A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation by John Matteson

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation by John Matteson Kathleen Logothetis Thompson A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation. John Matteson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021. ISBN: 978-0-393-24707-7. 528 pp., cloth, $35.00. When first reading the title of this work, I expected a new critical analysis and military history of the Battle of Fredericksburg and its effects on the war's military and political trajectory. What awaited me within the pages of John Matteson's book was an example of deft storytelling that draws readers into the very complex and human story of the Civil War. In A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation, Matteson weaves together the lives of five people to tell the story of Fredericksburg and the Civil War as a whole. First was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., born to a prominent family, who served as a captain in the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, was wounded several times and survived the war. He later served on the US Supreme Court, forever changed by his wartime experiences. Second was John Pelham, on the verge of graduating from West Point when called home to fight for the Confederacy. Pelham rose to fame skillfully commanding J. E. B. Stuart's Horse Artillery and died a Southern martyr at Kelly's Ford in March 1863. Third was Reverend Arthur B. Fuller, [End Page 215] who had faced constant tragedy in the years before the Civil War and longed to do something significant for his nation. Fuller went to war as a chaplain in the Sixteenth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry and struggled with the physical toll campaigning took on his health. He poured his enthusiasm into the spiritual health of his soldiers, until he picked up a gun at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Fourth was Louisa May Alcott, known for her literary work before and after the war but decidedly affected physically and emotionally by her work in a Union hospital in the months surrounding Fredericksburg in the winter of 1862–63. Finally was Walt Whitman, a poet who struggled with his reputation prior to the war and whose rise to fame was built off his experiences in the Civil War. Using the stories of these five individuals and the people immediately connected to them, Matteson leads the reader through Antietam, Fredericksburg, and the aftermath of the two campaigns of late 1862. The military history of both battles, as well as others, such as Ball's Bluff and Kelly's Ford, is present, and the reader will certainly understand the broad synopsis of each engagement. However, by focusing on the story of five military and civilian figures, Matteson brings the reader from the battlefield to the aftermath. In viewing family members' efforts to find their wounded or captured soldiers, he illuminates how the events on the field of battle rippled out into the civilian communities of the North. As he introduces each of the five subjects, he analyzes the individual motivations for entering service or the world of the war. Using Whitman and Alcott's nursing work in various Union hospitals, the reader views not only the action of the field but the aftermath and its toll on the bodies and minds of both soldiers and nurses. Matteson's continuation of the story into the postwar years allows the reader to see how war experiences affected Whitman, Alcott, and Holmes and directed their very public work in their later lives. At first, the title of this work seemed misleading; it was not the targeted analysis of Fredericksburg and its consequences that I had expected. However, as the book reached its conclusion it was clear that Matteson had demonstrated how the campaigns of 1862 had changed the nation. By weaving the lives of five main subjects together, all meeting in some way at Fredericksburg, and demonstrating how the experiences affected these individual people, Matteson illustrates how the Civil War shaped the very people of the United States, deeply and profoundly. The war altered not just the path of the military campaigns...