Civil War Scrapbook
by
WHEN he is not conjuring up sinister theories of plots and conspiracies in and out of Lincoln’s Cabinet, Otto Eisenschiml, one of the editors ofThe American Iliad (Bobbs-Merrill, $5.00), is a competent student and historian of the Civil War period. This reviewer is not familiar with the previous publications of the other editor of this “Epic Story of the Civil War,” but Ralph Newman is described as a Civil War expert and collector, moving spirit in Chicago’s famous Civil War Round Table. Between them, Mr. Eisenschiml and Mr. Newman have attempted to collect, select, digest, and present firsthand documents arranged to tell a coherent story of the Civil War. They have wisely chosen to use far more material from the pens of private soldiers and civilians than usually appears in a military history. They have digested strategical discussions to their simplest terms; and if they quote the Olympian words of a commanding general, they also quote the opinions of men in the ranks describing the same operation. The result is readable and varied and often vivid.
The task of letting the actors in that great drama tell their own stories was bravely undertaken back in the eighties by Robert Underwood Johnson, and was carried by him to brilliant fulfillment, in the ever memorable Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. But Mr. Johnson’s work appeared in four large volumes, while Mr. Eisenschiml and Mr. Newman have confined themselves to one volume of some 690 pages.
Obviously a comparison between the two efforts, however inevitable, would be quite unfair. The present editors have had at their disposal a very considerable amount of valuable and fruitful memoirs, journals, letters, and histories which have appeared since the publication of Battles and Leaders and, with certain surprising omissions, they have made good use of these new sources. (Incidentally, I failed to see a reference to Battles and Leaders in this volume except as a listing in the Bibliography.) Their book is given a more human and democratic touch by the liberal use of the thoughts of combat soldiers and officers, which Mr. Johnson in the grander manner of his day would often have relegated to footnotes in small type.
The editors state in their Foreword that they have adjusted the style and presentation of their material, sometimes changing the third person to the first, and otherwise editing the text, but they profess that “in no case, however, have we tampered with the meaning of our source material, nor have we distorted it in any way whatsoever.” This method of editing, in which alterations of original text are not indicated, will shock conventional historians. It is probably a dangerous and could easily become a pernicious practice. It is permissible only when frankly admitted and employed in the making of a “popular” rather than a “serious” history.
In presenting their material the editors have not succeeded in finding the happiest physical solution for differentiating between their running editorial comment and the source material. No quotation marks are used, and unless the reader pays the strictest attention, he is never quite sure whether he is reading Eisenschiml and Newman or the words of a midshipman on the Merrimac. Putting the editorial comment in italics would perhaps be visually tedious, and no easy solution is apparent; but one cannot help feeling that the editors have not employed the full range of typographical ingenuity. The maps, which are never elaborate, are easy to read and adequate for their purposes.
Just why the editors use the words “Iliad” and “Epic” in the title of their book is not apparent. If they have succeeded in presenting in readable form, from contemporary sources, a fair picture of how the Civil War was fought and what fighting in it was like—no small achievement in a single volume - they have failed to convey the emotion and the passion in the minds and spirit of the men and women who lived through that dreadful struggle. There is little or none of that dark poetry which stirred almost unbearably in the souls of men, nor of that mystical exaltation which produced the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” or the “Commemoration Ode.” Perhaps it is too much to ask for complete realism and poetry as well, but an American Iliad is more than the story of campaigns and mud and wounds and lice and death. If it is an epic, it must have, somewhere in it, epic poetry.
There is a blind spot in the vision of nearly all editors or writers of Civil War material. They cannot understand, because they themselves are so familiar with the facts, that the layman of today is completely ignorant, of even the simplest infantry tactics and terms employed in warfare eighty-odd years ago. Most readers certainly do not know just what is meant by a line of battle, or how a column is deployed into line, or how two or more ranks could fire without blowing one another’s ears off. Unless these elemental tactics are understood, readers cannot appreciate the terror of being flanked which appears in the story of every battle.
The theoretical and actual function and employment of field artillery, the range and nature of their missiles — all these matters could be explained in a few introductory paragraphs without insulting anyone’s intelligence and with enormous benefit to the “general reader.” Too often he would be puzzled to explain the difference between a Brigade and a Division, and his mental picture of what happened when “Sedgwick hurled his corps on Longstreet’s center and right” is surely in the nature of abstract painting. Is it too much to hope that sometime an editor or an historian will remember that not all his readers are exact students of extinct military tactics and of the use of obsolete weapons.