The Glorious Glorious Courage
Congratulations to ECW alumna Sarah Kay Bierle: her latest book, part of the Emerging Civil War Series from Savas Beatie, is now out. Glorious Courage: John Pelham in the Civil War arrived on my porch today, and wow, does it look good (and that’s a reference to the book, not to Pelham!).
Pelham, a youngartillerist from Alabama, was killed during the battle of Kelly’s Ford on March 17, 1863. During his years of Confederate service, he earned a national reputation as “the Gallant Pelham”—brave and dashing and, in the eyes of Southern belles, eligible. His death turned him into a Southern legend.
The audiobook for this title is now in production, voiced by the talented Tim Welch, and I’ve been listening this week to the audio files for approval. As a result, I’ve been immersed in “the Pelham book” for the past few days. Listening has reminded me of what a great job Sarah did on the research and writing for this project. She has pieced together a great documentary record; in the places where Pelham’s record fragmented too much, Sarah found some excellent ways to draw on other sources to fill those gaps.
Glorious Courage has been a real labor of love for Sarah (and she’ll tell us about that in a blog post of her own in the not-too-distant future). As with any good project, her attitudes about her subject evolved over time as she spent more time with him and learned new things. This book will bring a lot of new information and context to the literature.
Which is super necessary when it comes to Pelham, because he’s coated with a 163-year-old patina of Lost Cause romance, bathed in moonlight and wrapped in magnolias, topped with an eye-fluttering dose of teenage heartthrob. That has made him a challenging figure to excavate. I think readers will be pleased with the archeology Sarah has done to show us a more fully realized Pelham.
More details on the book, including the back-cover text, are available here.
Congrats, Sarah! Looking forward to reading it.
Am looking forward to this, I have recently learned I am a collateral descendant of John Pelham, which makes it even more interesting!
Or, one could say he was just a brave, young man.
I have been looking forward to this book since hearing Sarah’s presentation on Pelham at the ECW Symposium a couple of years ago (and then again at the Hampton Roads Civil War Round Table). Glad it’s out!
David Corbett gets it right – Pelham was just a brave young man. The bias against the South and its soldiers in this age of Civil War Marxist revisionism is a constant, ugly business, e.g. “Pelham…[is] coated with a 163-year-old patina of Lost Cause romance.” Many of these folks, just like the Founding Fathers and members of the Continental Army, indeed WERE highly romantic figures, and ought not constantly have their names besmirched in the cause of a bogus 21st century political ideology. Bias swings both ways, as well. These misinformed, malinformed bigots not only invented “the Lost Cause” by which to denounce the South as “White Supremacists” (note: they call EVERYONE White Supremacists, not only whites, but yellows, blacks and browns who refute them), despite the fact that only 7% of Southerners owned slaves, but they also invented “the Noble Crusade” and use it to whitewash figures of dubious integrity and achievement, such as Ulysess Grant, William Sherman, and Philip Sheridan. The smearing has to stop. It’s dishonest, it’s bigotry, and it’s anti-historical. In fact, it serves an ugly tool: Indoctrination.