Ralph Peters. Judgment at Appomattox. Forge, 2017.
Shelby Foote apparently started a trend. Jeff and Michael Shaara may be the best known, but Ralph Peters has written a number of novels of the Civil War. Like Foote and the Shaaras, he invents a few enlisted characters, but all the officers and events are historical. There is more dialogue than Foote because Foote only quoted things the high ranking officers actually said or wrote. In Judgment at Appomattox, the dialogue keeps the story moving.
Like the Shaaras’ works, we get a sense of what many of the characters say as well as think. This is risky. For example, and this is unusual, while I liked The Killer Angels, I liked the film Gettysburg better. The film just had dialogue. The Killer Angels tried to guess what people were thinking, and I felt that Michael Shaara’s interpretation of Robert E. Lee’s religious beliefs were just a bit too unorthodox for almost anyone from the time period who was not a Unitarian.
In some ways, Judgment at Appomattox was a more literary repeat of April 1865, which also the details the fighting from Petersburg, Virginia, till Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Of course, April 1865 is nonfiction, but both books do tell pretty much the same story with Peters providing much more embellishment.
Besides a few fictional characters like a Louisiana private named Riordan, readers observe a number of the main figures in the last two weeks of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. We see John B. Gordon, Longstreet, Pickett, Lee, his nephew Fitzhugh Lee and son Custis Lee among others. From the Union we see Grant, Sheridan, Meade, Barlow, Warren, and the Custer brothers (Tom and George A.).
We are reminded that George Armstrong Custer, after a few early mistakes, became a very adept fighter. If Peters presents a negative personality, it is Sheridan. He comes across as unlikeable, though having military savvy. Lee comes across as extremely stoical, not wanting anyone, even his son, to really know how he feels or what he thinks. Fitzhugh Lee and Pickett become poster boys for bad judgment by leaving the field for an afternoon to attend a shad bake while there is fighting going on and many of their men are starving.
Indeed, a recurring theme and image is simply that the Confederacy was running out of supplies. When a supply train on the only remaining tracks shows up at Appomattox Station, Sheridan and Custer captured the bulk of it. Unlike other retellings of Civil War battles, this is much more earthy in its description of hunger and digestive problems and the recollections that some of the men have of their wives.
The “creative nonfiction” approach works well, though. We get a sense of the action and certainly the way things appeared or might have appeared. Lincoln makes a cameo appearance as he visits the James River at the beginning of the attack on Petersburg and then goes to Richmond after it falls. Perhaps Peters’ most profound observation comes from a fictional rumination of Lincoln where we are reminded that Lincoln himself originally came from Kentucky, but from a poor family:
Pride, though, Pride, not slavery had led a haughty South to clamor for war. That was what men did not understand. The struggle had not been about black bondage, not at the start. Arguments over slavery served as the trigger, and the abolitionists had done their share to provoke friend and foe alike, but it was the pride of the South, not the Negro question, that stirred millions to violence. The war had sprouted from the planter class, whose members believed they were not only better than the Negro, but better than other whites, especially Northern “shopkeepers.” They had imported notions of aristocracy, of honor worn on the sleeve, better left behind. They valued indolence above honest work, wealth above rectitude, position above justice, and the horsewhip above the apology. The war had been made by “gentlemen” who had never chopped their own wood. (244)
Anyone who has read the Mary Chesnut diary could understand the class distinctions the Southern “aristocracy” believed in.
Just the past week, an article in The Wall Street Journal told us that it is much harder for middle class high schoolers to get admitted to elite colleges than either upper or lower class students. When I attended Harvard in the seventies, the most withering insult was to accuse someone of being bourgeois. It was worse than an insult about the ancestry of one’s mother. Back then it was simple: The upper class looked down on the middle class, and the radicals affirmed Marx’s critique of the bourgeoisie—and those two groups set the tone at Harvard back then. I guess they still do. The Journal article says that at places such as Harvard nowadays “The middle class tends to get a little bit neglected.” Back then it was just an insult one could shrug off. Now it looks like policy. Elitism seems to be dividing our country once more.
Lest the novel only blame the South, a Union soldier would complain to General Humphreys: “This was an unnecessary war. It wasn’t caused, it was manufactured. By loud mouths and traitors…How many of them came near a battlefield? Anybody see Greeley lead a charge?” (422) The North had its share of agitators, too.
We are reminded numerous times that many of the leading officers knew each other. Often they were friends before the war. Longstreet was Grant’s best man and probably knew Grant personally as well as anyone other than Grant’s wife, Julia. Peters had Longstreet meditate on his old friend:
Hadn’t they misread Grant, though? Longstreet had tried, within the conventions of Southern overconfidence, to warn his fellow generals not to dismiss Sam Grant. Yet even he, perhaps Grant’s closest friend in better days, had not foreseen the heights to which happenstance and a steady, bulldog genius would lift Sam. All he had known for certain was that no man possessed more exasperating integrity or greater reserves of stoicism—not even Robert E. Lee…he knew Grant well enough to understand that his pride hinged not on worldly success, but on a stubborn view of right and wrong. Ulysses S. Grant had been the least ambitious man Longstreet had ever encountered. Now he led vast armies subduing a continent. (275-276)
Yes, wars involve people. And Peters would have us see that these are interesting people. Some are crass, some downright evil, many under great pressure, lovers and haters, victims and oppressors, but in many ways no different from the rest of us—just caught up in circumstances that we still remember and analyze a century and a half later.