Review: Cowley (ed.), With My Face to the Enemy (2001)

With My Face to the Enemy: Perspectives on the Civil War by Robert Cowley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Anthology of essays about the American Civil War from MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. As is to be expected, they vary in quality, but the good ones---like James M. McPherson's essay about Grant---are very good.

(I think the editor is wrong to call Raphael Semmes, the captain of the CSS Alabama, a "genuine American hero" (429), first because Semmes was a traitor---I know the Confederates had many arguments to prove that they weren't traitors, and I don't buy any of them, especially not for men who were in the US armed services before secession---and second because, while he achieved amazing things, he achieved them in support of the Confederacy and therefore in support of chattel slavery. I ask myself whether, say, Frederick Douglass would have called Semmes a "genuine American hero," and the answer is a resounding no. I think in talking about the Civil War it's important not to keep erasing the subject position of Black people, and one of the things that means is that your definition of "American" can't have a hidden (white) in front of it. I feel the same way about the essay on Sheridan and its enthusiasm for his victories against the Native American tribes he persecuted. I digress, but it's, unfortunately, the thing about the book that is staying with me most vividly.)

Overall, none of the less good essays were terrible, and the good ones made the book worth reading.

Three and a half stars, round up to four.




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Review: Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995)

The Rise of the Gothic Novel by Maggie Kilgour

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Literary criticism, focused carefully on the Gothic from Caleb Williams to Frankenstein. Kilgour is interested in the way the books are talking to each other, particularly, in one strand, The Monk to The Mysteries of Udolpho, and then---Radcliffe's rebuttal---The Italian to The Monk. In the other strand she's interested in how Frankenstein reflects both on Godwin's Gothics and on Maria, the Gothic that Mary Wollstonecraft left unfinished at her death, and how those influences are tangled up in the biographical elements and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's experiences as the daughter of a famous philosopher (i.e., Godwin) and the wife of a famous poet. And in all of it, Kilgour is interested in the philosophical underpinnings of the Gothic, from Burke to Godwin to Rousseau. Her organizing idea is that the Gothic genre is always talking about itself---this is clearest in Frankenstein, where the monster as the (hideous) child of Frankenstein is directly parallel to the novel as the (hideous?) child of MWS.

This is densely written, but not theory-heavy---unless you count the theories of the philosophers she's interested in. The next time I teach Frankenstein, I may have my students read her chapter on it, because her reading certainly helped me structure my thinking about the novel.




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Review: Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972)

The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution by Christopher Hill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Justifiably classic work on the explosion of radical sects that occurred during the English Civil War. Nowadays, we only know about the Quakers (and Hill talks about why it is that the Quakers survived), but there were Diggers and Levellers and Ranters and Grindletonians and Muggletonians... And the thing about them that Hill conveys very well is that, along with being radical religious groups, they were all Utopian experiments, trying to imagine a better system than what they had. Some of what they came up with, especially Gerrard Winstanley, sounds shockingly modern and Marxist---the abolition of private property was one a lot of them had in common, and they were trying to figure out what do you do NEXT? Unfortunately, the answer is, you get betrayed by the generals, and the power that almost shifted in your favor shifts back, and before you know it, the world turns "right side up" again and hello, Charles II.

Hill is an excellent writer, and he writes about his very dense subject matter very clearly.



Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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Review: Kamensky, Governing the Tongue (1997)

Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England by Jane Kamensky

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I wanted this book mostly because she has a long chapter on the Salem witch trials, but the whole thing was excellent. Puritans were obsessed with speech laws---who gets to say what to whom---so Kamensky has buckets of primary source material: trials for heresy, trials for witchcraft, transcripts of sermons (and their interruptions), public apologies, the ubiquitous Cotton Mather...And she uses her source material to show both how speech was SUPPOSED to work and what happened when someone like Anne Hutchinson refused to follow the rules. And this is all interesting in its own right, but it's also building to her discussion of Salem.

It's appropriate that I just finished The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, because that's what Kamensky says happened during the Salem witch trials (I think she uses the actual phrase once or twice), people---girls, goodwives, slaves---who were normally supposed to be silent (and disregarded if they did say something) were speaking AND BEING LISTENED TO, and not just by people of their own status, but by the magistrates. Men, once accused of witchcraft, were not listened to, no matter how high status they were. People who confessed were spared; people who insisted on their innocence were hanged. And even after the trials had stopped, she points out that the world stayed upside down and we get the spectacle of a minister apologizing to his congregation.

Kamensky doesn't have answers for WHY the Salem witch trials exploded the way they did, but she does a great job of analyzing HOW.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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Review: Davis, An Honorable Defeat (2001)

An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government by William C. Davis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


My primary takeaway from this book is that Jefferson Davis was a pig-headed nightmare.

This is a step-by-step recounting of the flight of the Confederate government from Richmond. William C. Davis's two principal characters are Jefferson Davis and John C. Breckinridge, whom he depicts as locked in an almost-unacknowledged struggle for how the Confederacy was going to end the war. Or, in J. Davis's case, NOT end the war. He was talking up to the moment he was captured by the Yankees about going to Texas and raising another army, and the fact that he apparently could not understand that this was impossible is actually one of the things I found most frightening about him. Against him, Breckinridge's determination to end the war and end the Confederacy in a way that provided maximum protection for both soldiers and civilians does look honorable.

I think W. C. Davis is wearing rose-colored glasses in a couple of places. He asserts that Robert E. Lee waffled about telling J. Davis that the war had to end because the "old warrior" couldn't bring himself to admit defeat, whereas I've read enough about Lee to know that he waffled because that was what Lee DID---given almost any moment at which he needed to provide a clear statement of his opinion, he equivocated and sidestepped, was vague where he needed to be specific, etc. It was the nature of the beast.

And W. C. Davis is definitely wearing rose-colored glasses in his conclusion, where he tries to argue that BOTH Breckinridge AND Davis provided good examples for the South after the Civil War. Breckinridge I'll give you---when he came back to the US after the amnesty, he stayed away from political office, he supported the enfranchisement of Black men, when he said anything it was about reconciliation. But Davis?

"If the Confederate president never accepted defeat gracefully, and even if he fell into the bitter post war squabbles that helped to make so many Southerners look foolish and spiteful, still he always rose above the mendacity and rank falsehoods to which the others repeatedly sank. If he never inspired his people with love, still by his conduct as a prisoner and for twenty years afterward, he gave an example of unbending pride and refusal either to supplicate or apologize" (397), and I'm sorry, but how is this a good thing? Also, I'm not quite sure I understand the difference between "mendacity and rank falsehoods" and what he says about J. Davis's memoirs: "What he did not wish to admit, he simply wrote out of his history. Inconvenient facts he ignored, and embarrassing incidents he expunged. His failures were really those of others; his only mistakes had been putting faith in subordinates who then let him down" (395). It seems to me like W. C. Davis is splitting hairs, just as I think he's splitting hairs when he tries to argue that J. Davis wasn't a fanatic. J. Davis's complete divorce from reality seems to me to be the essence of fanaticism.

So I think W. C. Davis needed to think through what he was saying about J. Davis a second time. I would also have liked a slightly more heads-on acknowledgement of chattel slavery as a primary cause of the Civil War---he doesn't deny it, or try to ignore it out of existence, but he doesn't address it, either. I know, it's so much easier to talk about the Confederacy if you don't, because then it DOES almost look as simple as a disagreement over the Constitution, and words like "honor" don't have such an uneasy footing, but the fact is that the liberty that white Southerners were so loud about wanting was specifically the liberty to own other people, and while I understand that most of them didn't see it that way, I also don't think it's something that we should move past. We have the example of the abolitionists to show us that it's also NOT simply a matter of imposing 21st century values on 19th century people, and as I said in some other review, I think about Frederick Douglass and what HE would say. And that tends to cut through the rhetoric pretty quickly.



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