Regarp Book Blog

Four American presidents have died by assassination, the last when I was six years old. John F. Kennedy, who suffered a devastating head wound, was likely dead on arrival at Parkland Hospital. Nearly a century before, the first, Abraham Lincoln, was also shot in the head, but survived overnight. In 1901, William McKinley took bullets to the abdomen, and lived just slightly longer than a week, with hopes for his recovery rising and falling. But in 1881, James A. Garfield, shot in the back, lingered on the precipice of death—incapacitated and in excruciating pain—for an astonishing seventy-nine days before the end! When it was finally over, he had been president for only just a bit longer than six months, and nearly half of that time he spent very slowly dying. In the meantime, the entire nation, nearly paralyzed, watched and waited.

In Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President [2011], Candice Millard, certainly one of history’s greatest storytellers, splendidly captures the high drama of this event and its aftermath while skillfully recreating the milieu of an America—despite the brief interval in years—strikingly different than that which belonged to Lincoln or McKinley. 1880, the year Garfield was elected, was only fifteen years removed from Appomattox, but a time traveler from Wilmer McLean’s parlor would be astonished to find an entirely different version of this United States, marked by rapid economic expansion and the outsize wealth creation that characterized the Gilded Age—fueled by opportunity, ambition, and the technological advances of the Second Industrial Revolution. And it sat perched on the edge of even more wonders to come, the very dawn of the age of the great inventions that would so thoroughly transform American life over just three decades, with the incandescent bulb and widespread electrification, the phonograph, motion pictures, the automobile, and even manned flight!

But the first of these marvels—the telephone, which truly revolutionized communications—was becoming increasingly common. Patented in 1876, one was installed in the White House in 1879. (We can only imagine how eagerly Lincoln—who leaned so heavily on the telegraph for news of battlefield results—would have adopted this innovation and relied on it to talk strategy with McClellan, Meade, or Grant.)  By 1880 there already almost 48,000 telephones in the United States; that number would nearly triple just a year later. Its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, has a part in this tale.

The Republican Party wasn’t the same either. A week after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln was dead, replaced by grim Tennessean Andrew Johnson, who turned out to have far more sympathy for the rights of defeated rebels than the fates of millions of freedmen left to the sometimes vengeful “mercy” of their former masters. And Johnson had to contend with a Congress of “Radical Republicans” no longer tempered by Lincoln’s moderation. Impeachment failed, but soon Johnson was replaced by the great hero Ulysses Grant, who had the best of intentions but in the end made for a far better general than president. As time went on, Republicans cooled towards civil rights, and drifted into a rigid factionalism that saw few policy differences but was marked by an addiction to power and privilege fueled by corruption. That was the state of the party when Garfield won the White House, but to his credit in his very short tenure he took great strides towards crippling the power of the most corrupt faction in Congress, while asserting executive independence.

Garfield was a bright, amiable character, well-regarded by most, whose politics mostly chased consensus, and whose life’s trajectory bore some strange if uneven parallels to Lincoln’s. Each were born to poverty in a log cabin and were in their youths brilliant autodidacts, although unlike Lincoln, Garfield was to go on to formal education. Both had strong antislavery convictions, and during the Lincoln Administration, Garfield took the field as a major general before going on to the House of Representatives. But while prior to his presidency Lincoln had just a single term in Congress, Garfield served for nine terms, while also finding the time to practice law and publish a mathematical proof of the Pythagorean theorem! Both could be said to be “dark horse” candidates in their respective tries for the Republican Party’s nomination, but Garfield’s horse was far darker, so to speak: in 1860, Lincoln was everyone’s second choice; in 1880, Garfield was no one’s choice, not even his own, but was nevertheless nominated on the thirty-sixth ballot. Finally, in a truly odd coincidence, not only did each die by assassin, but Lincoln’s son Robert, who once sat at his father’s deathbed, happened to be walking towards Garfield when he was shot! For her part, Millard does not dwell much on Garfield’s life, nor does she need to; it is rather his long drawn out death that is the focus of Destiny of the Republic.

On the other hand, many pages are given to another main character, the unlikely assassin Charles J. Guiteau, who stalked Garfield at a distance for an extended period of time before gunning him down at a railroad station on July 2, 1881. Guiteau, likely insane, was overcome with visions of grandeur that had him convinced that he was personally responsible for Garfield’s election and thus deserved the Paris consulship as a reward. Prior to this, Guiteau had tried his hand in a number of avenues in life, including law, theology, bill collecting, and utopianism, only to fail spectacularly in each. Virtually homeless, he stayed at a series of boarding houses and fled when the bills came due. When it finally sunk in that Garfield—who was of course unaware of Guiteau’s mad fantasies—would deny him the grand recognition he believed himself due, he persuaded himself that the president was instead a villain who must be murdered for the good of the country. Guiteau’s lack of competence in every arena remained consistent with assassination, as well: pistol shots fired point-blank at Garfield’s back yet missed his spine and all major organs.

This is when the story really gets interesting, for based upon the extent of his injuries,  according to most modern appraisals Garfield should have recovered. Why he ultimately does not survive, and how heroically he endured persistent, agonizing pain for the eleven weeks of life that remained to him—while doctors fed the nation wildly inaccurate reports of his alleged recovery—is the central theme of this book. It is a tribute to Millard’s talent with a pen that the reader truly winces along with Garfield throughout his suffering.

More than anything else, Garfield was the victim of a medical community that did not yet believe in the existence of invisible germs. Much of Europe had adopted Joseph Lister’s antiseptic methods, which were mostly belittled in the United States. Thus, multiple doctors on multiple occasions inserted unwashed fingers into the wound site, probing for a bullet which could not be located. Ironically, this bullet which had skirted all critical internal targets was now essentially harmless. Following a duel, Andrew Jackson had lived another thirty-nine years with a spent bullet lodged just two inches from his heart. Numerous Civil War veterans of both armies carried bullets in various parts of their bodies for the remainder of their lives. But, unfortunately for Garfield, in the search for the missing bullet, one of those unwashed fingers introduced an aggressive infection that slowly and painfully killed him despite numerous attempts to save his life.

From the start, Garfield’s torment was exacerbated by his own doctor—actually his entire medical team—who naively waxed optimistic over his eventual recovery while stubbornly seeking the bullet that no longer posed a threat. One of these attempts involved the now celebrated Alexander Graham Bell, who had pioneered a prototype for the first metal detector that in this case promised the perfect marriage of technology and medicine, yet proved to be an epic fail that puzzled the renowned inventor and sent him back to the drawing board more than once. Only later did it emerge that the mattress of Garfield’s sickbed was constructed of internal metal springs that drove the detector’s sensors off the charts.

Meanwhile, as Garfield lingered, the entire country held its breath. When Lincoln was elected in 1860, the population of the United States stood at just thirty-one million. In 1880, it was more than fifty million, swelled by immigration. And it was far more networked than ever before with transcontinental railroads, the telegraph, and Bell’s telephone, so that communication was now near instant, at least in more populated regions. News of Garfield’s “progress” was broadcast daily, and crowds gathered around public bulletin boards hungry for updates. Much of it was misleading. The president was dying. Since his doctors could not acknowledge that to themselves, it is perhaps less surprising that they could not say it out loud. On September 19, James A. Garfield was no more. The author succeeds brilliantly in recreating the America of 1881 that daily watched breathlessly until Garfield breathed no more.

Millard, who is not a trained historian, puts many seasoned academics to shame by combining meticulous research with a gift for compelling prose that grips the reader from the first paragraph to the final pages. Her first book, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, won national acclaim for its appeal to both a popular and a scholarly audience. Its success was closely rivaled by the more recent Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill. For her readers, it is perhaps no surprise that Destiny of the Republic earns similar accolades. Like many other terrific books that I purchase and set aside for later consumption, this one sat on my shelves for many years. I eventually turned to it just after closing the cover of another author’s biography of Garfield that succeeded masterfully in its study of the man but was marred by a too superficial treatment of his era. Millard proved the perfect remedy! For fans of American history: do not skip this one.

My review of:  Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill, by Candice Millard    

My review of:  President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier, by C.W. Goodyear 

Interested in reading this book?  You can purchase a copy here:
https://capitaloneshopping.com/p/destiny-of-the-republic-large-pr/55CHR5FSSF?run=d38b6373-c5ec-4dc3-af61-a92982a96d76

 

 

 

 

I read an opinion piece in a leading New York newspaper that attributed the calamitous presidential election loss of one party’s nominee to the sinister tactics of the opposing party, which had enlisted vast numbers of the foreign born—many with strange customs and an alien faith—into voting for their candidate. This was primarily achieved, the author asserted, by willfully spreading misinformation and fanning the flames of fear among foreigners to “vote in a body for the side they are told is the Democratic, no matter what it proposes to do or leave undone.” Moreover, it was alleged, there was a suspicion of widespread fraud by noncitizens casting votes illegally that may have tipped the balance.

No, this editorial is not hot off of any press in 2024, but instead saw publication late in 1844! And the author is a no pundit on the right venting in an op-ed, but rather the esteemed Horace Greeley, a reformist who was then-editor of the Whig-friendly New-York Daily Tribune. That Greeley’s grievances strike such familiar chords one hundred eighty years later is illustrative of an unsettling but familiar constant in American history: a nation comprised almost entirely of immigrants has with some consistency frequently demonstrated a hostility towards the next generation of immigrants. This odd streak of nativism dates back to the very dawn of the Republic with the “Alien and Sedition Acts” of 1798, enacted only ten years after the Constitution was ratified and championed by none other than Alexander Hamilton, who himself was born in the West Indies! And long after Greeley was gone, Woodrow Wilson warned in 1903 that “there came multitudes of men of the lowest class . . . as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.” As recently as 1960, Rev. Norman Vincent Peale assailed the candidacy of John F. Kennedy in apocalyptic terms: “Faced with the election of a Catholic, our culture is at stake.” In this context, the uncomfortable truth is that when Donald Trump branded Mexicans “rapists” and called for a Muslim ban, he was operating within a reluctantly acknowledged time-honored American tradition, even if he voiced it in a tone more vulgar than customary.

But never in our history did nativism—and the forces aligned against it—have as much outsize consequence for American politics and policy as it did in the antebellum and the Civil War era, as becomes abundantly clear in the splendid new book by acclaimed Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration [2024]. In these pages Holzer, author of more than fifty books and winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize, takes a fresh look at the critical if too often overlooked significance of the Native American “Know-Nothing” Party in antebellum politics as the Whigs came apart and the new Republican Party was born. At the same time, he widens the lens on the familiar “benefit vs. burden” debate over immigration to establish with some conviction that in this particular moment in history immigrant minorities proved not only key cohorts of electoral contests but, upon the onset of secession and war, surprisingly essential to our national survival.

First, Holzer takes us back to a time when the most despised immigrant population was the Irish: desperately poor, largely illiterate, and Roman Catholic—a faith that was an anathema to Protestant America. Their numbers increased exponentially after 1844 with the devastating potato famine that claimed a million dead to starvation and sent millions more fleeing the country. They were largely unwelcome in America, even as their addition to the labor force boosted American business. There was the typical charge against the Irish of putting the native born out of work, but like most immigrants then and now, they flocked to low-paid menial jobs most Americans did not want, and because of an overheated demand, their presence actually generated a degree of upward mobility for those already employed, particularly in places like Boston brutally focused upon wage labor in factories and mills. But, then and now, the perceived threat was all that really mattered.

Politically, that perceived threat spawned an unlikely coalition of the disaffected, including many former Whigs, to form secret societies to resist the influx of immigrants that quickly evolved into the Native American Party, popularly dubbed the “Know-Nothings,” which briefly but mightily shook up the established political order. That the Whigs as a national party eventually imploded over the issue of slavery overlooks nuance in other factors such as the Know-Nothings, which contributed to their slow unraveling. At the same time, the Know-Nothings’ advertised hostility to the Irish sent them into the welcoming arms of the Democratic Party, which happily targeted them as a dependable long-term voting bloc. This was the conundrum Greeley, a steadfast Whig, opined about in the Tribune.

Today’s charged allegations of immigrant votes swaying elections are largely imaginative talking-points broadcast to inflame hyperpartisanship, but in Greeley’s day such anxieties were well-founded. The reality in our times—with so much vitriol directed at millions of the undocumented—is that in order to cast a ballot, an immigrant must first establish legal residence (no small hurdle for those who lack legal status), then wait five years before applying for citizenship and earning the right to vote. But back then, no one could be branded as “illegal”—such a concept did not even exist until the shameful 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—so five years after stepping off the boat, regardless of national origin, virtually anyone could request and be granted citizenship, and along with it any male of a certain age could obtain voting rights. The push-pull factor of the Know-Nothings’ blatant enmity and the deliberate embrace of the Democrats rattled Whig confidence to no end.

The other significant foreign born demographic was German, Protestant and Catholic, many whom had fled Europe after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. While wary of Whigs who sometimes danced in the same circles as Know-Nothings, their antislavery principles could not abide a close coupling with Democrats closely allied with southern slave power interests. Germans, for a variety of factors, also seemed to assimilate more rapidly, and their votes remained valuable if up for grabs. All of this occurred against a dramatic backdrop that saw national unity crumbling, Whiggery gradually going extinct, and the creation of the Republican Party.

Enter Lincoln, a longtime Whig unfriendly to nativism, who was also a brilliant politician  capable of sensing and seizing opportunities. Armed with reliable antislavery credentials but well-distanced from the radicalism attached to abolitionists, Lincoln privately denounced the Know-Nothings while publicly withholding judgment, and championed “free soil” opportunities in the territories equally attractive to the native and the foreign born. Shrewdly navigating a precarious center that found competing as well as conflicting interests to his left and right, Lincoln recruited all-comers, reconciling nearly all save those that would countenance the further spread of slavery. In the end, Lincoln managed to find wide support among immigrants, especially the Germans, without alienating former Know-Nothings, a notable achievement too often overlooked in the literature. But none of it was by accident: leaders of the German-American community that Lincoln courted worked tirelessly to drive voters to the polls. The breadth of Holzer’s scholarship and his expert analysis are perhaps best showcased in this portion of the narrative as he explores how the subtleties of Lincoln’s character, coupled with his strategic instincts, reinforced his political acumen.

With secession and Civil War, of course, the focus shifted from ballots to bullets, and here immigrants—citizens and non-citizens alike—proved vital to the struggle. The foreign born filled the ranks. With  their adopted nation under threat, the Irish, who had voted for Lincoln in far smaller numbers than their German counterparts, nevertheless sent more than 150,000 men to the front. Still, the largest ethnicity belonged to the Germans, who contributed well over 200,000 soldiers—about ten percent of the fighting force! But the new president also put his thumb on the scale: in the scramble for political appointments Lincoln astutely rewarded those with the most clout, including German-Americans who campaigned for him. And this type of favor was even more pronounced as new generals were commissioned, most famously with Franz Sigel, whose ability to inspire enthusiasm in the ranks vastly exceeded his talents on the battlefield. Sadly, he was not alone. In fact, the ineptitude of many of Lincoln’s political generals—both native and foreign born—plagued him throughout the conflict, but yet remained essential to recruitment efforts as the war dragged on.

Immigration was crucial elsewhere, as well. From the time the first shots were fired, the Confederacy was able to field a larger percentage of men with muskets than the United States because they could rely on the enslaved as a massive labor force, both at home and at the front; we now know that thousands of “camp slaves” accompanied rebel armies for the duration of the war. The north had no such luxury. So in addition to their service in uniform, the Union counted on immigrants behind the lines for production of materiel as well as to take the places of those at the front in factories, mills, and beyond. At the same time, acts fostering internal improvements, long blocked by the south, were now making their way through Congress. Lincoln, a man of vision whose prescience often far exceeded that of any of his contemporaries, recognized the urgency in expanding the population to meet accelerating demands for labor, just as the nation confronted an existential threat of extinction. Of course, with no end to the war in sight, more soldiers would be needed too. Thus Lincoln became the first president to sponsor and sign legislation that encouraged immigration.

Many nationalities other than Irish and German deserve their due, and the author touches upon them, but he rightly focuses his attention on the most consequential groups. Yet, he does carve out space to discuss Jews in America, a minority both within and outside of the immigrant community, whom Lincoln generally treated with favor, for personal as well as political reasons. While Lincoln was sometimes given to the telling of ethnic jokes, as Holzer recounts, he genuinely seems to have lacked many—if certainly not all—of the prejudices common to his time.

If I was to find fault, I thought there were far too many pages devoted to chronicling the series of German-American generals who consistently let Lincoln down on the battlefield, the only drag to an otherwise fast-moving narrative. At the same time, I craved a deeper dive into what drove fierce German antislavery sentiments to begin with, something that made them natural allies to the Republican cause. But these are, I suppose, just quibbles. It is, after all, a fine work, and it more than earns a place on your Civil War bookcase.

I came to this book in an unusual fashion. I unexpectedly ran into Harold Holzer in the lobby of an eighteenth century inn in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. We had met before, at the Civil War Institute Summer Conference at Gettysburg College, and at other events. I was on my way to see blues guitarist-vocalist extraordinaire Samantha Fish in Great Barrington; Harold was returning from a presentation of this very book at a local library. We exchanged pleasantries and moved on. The next day, my wife and I stopped in at bookstore in a nearby town and I asked about Holzer’s book. The owner of the bookstore suddenly became quite animated. Did I know Harold, he wanted to know … While I chatted with him, I pretended not to notice my wife surreptitiously purchasing Brought Forth on This Continent, which two weeks later showed up in my Easter Basket. (Yes, we still do Easter Baskets in my house!)

I was most grateful to receive this book because antebellum nativism falls into my zone of interest. Some years ago, I even published a journal article about the weird confluence of events that in 1855 had the Massachusetts legislature controlled by Know-Nothings pass the very first bill mandating school desegregation in American history! I have also spent decades studying Lincoln and the Civil War, so Holzer’s book checked all the boxes. As it turned out, I was not disappointed. This is an outstanding work that succeeds not only in recapturing critical moments in American history, but in restoring the relevance of immigration to the survival and success of the Republic. Given the dynamics of this election year, that comes perhaps not a moment too soon.

Link to Greeley, cited above:  New-York Daily Tribune, November 11, 1844

Link to my journal article: Strange Bedfellows: Nativism, Know-Nothings, African-Americans and School Desegregation in Antebellum Massachusetts, by Stan Prager

More on the Know-Nothings: Review of: The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts: The Rise and Fall of a People’s Movement, by John R. Mulkern

More on CWI:  Civil War Institute at Gettysburg Summer Conference 2024 – Regarp Book Blog

 

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!