The Continuing War

Abstract

The Continuing War EDITED BY RICHARD B. HARWELL 35 Malvern Avenue, Apt. 5 Richmond, Virginia exactly conversely to the campaigns and battles of the Civil War the books about the War slow down in frequency during the summer. The Confederate and Union armies held what novelist John Esten Cooke called "the mire truce" of winter. Their spiritual descendants, the Civil War buffs of 1956, relax the continuing literary war during the heat of summer — perhaps to read the manifold productions of the months preceding , perhaps to work out on actual fields what they have learned from books, perhaps to renew acquaintance with wives and families. But the summer is soon over, and the 1956-57 book season promises a steady stream of new items about the War. Two of the leading fall books are delayed items from the spring. Bell Wiley's fine edition of Nat Wood's Reminiscences of Big 7 is a selection of the Civil War Book Club and should be in your hands by the time this number of Civil War History reaches you. Also postponed from the spring was Bruce Catton's This Hallowed Ground. Another selection of the CWBC, this volume is eagerly awaited, the first major historical publication of Pulitzer Prize winning Catton since his wonderful trilogy of Lincoln's army. Burke Davis, like Catton a reporter turned historian, has come up with two winners in his recent one-volume biographies of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. He, again like Catton, aims at the transmission of the spirit of the war, the essence of his subject, rather than at definitive biography. He strives to produce in short compass a lively, realistic portrayal of an individual. The success of They Called Him Stonewall and The Gray Fox is measure enough of his success. Mr. Davis is now at 85 86RICHARD B. HARWELL work on a book about a third great Confederate hero — J. E. B. Stuart. There is doubtless a third winner in the making, but the author, who faced hard tasks in the wake of G. F. R. Henderson's Jackson and of D. S. Freeman's Lee, faces an even harder job here. The Henderson and Freeman books were serious, scholarly biographies. With an account of Stuart, Mr. Davis will be competing with the still in print and still popular JEB Stuart of the late John Thomason. To maintain his high average, Mr. Davis will have to develop previously unused materials to a higher degree than was necessary before. The results will be interesting — and interesting to read. Still on the Confederate side: Clifford Dowdey is finishing a novel on the James River plantation country of Virginia that will be enlightening in its background for Virginia at war. The book is the story of Berkeley Hundred from the days of its first settlement across more than two hundred years to the beginning of the Civil War. Next on Mr. Dowdey's work schedule is a minute-by-minute account of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg to be titled, appropriately enough, Pickett's Charge. Another forthcoming book which will give much of the background of the War is John Hope Franklin's The Militant South, 1800-1861 which Harvard will publish in September. And Oxford's fall lists will include a history of cotton, certainly a product directly related to the causes of the War. Rinehart will publish the major fall book on Lincoln — a new collection of comments on him by contemporaries that reflects tremendous research and promises some really new material. Bruce Lancaster and F. Van Wyck Mason, old pros among Civil War novelists, each has a new book for the fall season. Lancaster's is Roll Shenandoah, a story of the closing months of the War in the Valley of Virginia. Mason's is a third volume in his series of novels on the naval history of the War. This one, Our Valiant Few, is a story of besieged Charleston and of Confederate efforts to break the blockade. The Virginia State Library will undertake publication of the first supplement to Marjorie LyIe Crandall's monumental bibliography, Confederate Imprints. The completed publication is a long way off, but additional entries...