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truepenny
The Siege of Charleston, 1861-1865 by E. Milby BurtonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
So, yes, this book has the flaws you would expect from a history of the siege of Charleston originally published in 1970. He goes on about "honor" and "gallantry" and the magnificent spirit of Southern women and evinces no real recognition of Black people as having subject positions of their own.* Also, the writing lacks something which we might possibly call panache. It's clear and easy to follow (99% of the time), but there's no life in it.
On the other hand, if you ever want to write a story set during the siege of Charleston (I don't think I do, but you never know), E. Milby Burton is the guy who has figured out who were the officers, both Union and Confederate, involved in every piece of the siege (not, of course, the enlisted men). So if it's a matter of who was where when or what happened to a particular general, he's great.
Also, he told me about the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley, by which I was of course fascinated in the uneasy way I am always fascinated by submarines and submarine disasters. The career of the H. L. Hunley did not make me less uneasy.
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*Burton is not entirely wrong about the gallantry. There WAS distinct camaraderie between Union and Confederate soldiers. This WAS a war in which officers on both sides were expected to behave like gentlemen. And I don't want to sound like I don't know that the North was racist; many men were willing to fight to preserve the Union while being actively hostile to Black people. What I object to---well, one of the many things I object to---is the myth of Southern superiority. Southern women are more womanly and more spirited, Southern officers are more gallant (I hate the word "gallant"), the South is somehow the injured party in the Civil War---this being a pose Southern politicians had been perfecting for thirty years. I think this myth, like its concomitant myths of white superiority and the Lost Cause and so on and so forth, has done and is still doing tremendous amounts of damage.
So I believe that most white Southerners believed their own rhetoric implicitly; they weren't conscious hypocrites (well, at least, most of them). I just don't think we should talk about them without pointing out that their refined, civilized, GALLANT way of life was predicated on chattel slavery, and that that needs to be unpacked with a recognition of the equal humanity of the enslaved people.
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