War through enemy eyes

TO GETTYSBURG AND BEYOND, by Michael Golay, Crown Publishers, 436 pages, $27.50.

“I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes,” insisted Carl Sandburg. Some of those who disagree compare the past to a lantern whose beams light the way to the future. An eloquent case in point is this memorable re-creation of the four-year internecine war in the United States over the issue of slavery. This costly conflict between the North and the South was fought in pastures and orchards, woods and towns, on roads, rivers, and in ravines. It resonates with the names of battles such as Antietam (America’s bloodiest single-day encounter), Bull Run, Fredericksburg, The Wilderness, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg and, in its dying days, Appomattox. It was there that Gen. Lee laid down his sword in the parlor of farmer Wilmer McLean and surrendered to Gen. Grant after four years of the fiercest fighting our country has ever experienced. It is a gripping close-up.

The 620,000 men who died on the battlefields during the Civil War live on in histories such as that of Golay who tersely describes the fallen Yankee soldier who, mortally wounded, tried in vain to club himself into merciful oblivion with his own gun; and the moving metaphor implicit in the bloodied dead body of a teen-age Confederate infantryman slumped against a tree, eyes open and staring, his life over before it had truly begun. “The mighty scourge of war,” said Abraham Lincoln in his second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, a short six weeks removed from his own death by assassination on April 14.

Running through Golay’s chronicle are events in the lives of two men of antithetical allegiances who fought in the Civil War. Although one wore blue and the other gray, both were self-driven achievers. Blue-eyed, dark-haired Joshua Chamberlain ,who never completely shed his childhood stammer, was born in Brewer in 1828. As a child, while doing chores on his father’s farm, he got a haywagon wheel stuck between two large stumps. When he called out to his father asking how to get it free, his father replied briefly, “Do it; that’s how.” This became the yardstick by which Chamberlain was to measure every challenge — as a Bowdoin College student, minister-in-training at the Bangor Theological Seminary, and, later on, as a professor at Bowdoin, commanding officer of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War, four-term governor of Maine, and fifth president of Bowdoin for 13 years. Despite constant pain from a war wound which never healed, he remained grateful for his years of war service, his elevation to brigadier general, and the award of the Medal of Honor.

Edward Alexander, who wore the gray uniform of the Confederate Army with pride, was six years younger than Chamberlain. Reared in the aristocratic affluence of plantation life in Washington, Ga., he attended West Point when its superintendent was Robert E. Lee. Possessed of a passion for perfection, he was by nature charming, cheerful, and a whiz kid in engineering skills. Because of the latter, he became indispensable to Gen. Lee as his chief of artillery. During the Seven Days’ battles (when McClellan’s Army of the Potomac was swarming up the Virginia peninsula toward Richmond), he briefly held the distinction of serving as Lee’s “one-man air force” when he ascended in a balloon (made of dress silk sealed with rubbery varnish) and observed the progress of the Northern troops from the air. In time he too rose to the rank of brigadier general. In 1910, three years before he died, Alexander published “Military Memoirs of a Confederate,” a work that is still regarded as valuable and valid in the Civil War genre. In spite of his ardent loyalty to the Confederate cause he said in a postwar commemoration speech at West Point, “Whose vision is now so dull that he does not recognize the blessing it is to himself and to his children to live in an undivided country?”

But the deeper, thornier question that the Civil War left unanswered was, according to Golay, “How were the whites and blacks to live togther?” Bravely, untold numbers had died to rout the specters of slavery and secession. The referential influence of their unprecedented sacrifice is a debt that holds us all accountable to our conscience. Can whites and blacks live together? Yes, because the past is not a bucket of ashes. It is a lantern whose beams light the way to the future.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a monthly feature in the Books & Music section.