There is an inclination to think of American frontiersmen in near mythic terms. They’re independent, fearless, dress from a coonskin capped head to moccasined toe in animal skins and spend their lives in a constant state of hand-to-hand combat with some group of Native Americans. Robert Morgan dispels many of those stereotypes in his “Boone, A Biography” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007).

The first sentence in Morgan’s introduction informs us that no raccoon gave up his life for Boone’s chapeau, and then with an easy narrative Morgan shaves away other preconceptions that come naturally to a society whose impressions of the Long Hunter are gleaned from 20th Century entertainment. Morgan says, for example, that Boone admitted killing only one lone Indian in his long life, a far cry from the number Fess Parker dispatched on a weekly basis on his 1960s television series.

Boone had a much more complex personality and life than might be expected. While his formal education was limited, indications are that he spoke well. Growing up in an era were reading and writing were not complementary educational practices, Boone was an avid reader but a random speller. He was the enthusiastic hunter that one might expect — leaving home for a period of two years at one point — but his trips were also journeys of exploration, a search for new lands that eventually led him into speculation in the era after the American Revolution. While Boone was at home in the wilderness, surviving happily and going to great lengths to avoid confrontations with the Shawnee and Cherokee, he was ham-handed in his relations in the political and commercial business spheres. The result was that despite having owned tens of thousands of acres in Kentucky, he left the state for his later years in Missouri deeply in debt.

Morgan’s description of this early American hero with a strong moral compass to match his internal compass is rich, vivid, insightful and well researched. But Morgan’s background as a poet and fiction writer lead him often to draw analogies to Whitman and Emerson when Jedediah Smith and Kit Carson seem to fit more neatly. Morgan’s inclination toward the literary yields convincing arguments that Boone’s exploits inspired the likes of James Fenimore Cooper and Lord Byron. In all, “Boone” adds an impressive depth of understanding this trailblazing guide who was a legend in his own time and beyond.

N.B. Those who appreciate this sort of adventurous narrative might also be interested in reading “Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West“ by Hampton Sides.

 
As any high school kid forced to plod through “Streetcar Named Desire” can attest, reading a play is nothing like going to one. Scripts are akin to coloring books waiting to be filled in. The reader must imagine his own sets, lights, sound, costumes, blocking, and to top it off, he then has to cast the play in his head, like a fantasy baseball team.

(Playwrights occasionally include stage directions, which usually appear italicized and in parentheses, like this, and when they aren’t plain distracting to read, they are  irritatingly bland, i.e., “There is a knock at the door”, or “The lights go down on the scene.”) 

I’d rather watch Marlon Brando howl “Stella!” than have to conceptualize it myself. That’s why I am a playgoer. I defer to the artists to do all the imagining and interpolating for me. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Civil War began so blithely and blindly on April 12, 1861, no one had any idea of the slaughter that lay ahead, that what escalated into a horrendous four-year war of attrition would turn the Eastern Seaboard into a charnal house. The statistics are still staggering. It is estimated that 620,000 soldiers died in the Civil War, more deaths than all the fatalities of the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II and the Korean War combined. Confederates, outpowered and outmanned, died at three times the rate of Yankee soldiers. The scale of the carnage, says Drew Gilpin Faust in her poignant and elegiac new book, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95), changed the way that Americans perceived the relationship between life and death, the comforts of religion, the duty of the living to the dead, the notions of nationhood and shared suffering. “Sacrifice and the state,” Faust writes, “became inextricably intertwined.”

Faust first discusses the factors that led to such wholesale slaughter. The armies were huge, especially after the North instituted the draft, and battle lines were much broader than they had ever been in the history of warfare; even experienced officers were unable to control their men once battle was engaged. Armies of hastily trained men often lacked discipline or the knowledge of fighting techniques. Advances in weaponry meant that by the final year of the Civil War the Northern forces particularly were capable of immense firepower; the American Civil War was the first war in which men could be not just wounded or killed but obliterated. Finally, the manner in which the North and the South and the armies that represented the sundered sections of the young nation regarded each other, again especially in the war’s last horrific year, contributed to an atmosphere of relentless savagery and vengeance.

Neither civilians nor the military nor the government was prepared to deal with the consequences of the death tolls that mounted week by week as the war continued. The dead often lay unburied on battlefields for months or years. Families could often get no news of their sons, brothers and husbands. The 19th century ideal of the Good Death, borne with Christian dignity, fortitude and anticipation of heavenly reward, began to dissolve as people questioned God’s purpose in the face of the magnitude of the butchery and the uncertainty of the fate of their loved ones. In her meticulous research, Faust seems to have read every available diary, every letter and contemporary newespaper article, and she notes again and again the sorrow and heartbreak of ordinary citizens searching not only for records, news and rumors, as well as for bodies that might never be found, but for meaning in a situation where old beliefs were being severely tested.

Faust chronicles how the scope of suffering and dying, the sheer weight of public and private mourning, the large numbers of bodies affected the logistics of transportation, funerals and burial. The culture of death not only permeated the language of newspaper editorials and sermons, poems and novels but warped the nature of language itself, which seemed incapable of surviving the strain of adequate description and metaphor. Immediately after the war, the federal and state governments began the arduous process of enumerating the dead, sending teams, including one led by Clara Barton, to battlefields all over the South to exhume individual and mass graves, to search forests and ravines and farms (and the infamous prison camps), in an attempt to do justice to the sacrifice of common soldiers and their officers, to make certain that their deaths became a part of the official heritage of the nation. These efforts led to the establishment of national cemetaries, those strict burying grounds that function as the nexus where individual heroism melds with collective feeling in the awesome service of democracy. 

It’s gratifying to know that Faust, the president of Harvard University, is not only a tireless reseacher but a fine writer whose fluent and fluid prose perfectly captures a dark and defining period in American history. One feels in every sentence her command and compassion.