground he trod upon than most of his white oppressors.  Frequently condemned to a lifetime of hard labor in unforgiving environments, often sustaining conditions little better than that afforded to livestock, this sophisticated intimacy of their natural surroundings could for the enslaved prove to be the only alternative to a cruel death in otherwise harsh elements. And, sometimes, it could—always at great risk—also translate into liberty.

Those who claimed ownership over their darker-complected fellow human beings were not entirely ignorant of the precarious balance of nature in the land they exploited, but they paid that little heed. Land was, after all, not only cheap but appeared to be limitless. As the Indigenous fell victim in greater numbers to European diseases, as militias drove the survivors deeper into the wilderness, as the British loss in the American Revolution removed the final barriers to westward expansion, the Chesapeake elite counted their wealth not in acreage but in human chattel. Deforestation was widespread, fostering erosion. First tobacco and later wheat sapped nutrients and strained the soil’s capacity to sustain bountiful yields over time. Well-known practices such as crop rotation, rigorously applied in the north, were largely scorned by the planter aristocracy. The land, as Ball had discerned, was rapidly used up.

Already in Jefferson’s time, “breeding” the enslaved for sale to the lower south was growing far more profitable than agriculture in the upper south. And demand increased exponentially with the introduction of the “cotton gin” and the subsequent boom in cotton production, as well as the end of the African slave trade that was to follow. Human beings became the most reliable “cash crop.” Charles Ball’s transport south was part of a trickle that grew to a multitude later dubbed the “Slave Trail of Tears” that stretched from Maryland to Louisiana and saw the involuntary migration of about a million enslaved souls in the five decades prior to the Civil War. Many, like Ball, were forced to cope with new environments unlike anything they had experienced before their forced resettlement. What did not change, apparently, was the utter disregard for these various environments by their new owners.

For those who imagined the enslaved limited to working cotton or sugar plantations, Silkenet’s book will be something of an eye-opener. In a region of the United States that with only some exceptions stubbornly remained pre-industrial, large forces of slave labor were enlisted to tame—and put to ruin—a wide variety of landscapes through extensive overexploitation that included forestry, mining, levee-building, and turpentine extraction, usually in extremely perilous conditions.

The enslaved already had to cope with an oppressive collection of unhealthy circumstances that included exposure to extreme heat, exhaustion, insects, a range of diseases including chronic ringworm, inadequate clothing, and an insufficient diet—as well as an ongoing unsanitary lifestyle that even kept them from washing their hands except on infrequent occasions. All this was further exacerbated by the demands inherent in certain kinds of more specialized work.

Enslaved “dippers” extracted turpentine from pine trees which left their “hands and clothing … smeared with the gum, which was almost impossible to remove. Dippers accumulated layers of dried sap and dirt on their skin and clothes, an accumulation that they could only effectively remove in November when the harvest ended. They also suffered from the toxic cumulative effect of inhaling turpentine fumes, which left them dizzy and their throats raw.” [p70] Mining for gold was an especially dangerous endeavor that had the additional hazard in the use of “mercury to cause gold to amalgamate … leaving concentrated amounts of the toxin in the spoil piles and mountain streams. Mercury mixed with the sulfuric acid created when deep earth soils came into contact with oxygen poisoned the watershed … Enslaved miners suffered from mercury poisoning, both from working with the liquid form with their bare hands and from inhaling fumes during distillation. Such exposure had both short- and long-term consequences, including skin irritation, numbness in the hands and feet, kidney problems, memory loss, and impaired speech, hearing, and sight.” [p24] There were dangers too for lumberjacks and levee-builders. Strangely perhaps, despite the increased risks many of the enslaved preferred to be working the mines and forests because of opportunities for limited periods of autonomy in wilder locales that would be impossible in plantation life.

In the end, mining and deforestation left the land useless for anything else. Levees, originally constructed to forestall flooding to enable rice agriculture, ended up increasing flooding, a problem that today’s New Orleans inherited from the antebellum. All these pursuits tended to lay waste to respective ecosystems, leaving just the “scars on the land” of the book’s title, but of course they also left lasting physical and psychological scars upon a workforce recruited against their will.

What was common to each and every milieu was the mutual abuse of the earth as well as those coerced to work it. Ball mused that the quotient for cruelty towards those who toiled the land seemed roughly similar to the degree that the land was ravaged. Indeed, cruelty abounds: the inhumanity that actually defines the otherwise euphemistically rendered “peculiar institution” stands stark throughout the narrative, supported by a wide range of accounts of those too often condemned to lives beset by a quotidian catalog of horrors as chattel property in a system marked by nearly inconceivable brutality.

Beatings and whippings were standard fare. Runaways, even those who intended to absent themselves only temporarily, were treated with singular harshness. Sallie Smith, a fourteen-year-old girl who went truant in the woods to avoid repeated abuse, was apprehended and “brutally tortured: suspended by ropes in a smoke house so that her toes barely touched the ground and then rolled across the plantation inside a nail-studded barrel, leaving her scarred and bruised.” [p78]

Slaveowners also commonly employed savage hunting dogs or bloodhounds that were specially trained to track runaways, which sometimes led to the maiming or even death of the enslaved:

“One enraged slave owner ‘hunted and caught’ a fugitive ‘with bloodhounds, and allowed the dogs to kill him. Then he cut his body up and fed the fragments to the hounds.’ Most slave owners sought to capture their runaway slaves alive; but unleashed bloodhounds could inflict serious wounds in minutes … Some masters saw the violence done by dogs as part of the punishment due to rebellious slaves. Over the course of ten weeks in 1845, Louisiana planter Bennet Barrow noted in his diary three occasions when bloodhounds attacked runaway slaves. First, they caught a runaway named Ginny Jerry, who sought refuge in the branches before the ‘negro hunters … made the dogs pull him out of the tree, Bit him very badly’ … Second, a few weeks later, while pursuing another truant, Barrow ‘came across Williams runaway,’ who found himself cornered by bloodhounds, and the ‘Dogs nearly et his legs off—near killing him.’  Finally, an unnamed third runaway managed to elude the hounds for half a mile before the ‘dogs soon tore him naked.’ When he returned to the plantation, Barrow ‘made the dogs give him another overhauling’ in front of the assembled enslaved community as a deterrent. Although Barrow may have taken unusual pleasure in watching dogs attack runaway slaves, his diary reveals that slave owners used dogs to track fugitives and torture them.” [p52-53]

That such practices were treated as unremarkable by white contemporaries finds a later echo in the routine bureaucracy of atrocities that the Nazis inflicted on Jews sent to forced labor camps. For his part, Silkenat reports episodes like these dispassionately, in what appears to be a deliberate effort on the author’s part to sidestep sensationalism. This technique is effective: hyperbolic editorial is unnecessary—the horror speaks for itself—and those well-read in the field are aware that such barbarity was hardly uncommon. Moreover, it serves as a robust rebuke to today’s “Lost Cause” enthusiasts who would cast slavery as benign or even benevolent, as well as to those promoting recent disturbing trends to reshape school curricula to minimize and even sugarcoat the awful realities that history reveals. (Sidenote to Florida’s Board of Education: exactly which skills did Sallie Smith in her nail-studded barrel, or those disfigured by ferocious dogs, develop that later could be used for their “personal benefit?”)

I first encountered the author and his book quite by accident. I was attending the Civil War Institute (CWI) 2023 Summer Conference at Gettysburg College², and David Silkenat was one of the scheduled speakers for a particular presentation—“Slavery and the Environment in the American South”—that I nearly skipped because I worried it might be dull. As it turned out, I could not have been more wrong. I sat at rapt attention during the talk, then purchased the book immediately afterward.

Silkenet’s lecture took an especially compelling turn when he spoke at length of maroon communities of runaways who sought sanctuary in isolated locations that could be far too hostile to foster recapture even by slave hunters with vicious dogs. One popular refuge was the swamp, especially unwholesome but yet out of reach of the lash, another underscore by the author that enslaved blacks by virtue of necessity grew capable of living off the land—every kind of land, no matter how harsh—with a kind of adaptation out of reach to their white oppressors. Swamps tended to be inhospitable, given to fetid water populated with invisible pathogens, masses of biting and stinging insects, poisonous snakes, alligators, and even creatures such as panthers and bears that that had gone extinct elsewhere. But for the desperate it meant freedom.

A number of maroon communities appeared in secluded geographies that were populated by escapees mostly on the margins of settled areas, with inhabitants eking out a living by hunting and gathering as well as small scale farming, supplemented by surreptitious trading with the outside world. The largest was in the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina, where thousands managed to thrive over multiple generations.

But not all flourished. In Scars on the Land, Silkenat repeats Ball’s tragic tale of coming upon a naked and dirty fugitive named Paul, an African survivor of the Middle Passage who had fled a beating to the swamp. On his neck, he wore a heavy iron collar that was fastened with bells to help discourage escape. Ball assisted him as best he could clandestinely, but could not remove the collar. When he returned a week later to offer additional assistance, his nostrils traced a rancid smell to the hapless Paul, a suicide, hanging by his neck from a tree, crows pecking at his eyes. ³ [p124]

Scars on the Land is directed at a scholarly audience, yet it is so well-written that any student of the Civil War and African American history will find it both accessible and engaging. But more importantly, in a genre that now boasts an inventory of more than 60,000 works, it is no small distinction to pronounce Silkenet’s book a significant contribution to the historiography that should be a required read for everyone with an interest in the field.

 

¹Charles Ball. Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, Who Lived Forty Years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a Slave Under Various Masters, and was One Year in the Navy with Commodore Barney, During the Late War. (NY: John S. Taylor, 1837)  Slavery in the United States

² For more about the CWI Summer Conference at Gettysburg College see: Civil War Institute at Gettysburg Summer Conference 2024

³The illustration of Paul hanging from a tree appears alongside Ball’s narrative in this publication:  Nathaniel Southard, ed. The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1838, Vol I, Nr 3, The American Anti-Slavery Society, (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838), 13, The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1838

Note: I reviewed this book about a well-known maroon community here: Review of: The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, by Matthew J. Clavin