treason

Review: Civil War Shock & Awe

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★★★★★

Erik Larson is one of our country’s best writers in any genre and one of the few popular historians I regularly re-read.

Whether writing about a historic hurricane in early 19oo’s Galveston or Nazi Berlin in the 1930s, his books are thrilling, evocative, beautifully written, and totally immersive. His level of detail is never excessive but always well-balanced. Every book is a fantastic voyage and his subjects are chosen, he says, for their suspense and a clear beginning, middle, and end. They’re true page turners and you often feel you’ve been transported into the scenes he is sharing.

Larson’s story of the siege of Fort Sumter and the dithering in Washington D.C. about its fate as secession spread through the South is an amazing tale of courage, cowardice, treachery, stupidity, loyalty, lies and propaganda–in sum, a sadly American story.

Relying on contemporary letters, diaries, government reports, speeches, and newspaper stories and editorials, Larson makes you feel like you are in the midst of the rising turmoil in which both sides seem to overestimate their own chances for success.  You come to know President-elect Lincoln and women like the indefatigable diarist Mary Chestnut in new and illuminating ways.  They’re surrounded by myriad schemers, wastrels, fools, incompetents, liars, traitors and cowards–with rare men or women of sense making an appearance anywhere.

And the thread all the way through is the Southern culture of honor and shame. Because so many Northerners believed that slavery was evil and shameful, Southern planters and their kith and kin were humiliated by those feelings, terrified of losing the lifestyle and economy that would collapse without slave labor.  The hysteria in places like Charleston was a heavy miasma, likewise the savage hatred of Yankees.

Larson’s explanation of the weaponry aimed at Fort Sumter and the fortress itself is anything but dry.  You will feel yourself in the thick of the battle. Even more fascinating is his portrait of paranoid, cloistered, provincial South Carolina’s elite who thought of themselves as “the chivalry.”  They believed in fighting duels and quoting poems and novels by Sir Walter Scott as if they were living in another time.  And they were: the rest of the country was expanding railroads and telegraph service while they resisted because such changes could supposedly lead to unrest: slave rebellions.

The book is filled with shocking details like a 9:00 curfew bell ringing in Charleston to make sure that all Black men and women, whether free or slaves, got off the streets and went to their homes wherever they might be. Chivalry, of course, only covered rich white people who lived a life of endless, mindless calling upon another, teas and dinners and horse racing–and politics.  The up side of this was the attack on Fort Sumter which is the main story line: southerners actually at times cheered the bravery of the fort’s commander and his men.

It’s impossible to read this thrilling book that describes such myopic, arrogant, and bigoted participants in the national drama and not think about today’s current cultural and political madness.

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press and  three different public radio stations in Michigan.

Tudor Thrills & Chills

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Vanessa Wilkie’s book focuses on a powerful woman and her dynasty, a woman who should be much better known.  This is a compelling story of upward mobility as Alice Spencer, the daughter of a wealthy sheep farmer, rose to wealth and status through two important marriages, married her daughters off extremely well, and worked hard to maintain all the right connections.

Status anxiety was rampant in this period and the author clearly lays out the importance of finding the right patron and keeping him happy, of marrying well, of expanding one’s holdings of land, and doing everything possible to rise higher.  There was always the possibility of the Wheel of Fortune dropping you to the bottom in an instant.  Doom could be quick and sudden and your head could end up on a pole.

There are times when the book reads like a thriller, as when Alice’s husband, the Earl of Derby, is approached by Catholic plotters who want him to depose Elizabeth and restore Catholicism in England.  They pick him because he’s a descendant of Henry VIII’s sister and might be a Catholic despite publicly adhering to the Protestant faith.  He alerts authorities that he plans to lead them to London where they should be arrested as traitors.  The ride south takes several several days.

Given legitimate paranoia about attempts to overthrow the Queen, there was the chance that he himself could be arrested, tortured, and executed on suspicion of treason, leaving his wife ruined and persona non grata.  It’s a harrowing episode in a generally well-wrought story of power and privilege. 

In some ways, the Tudor period in which Alice began to rise feels very close to ours: she needed good publicity as she made her way into the upper realms of Tudor society and did everything possible to enhance the position of her three daughters.  Alice, a book lover, was the recipient of fulsome praise via author’s dedications and thereby “gained social capital for being celebrated as [a patron] of the arts and religious works.”  No less a poet than The Faerie Queene’s Edmund Spenser  praised her in some really wretched verse that seems to have helped boost her reputation.  

The prose in this book often undermines the strength of the narrative because it’s filled with words like “probably,” “likely,” “would have,” “could have, “maybe,” “surely,” “may have been,” and “very likely.”

The author does offer up some fascinating material, like the fact that there were actually two forms of secular court at the time whose jurisdiction overlapped:  the common-law courts and so-called equitable courts that dealt with exceptions demanding demanded special attention.  This comes up in the context of a nasty lawsuit brought by Alice’s brother-in law that lasted for well over a decade.  And then there’s a bizarre, horrendous sex scandal worthy of the Marquis de Sade involving one noble daughter and granddaughter.  It’s so freakish, it could truly have been the focus of a separate book.

Alice Spenser was a strong, determined woman who actively built and fostered “a political and social network” while creating “a persona of grandeur” and amassing “landed wealth and power.”  Wilkie doesn’t downplay her faults–like being overly litigious and caring so very much about propriety–but deftly situates her in the complex, murky terrain of upper-crust Tudor and Stuart England.

Lev Raphael recently reviewed a dual biography of Queen Elizabeth I and Marie de Medici: Blood, Fire, and Gold.