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, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago…
— William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust
Above, you see a picture I took, right about this time of year in 2005, of the high water mark of the Confederacy — the stone wall at the top of the ridge.
I had just looked out over that wall, and was stunned by what I saw. It wasn’t really anything my camera could capture, because what I was looking at was vast, flat, open space — the space across which Pickett’s men walked, suicidally, into a hailstorm of lead. It looked to be two miles across. The high ground was not only well-defended by infantry, but crammed with artillery. It was the worst place in the world to attack, and the world possible ground to attack across.
What could they have been thinking of during that long walk? What ran through their heads?
I’d never seen anything before that made history seem so immediate. I was in awe. How brave they were. How stupid they were. How mad they were. And they just kept coming, until there was only a trickle left to try to fight their way over the wall, and then… it was over. And with it, the South’s hope for having its way — although the South being the South, that wouldn’t be fully acknowledged for almost two years.
And it happened 150 years ago today.
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It was a brutal, horrifying event. Thank God the South lost.
But EVERY Southern boy? Really? Even the black ones? I don’t think so, Faulkner. I never could stand him. In school it was like you were required to like him just because he’s Southern.
It’s because he’s one of the greatest writers America has ever produced.
If you want to read a work that tackles the way the South regards race, read Absalom, Absalom! It’s an amazing work of fiction that captures the pathology of the South. He doesn’t romanticize the South (it’s not “moonlight and magnolias”). It’s harsh. Truth usually is.
It’s not easy reading, but it’s worth it. I need to go back and re-read it, again.
To Faulkner’s audience, Southern boys were white.
And there’s a certain logic to that. Black people were not the Southerners, they were the unfortunate people dragged here against their will by Southerners.
In the end, though, that doesn’t hold up. So much of what we regard as Southern culture is not European, but came here from West Africa. So yes, black 14-year-old boys who grow up here are as Southern as white 14-year-old boys. But I sort of understand what Faulkner meant.
In any case, it’s magnificent writing. It’s the sort of thing that intimidates me away from writing fiction, because I don’t think I could ever match that. I’m not a Faulkner fan, but that’s a magnificent passage.
I like things like that that take dry history and not only make it real in a naturalistic sense — so you feel the heat and the sweat and you practically squint in the brilliance of the sun — but show how it is alive in our hearts today, relevant and true.
I have trouble accurately describing what something felt like last week, much less what something that happened before I was born was like. Patrick O’Brian does this thing better than anyone, and it leaves me in awe.
But what if Bob Hughes had turned that into a development, with streets, etc., paid for by the city…..
A very good question, KF.
I got plenty more where that came from…..
Come, now. Bull Street hardly compares, for historical value, to Gettysburg. No doubt much noble work went on there, and great suffering as well.
But no one ever felt moved to say this of it:
Gettysburg is one of history’s great pivot points, a place where the destiny of a nation — this nation — was determined. And where the promises of the Declaration became something that could be real for all of our people. There’s no other place quite like it. Independence Hall is a big deal, of course, but it was a lot easier for Jefferson to write fine words in Philadelphia than it was for the words to be realized.
It is what we have, and it will be generic crap unless we preserve the core asylum village. The fact that no one wrote some highfalutin prose about it doesn’t change its importance. So much good went on behind those walls, but few saw it.
April 19, 1775. That’s the other.
Totally different. Completely American.
It is the crushing loss of life after life that made Gettysburg the turning point of the Civil War. Even today, driving up and down the country one can see how very different the North and South were then, in terms of economics and of population. The things that have hurt the South didn’t simply arise out of slavery. That had a huge influence of course. But it was the stubborn adherence to what had been that is the thing that the South still grapples with even today. Faulkner is a recorder of this trait. The southern soul is a unique beast. The South repeats…
May we have many more Fourth of July’s; but none like 1863 must have felt.
Absolutely, Mark.
The thing that struck me, more than anything else, on my frequent visits to rural Pennsylvania in recent years is just how much more affluent the countryside looked. All these farmhouses that dated from well before the War, still standing and looking great. Nobody lived in houses like that down here, except maybe in Charleston or some other commercial center.
I was riding on some roads in the Pee Dee recently — roads I’d either never been on, or hadn’t been on in a long time — and I was struck again at how little we have to show in the countryside even today.
And today, the same self-destructive political impulses cause us to continue to refuse to build a society in which everyone can thrive. It’s really, really perverse.
We move slowly to buttress ourselves against the fast moving world around us. Death and change (and bill collectors) are standing across the road impatiently tapping their feet and we move slowly hoping to stall them.
The wood rots in the rain and burns in the dry. The grass and the vines spring up faster than we can repair our lawnmowers or buy a gallon on Thompson’s Water Seal and they tear our foundations apart. We’ve come to accept this.
Rejoice in the rain so we may drink in the Winter. Rejoice in the vines so they might give us shade in the Summer. Eat, drink and be merry for tonight after News@11 we may die, .
You’re pulling my leg.
Work is the best hobby.
I noticed the same thing on a recent trip to Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. Even rural Canada looks more prosperous.
But Mark, I have to differ about April 19, 1775. That wasn’t like Gettysburg. Gettysburg was the climax of our deadliest war.
Lexington and Concord were more like — well, like firing on Fort Sumter, in a way.
I’ve always felt uncomfortable admitting this, but I have trouble being proud of what the minutemen did. And y’all know I’m the flag-waving type. Doug challenged me the other day, asking if there was ANYTHING that we’ve done in the fight against terrorism that bothers me (since the NSA surveillance programs certainly DON’T bother me). I answered yes — torture.
And when I look back on our history, one of the moments that bothers me the most was when the minutemen shot at redcoats who just happened to be the duly appointed representatives of law, going about their duty.
I’m quite proud of the Declaration of Independence and I have no problem with the fighting that went on AFTER we had separated ourselves from Britain. But April 1775 bothers me. So… we’re shooting at soldiers doing their duty because… we’re ticked off about TAXES? Really? Oh, and because we don’t like gun control laws?
People glorify it, but it’s never seemed to me like our finest moment.
I just went and read a detailed account of what happened — the differing accounts of what happened — at Lexington, and it seems to have been a classic case of the fog of war. No one even knows who shot first.
It wasn’t the cliche of our guys hiding behind trees picking off redcoats in the open. And of course the Americans were seriously outnumbered and at a disadvantage against the toughest army in the world.
But even if it was just a case of SNAFU, it’s still not one of our more glorious moments.
There were hundreds more Americans than British troops around Concord.
The thing is, at some point words shift to violence in revolutions. It isn’t ever clear what will happen; and then suddenly it is.
Yes, there are many similarities for the action at Lexington and Concord with the firing on Fort Sumter. However, history demonstrates the difference. It wasn’t just about winning – it was also about the greater cause. To me it sounded as though you are trying to gloss the difference. One was about freedom of self-determination; the other about slavery. Sometimes, it all just comes down to morality; 1860-61 was not about morality, 1775-76 was.
And anyone who says the Civil War wasn’t about slavery has never actually read South Carolina’s Ordnance of Secession, nor the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, which was issued four days after the Ordnance.
Mark, my point in saying Lexington and Concord were more like Fort Sumter is that they were “first shots,” rather than climatic, strategically decisive battles like Gettysburg.
The south repeats because they eat so many beans, peas and collards….
I had the same reaction looking down from the German defensive positions at Nijmegan Bridge. It was a shooting gallery.
Hats off this day to my ancestor Lafayette Burlingame of Massachusetts, who perished at Gettysburg fighting for the Union.
What a great name.
To the best of my knowledge, 6 of my 8 great-great-grandfathers served in the war, all for the South. All for South Carolina, I believe.
I only know about one who actually died in the war. His name was Henry Waller. He died of disease, like so many, at Petersburg.
Here’s the story I’ve heard about him: On the long march north, he went AWOL, so he could run home to the farm in Marion County and see his wife and family. Then he rejoined his unit. Nine months later, my great-grandmother was born. She would live to see me; she died when I was 4.
So, I owe my existence to the lack of discipline in a Confederate soldier…
… and my great-grandmother owed the fact that she never knew her father to his honor in returning to his unit…
I owe my existence to the fact that one of my great-great grandfathers deserted from the Confederate army when he saw that the war was hopeless. But there were several others who held on to the bitter end.
My great uncle fought for Kaiser Wilhelm….
No, he didn’t. Not really. If he fought, he fought for the guys next to him. That’s what all soldiers do.
BTW, the online Soldiers and Sailors Database, run by the Park Service, is a good entree into finding out about your Civil War ancestors.
Thanks for the information. Several years ago, my mother’s family had a ceremony when the remains of a family member who fought in the Civil War and was taken captive and sent to a prison camp in New York was brought home and interred in the family cemetary at the church the family founded. He died as a result of harsh treatment, malnutrition, and dysentery based on the records the family historian was able to find. Maybe the infamous Southern prison camps were not the only ones that mistreated prisoners.
Life, generally, was harsh in the nineteenth century – and earlier. We have lost our connection in a way with how the world was, post WWII in America.
All prisoners, wrongly, were mistreated in prison camps in the Civil War. But the difference between those conditions and our present lives and those conditions and the pre-capture lives of the soldiers themselves are absolutely non-comparable. Instead of condemning the past, we should give thanks for the present – as imperfect as it is to us.
George Will had a good column on the same subject. Worth the read and his take on it.