A Confederate Chronicle: The Life of a Civil War Survivor, and: Hell's Broke Loose in Georgia: Survival in a Civil War Regiment (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Confederate Chronicle: The Life of a Civil War Survivor, and: Hell’s Broke Loose in Georgia: Survival in a Civil War Regiment Brian Craig Miller A Confederate Chronicle: The Life of a Civil War Survivor. By Pamela Chase Hain. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005. Pp. 273. Cloth, $39.95.) Hell’s Broke Loose in Georgia: Survival in a Civil War Regiment. By Scott Walker. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Pp. 311. Cloth, $39.95.) Throughout the course of the last decade, historians have produced a plethora of published collections of letters and diaries from soldiers and civilians who lived through the experience of the American Civil War. Both Pamela Hain and Scott Walker place a rich body of primary sources into a narrative in order to shed light on their respective subject's experience during the war. Pamela Hain's compelling narrative examines the life of Thomas Lowndes Wragg, a son of privilege who joined the 8th Georgia Volunteers in the late spring of 1861. Hain weaves Wragg's letters into a cultural narrative, examining everything from the battlefield and camp conditions of the war to the experience onboard naval ships and within the walls of a prison. After a year of serving with the infantry, Thomas Wragg joined the Confederate Navy in December 1862, where he served on both the CSS Georgia and the CSS Atlanta. Hain includes Wragg's naval notebook, which provides a wealth of specific details on how a gunboat operated. On June 17, 1863, during the maiden voyage of the Atlanta, the ship failed to escape from a Union gunboat. During his subsequent imprisonment, Wragg continued to write to his father and expressed his feelings of abandonment. Following his prison ordeal, Master Wragg was paroled and exchanged and served the final years of the war onboard the CSS Fredericksburg and the CSS Richmond. When Petersburg [End Page 323] fell in April 1865, Wragg to set off on foot to North Carolina with Admiral Raphael Semmes's artillery unit and eventually returned to Georgia. Upon his return home, Wragg spent a limited amount of time in Savannah before moving to Thomasville, Georgia, where he met his future wife. Hain includes the correspondence between the two and also several of Wragg's poems in an appendix. Following his marriage in 1868, Wragg worked as a bookkeeper, a railroad conductor, a farmer, and a store owner, and he eventually studied medicine and moved to Florida with his wife and children. However, Wragg's life came to a tragic end on April 10, 1889, when he was shot three times in broad daylight on the streets of Quincy, Florida. Wragg's assailant, Charles DuPont, shot the doctor because he believed him to be the father of his sister's child, who had been born out of wedlock a few years earlier. Hain reveals that the actual father, as well as the DuPont family, had enough political clout in the community to prevent Mrs. Wragg from ever bringing her husband's killer to justice. Hain ultimately provides enough rich detail to show that Wragg's experience in battle, in prison, on a ship, and in dealing with the aftermath of war represents that of many who shared the incommunicable experience of war. Scott Walker's Hell's Broke Loose in Georgia examines not one individual, but a whole regiment, the 57th Georgia, and traces its experience throughout the war in the West by making use of a rich body of letters and diary entries. Throughout the narrative, Walker examines camp life, the bonds between soldiers, the physical and emotional strain of the war on both the soldiers and their families, and how the actions of the 57th Georgia fit into the larger military narrative of the war. Walker's book is strongest when he utilizes the letters and diary entries of the 57th to paint a rich portrait of the horrific experience that soldiers, as well as their families, faced on a daily basis. Walker admits in his introduction, however, that his work is a "narrative history," which allowed him to "describe thoughts or emotions" that the soldier "probably had but are not made explicit...