Franco-American Civil War classic reborn in English

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CONCORD, N.H. – The U.S. Civil War attracted tens of thousands of fighters from Canada, a largely overlooked chapter of Franco-American history.

Now, the battlefield exploits of one underage fighter who endured the final bloody months of the war have been published in English for the first time, offering new insights to historians, Civil War buffs and Franco-Americans whose ancestors brought their culture to the United States.

French Canadian Remi Tremblay, born about 80 miles north of Montreal in Saint-Barnabe, Quebec, crossed the border in 1863, lied about his age and enlisted in the Union Army at age 16. In the next 18 months, he fought in some of the war’s bloodiest battles before being held captive at Libby Prison in Richmond, Va., infamous for its harsh conditions and high death rate.

Twenty years later, in 1884, he turned his experiences into the story of two French Canadian heroes, Leon Duroc and Eugene Leduc, in a romantic novel, “Un Revenant,” or “One Came Back.”

It was a Franco-American classic, but available only in French.

Enter Keene State College French professor Margaret Langford, who spent six years translating the novel into English.

Langford translated word plays, slang, dialect, military terms and nuances of language from a century and a half ago. From military experts, handwritten records, linguists and even a physicist, she gleaned facts such as the number of French Canadians who fought in the Union Army, period details to flesh out the descriptive narrative, and expert commentary about the events Tremblay depicted.

“I had been on the lookout for a work written by a Franco-American, in French, to connect to an event that was so mainstream American that it would be difficult to ignore the contribution,” Langford said.

“I thought if I could find such a work that made this connection and also was intriguing and readable, it would lessen the invisibility of ordinary Franco-Americans.”

She found it on her own bookshelf. After countless days of rising early, getting to bed late and working with papers spread around her at a Keene coffee shop, she hopes the book soon will be on many other bookshelves.

The story traces Tremblay’s war experiences with the 14th U.S. Infantry through his heroes, Duroc and Leduc.

Duroc is wounded and reported dead. Leduc, like Tremblay, survives the battles of Spotsylvania, The Wilderness, Cold Harbor and Petersburg, and endures the winter of 1864-65 in Libby Prison, where he fought other prisoners for scraps of food.

“Some, though they could no longer stand up, found the courage to crawl on their hands and knees to squabble over a crumb of cornbread no bigger than a plum pit – a crumb that a prisoner who wasn’t as hungry had let fall into the spit and tobacco juice on the floor,” he writes.

On the battlefield, Tremblay describes a bomb exploding overhead as Leduc crouches over his campfire.

“One of the fragments had killed a man right beside him; another blew away coffee, kettle, fire and fuel. It had buried itself in the earth after covering two or three of his campfire mates with sand.”

Intertwined with the war is intrigue back home involving a swindler who stole $1,000 from Duroc, and both heroes’ Romeo-and-Juliet love stories.

Tremblay uses his experiences to defend the exodus of up to 1.5 million French Canadians to New England from around the Civil War to the early 20th century.

The immigrants generally were scorned in Canada for leaving their agrarian Catholic roots for the “evils” of the English-speaking, Protestant cities of America.

Tremblay’s family moved from Quebec to the mills of Massachusetts and Rhode Island when he was 12, but moved back. After the war, he worked as a journalist and eventually editor of a Franco-American newspaper in Fall River, Mass.

“The Canadians who have emigrated to the U.S. are honest workers and those who denigrate them are the riffraff,” Tremblay proclaims through one of his heroes.

Publisher Tordis Ilg Isselhardt, at Images from the Past in Bennington, Vt., said Langford preserved the feel of the 19th century while making the story engaging for today’s reader.

“She doggedly kept sniffing out every lead, every twist and turn of the story,” Isselhardt said.

In the closing months of the translation, project collaborator Claire Quintal, founder of the French Institute at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., found an incomplete, unpublished translation by Tremblay himself.

Langford called it “a work in progress” and said it helped resolve some conflicts over interpretations. But Tremblay left out some of the richness of the original French, including some word plays that Langford painstakingly preserved.

At the Franco-American Institute in Manchester, a city Franco-Americans helped build, director Francoise Elise said the novel will call attention to the unheralded contributions of earlier generations.

“We are a quiet bunch,” she said.

“This book connects with non-Franco-Americans – that we’re just like them and they are just like us,” she said.

She also hopes it will help young people appreciate their heritage.

“They were raised in English households, with no connection to where they came from – the history, the immigration,” she said.

“One Came Back” will be published in June.