Five Forks: Waterloo of the Confederacy

Robert Alexander's Five Forks is a splendid and intriguing study of the South's Waterloo. I can't recommend too highly this book that so clearly belongs in anyone's permanent Civil War collection. The prose is improbably lucid and lovely. Jim Harrison Alexander's purpose is not to furnish us with another tactic account of the Battle of Five Forks, fought April 1, 1865, but rather to entwine a narrative of those events which led up to this climatic battle of the Civil War known as 'the Waterloo of the Confederacy.' With the generous use of primary sources, from commanding generals to the common soldier, he interweaves their stories in telling how the two contending armies got to Petersburg, along with providing a lively discussion on how the war actually came to be. It is thought-provoking read and recommend for all who enjoy this period in America's history. Chris Calkins, Historian, Petersburg, Virginia I have read a range of work from Hart Crane and Walt Whitman to contemporary writers. Five Forks stands with the best of them, an original and imaginative creation the structure of which part narrative, part poetry, part history, part journalsets it apart and heightens its appeal. Marie Harris, New Hampshire Poet Laureate 1999-2004

Autorentext
Robert Alexander is a poet and writer living in Madison, Wisconsin, and Grand Marais, Michigan. He is author of White Pine Sucker River: Poems, 19701990 and was Creative Director of New Rivers Press.

Klappentext

Five Forks is a splendid and intriguing study of the South s Waterloo.

Zusammenfassung
Five Forks is a splendid and intriguing study of the Southâ™s Waterloo.

Leseprobe
In graduate school, years ago, a couple of friends and I met once a week at Sonny's to eat pizza and drink red wine and talk about Shakespeare. Across the street the concrete tower of the English department stood motionless as winter ebbed into spring. One afternoon Gordon talked about the history plays. Gordon had been reading Heidegger, and, so he explained, the histories were a good example of how it is that we meet our past coming to us out of the future. Abe Lincoln, Gordon told us, was an avid reader of Shakespeare's history plays. In a flash of wine-and-pizza insight, cars gliding by silently beyond the plate glass window, I saw that the soul of Shakespeare's history plays had transmigrated over four centuries into a TV miniseries. And indeed, just as Shakespeare picked his history carefully (he could please or offend the ruling Tudors, depending on how he framed the wars of succession a century or two before his time), I found myself drifting back to the days of Abe Lincoln's presidencybrought to you by Chevrolet, the Heartbeat of America. Robert Penn Warren: To begin with, the Civil War offers a gallery of great human images for our contemplation. It affords a dazzling array of figures, noble in proportion yet human, caught out of Time as in a frieze, in stances so profoundly touching or powerfully mythic that they move us in a way no mere consideration of 'historical importance' ever could.1 Edmund Wilson: Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 186165 in which so many people were articulate? . . . The drama has already been staged by characters who have written their own parts; and the peculiar fascination of this literature which leads one to go on and on reading it is rather like that of Browning's The Ring and the Book, in which the same story is told from the points of view of nine different persons.2 Walt Whitman: The War of Attempted Secession has, of course, been the distinguishing event of my time.3 On the small screen of my mind, Union and Confederate generals strut about, declaiming Shakespearean lines as pompously as Mark Twain's Duke and Dauphin. Night. Another part of the field. Harry and Hotspur somewhere in Virginia, the spring of 1865. Dim and smoky campfires, councils of war. Harsh glances and savage words: The Road to Appomattox, perhaps, a dozen hours of docudrama, a full week of primetime TV. From a thespian point of view, all wardespite the vagaries of chance, despite differences in manpower and resourcescomes down to an ultimate contest of will between the two commanding generals. On the Southern side stands Robert E. Lee, fifty-eight years old at Appomattox, former superintendent of West Point. Lee was a longtime career soldier in the U.S. Army, who had fought in the Mexican War and whose father, Light Horse Harry Lee, a compatriot of George Washington, had been a cavalry commander in the Revolutionary War. In 1859, while at home on leave in Arlington, Lee was chosen to go take charge of the situation at Harper's Ferry, where some crazy man named John Brown and a bunch of Free-Soilers had taken hostages and were holed up in the federal armory threatening to start a slave rebellion in Virginia. Walt Whitman: As the period of the war recedes, I am more than ever convinced that it is important for those of us who were on the scene to put our experiences on record.4 Baltimore, Monday, October 17, 1859 A dispatch just received here from Frederick, and dated this morning, states that an insurrection has broken out at Harper's Ferry, where an armed band of Abolitionists have full possession of the Government Arsenal. The express train going east was twice fired into, and one of the railroad hands and a negro killed, while they were endeavoring to get the train through the town. The insurrectionists stopped and arrested two men, who had come to town with a load of wheat, and, seizing their wagons, loaded them with rifles, and sent them to Maryland. The insurrectionists number about 250 whites, and are aided by a gang of negroes. At last accounts, fighting was going on.5 Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Leeaided by Lieutenant Jeb Stuart and a company of U.S. Marinesmade quick work of what in fact turned out to be only twenty-some individuals. The survivors, John Brown and six of his followers, were tried, convicted, and hanged for insurrection. Less than two years later, when the war Brown had anticipated broke out in 1861, Lee was offered command of the Federal armies, but declined. Soon thereafter, he resigned his commission and accepted command of the Virginia forces when, following her sister states of the Deep South, Virginia seceded. Four years later, Lee is in command of all the Southern armies. Walt Whitman: It does not need calling in play the imagination to see that in such a record as this lies folded a perfect poem of the war comprehending all its phases, its passions, the fierce tug of the secessionists, the interminable fibre of the national union, all the special hues & characteristic forms & pictures of the actual battles with colors flying, rifles snapping, cannon thundering, grape whirring, armies struggling, ships at sea or bombarding shore batteries, skirmishes in woods, great pitched battles, & all the profound scenes of individual death, courage, endurance & superbest hardihood, & splendid muscular wrestle of a newer larger race of human giants with all furious passions aroused on one side, & the sternness of an unalterable determination on the other.6 On the Federal side is Ulysses S. Grant, fifteen years younger than Lee. In 1854, Grant had resigned from the armyperhaps in part because of a drinking problemand later rejoined, a political appointee, at the start of the war. In the interim, after various failed ventures, he had worked in his father's leather store in Galena, Illinois. By 1864, three years into the war, he has become commanding general of the Union armies. A year later, he is on the verge of victorya good example of how war takes men who seem to have no particular success in civilian life and makes of them illustrious heroes or killers, depending on your point of view. Walt Whitman: My idea of a book of the time, worthy the time . . . incidents, persons, places, sights . . . a book full enough of m…