John Brown Gordon and the Self-Immolation of Lee’s Shattered Corps
Doing some work on an Overland Campaign project this past weekend, I was once again reminded why I find John Brown Gordon’s memoirs so entertaining. His writing style is so over the top, nearly breathless in its sweeping delivery, that I can’t help but chuckle. “Hyperbole” doesn’t seem big enough to do it justice. Kris White and I always joke that Gordon is always about to not only sweep the Yankees from the field but then capture Washington, defeat Hitler’s panzer divisions, and take Moscow in the winter.
Here’s the passage that caught my eye this time:
Fragments of broken iron are welded closest and strongest in the hottest fires. So the shattered corps of Lee’s army seemed to be welded together by Grant’s hammering—by the blood and the sweat and the fury of the flames that swept over and around them. In the tangled jungles of the Wilderness; through the incessant uproar by day and night at Spottsylvania; on the reddened banks of the North Anna; amidst the sickening slaughter of Cold Harbor,—everywhere, and on every field where the American armies met in deadly grapple, whether behind breastworks or in the open, whether assaulting or repelling, whether broken by the resistless impact or beating back with clubbed muskets the headlong charges of Grant,—these worn and battered soldiers of Lee seemed determined to compensate him for his paucity of numbers by a self-immolation and a steadfast valor never surpassed, if ever equalled.
————-
John Brown Gordon, Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 293.
Since I have read John Brown Gordon’s writings, I was surprised how critical he is of Ewell and Early. This includes both Gettysburg and The Wilderness.
JB Gordon didn’t do much at Gettysburg himself, but after the war he jumped on the bandwagon and also fanged ole Pete Longstreet.
His called Ewell a close friend, but he was critical of him in his writings. The animosity with Early dates back at least to the second day of the battle of the Wilderness, where Early overruled him on a May 6 flank attack, and only Lee’s intervention allowed it to go forward. And then there was the infamous “pause” at Cedar Creek….
Wow!!! ?
Laugh at myself ?…not sure where the “?” came from…but I want to read over the top writing!!
Didnt he win the Joshua Chamberlain “My Years Winning the Civil War, Reconstruction and the Statehouse of Maine in 400 Florid Phrases or More” Award?
Sigh…
I don’t know what it is. It MUST be the immensity of the emotion that tries to make sense of the sheer unscaled amount of Death and Suffering that war inflicts olio in normal people. Heaping the emotion out and onto the memory of events is a coping mechanism.
You can see it here in Gordon’s work. I’ve read it in the New Guard’s holdings in the Mitchell Library in Sydney when these ex-A.I.F. write of the ‘meaning’ of Gallipoli and the Western Front, (‘an event, which at the price of rivers of blood had made us a nation’), in the Francis De Groot papers.
I’ve seen it when Eamon De Valera and Dan Breen spoke of the Anglo-Irish War and Irish Civil War. The need to make the past ‘absolutely’ fit their emotional depiction.
When the former Highlanders and Bonnie Prince Charlie would lament of Culloden…
The plain facts are validated by themselves.
What legitimates the emotional outlay is if the historical agents have at least tried to step back at some point and reckon with what’s happened in rational manner, as Matt Atkinson said in his own words.
And just because I saw it re-read it recently, ‘Dark Emu’ by Bruce Pascoe is a good example of that as well.
Mid to late Victorian writing is florid by the standards of just fifty years later. It’s hard to imagine writing about WWII like this, more “names of certain towns and numbers of hills” In “The Great War and Modern Memory” Paul Fussell describes the common phrases of the time, and how inadequate they became.
The era you cite certainly did have that tendency, but that’s why I included ‘Dark Emu’.
It uses hagiographic depictive writing about pre and early Contact between Aboriginal Australians/Torres Strait Islanders and Europeans, when it should write more simply to accurately describe this historical timeline as what it was: Life.
It won various literary prizes about 2015 or so (give or take).
‘It has been a while since I have seen “florid” used … reading the old general’s tome I immediately thought of “flowery” … “florid” is far better, more manly.
Equally entertaining are the after action reports, memoirs, etc. of Ulysses Grant, William T. Sherman and Philip Sheridan. A more scurrilous collection of liars, thieves and sociopaths were never given vast military power like they got until the Nazis of World War II, and they got caught with their pants down and soundly whipped time and again…but to read their magnificent lies you’d think the Confederates were cowering and surrendering at their very names without firing a shot. So the victors write the history – like Grant’s Overland Campaign, in which he lost every battle though he had 564,000 men at his disposal against Lee’s 60,000 – but thank goodness real historians eventually unearth the buried facts.
Getting a bit florid yourself there.
there it is again … “florid” used twice in one day … well done!!!
That’s a pretty gross misrepresentation of the tactical situation in the Overland Campaign, Eric. I do agree that sometimes the northern memoirists were selective in what they wrote about–as were southern memoirists–and Sherman was an especially unreliable narrator. But to compare them to Nazis when, in fact, the South was CLEARLY the side engaged in race-based cruelty, is ridiculous and, frankly, disingenuous on your part.
I want to find a way to use “florid” in a sentence for Mark’s sake, but I’ll have to just refer to it instead of use it.
I agree in huge manner, Chris.
While both the Union and Confederacy engaged in indisputable, race-based etc, oppression as nation-states, both to their credit demonstrated a willingness to reform.
While fully conceding a measure of fair and balanced criticism can indeed be objectively put to both for their initial stances, to compare either to the Holocaust engaged by the 3rd Reich is historically indefensible and needs no further explanation.
Was cruelty engaged in on by both sides? Absolutely.
Nothing objectively discernible of the conduct of either warrants allusion to the Nazis.
The most frustrating thing is Gordon seems to be our only source for the planning of Fort Stedman and his memoirs are just not terribly reliable although certainly never dull.
Chris:
Very nice response to Mr. Schafer.
Hmmm, I wonder if he referring to the same Robt. E. Lee responsible for Malvern Hill & Pickett’s charge?
Perhaps he is unaware of Grant’s Vicksburg campaign. Or Ft. Donelson
I saw/heard General Petraeus at a seminar recently; when asked in the Q&A for his opinion about the best General in US history; he remarked that from a strategic-capability standpoint; U. S. Grant hands down.
Appears Mr. Schafer may still be upset that his “team” lost; some 160 years later.
I’ll just say it here: Florid.