When the political clearly trumps the personal: "Our Day of Grace" by Jim Shepard

About six weeks ago, I went to Antietam National Battlefield for the observation of the 157th anniversary of the terrible battle there. I've wanted to go on the anniversary for years. Antietam is one of my favorite places to be on the entire planet Earth, and the anniversary is a special day. Rangers take groups on hikes across a good chunk of the battlefield, and you get pretty good explanations of what was going on relative to the terrain you're standing on. Meanwhile, 157 years ago on that very spot, one soldier was being killed or wounded every two seconds for twelve hours straight.

At sunrise on September 17th, Antietam's lead ranger Keith Snyder led the other rangers on about a 90-minute walk/reading. The words they read were entirely written by the soldiers who fought there, often in the form of letters they wrote to their loved ones after the battle.

Anyone who has studied the American Civil War in any depth cannot help but be startled by the richness of insight, the sharpness of prose, and the vividness of imagery these soldiers wrote with. It's utterly astounding. Farmers and factory workers tossed off missives as profound as some of the finest American literature ever produced, and they did it during the moments of boredom that broke up the terrifying climaxes of the most destructive fighting the world had yet seen.

As Keith put it, there are hundreds of thousands of cornfields in America, but only one "The Cornfield." 

Shepard's epistles

Given how wonderful Civil War letters are as a literary form in their own right, Shepard's instinct to write an epistolary story in the manner of Civil War letters seems like a sure bet. And Shepard really nails the form. Had the letters in this story appeared in a book with the title "Civil War Letters" on it, I'd have simply thought these were some fairly poignant examples of the genre--although probably not the most poignant I've ever read. There's the same humor without even meaning to be funny ("Your mother says she worries about my superintendence of our home, but I know you will not find fault with it"), the same mix of the quotidian with the eternal, the sacred with the profane ("A house in town containing the bodies of smallpox victims was burned. Asa has still not gotten his duck.") There's the longing for home and the hope that all this sacrifice must be for something.

A reader cannot possibly fail to grasp, reading this story in 2019, that the writers and readers of these letters are all Southerners. It's the last week of November in 1864, right before John Bell Hood leads the last serviceable Confederate Army west of Virginia into disaster at the Battle of Nashville. Hood's entire campaign in 1864 ranks among the most ignorantly fought campaigns in history. Jefferson Davis relieved Joseph Johnston in favor of Hood for no reasons greater than Davis never liked Johnston and did not grasp how appropriate Johnston's strategy of sticking to defensive trench warfare and retreat before a larger force was the exact right strategy for the South's predicament. Hood came in with the intent to bring aggressiveness back to his army, and he did--he aggressed them right into disaster, attacking a larger, better equipped Army his troops had no hope of defeating and squandering what troops he still had left. In December of 1864, Hood's army disintegrated, many of the soldiers not stopping after their retreat until they made it home.

But none of that is known to the characters writing letters in "Our Day of Grace." The last letter is the day before the battle starts.

The personal and the political

Any college-level literature course will at some point encourage students to investigate work from the lenses of the personal and the political. These aren't exactly diametrically opposed lenses, but they do work in tension with one another. All humans are living purely private and personal lives in which they follow their own interests, and the world presents itself to them only through the aperture of their own subjective senses. At the same time, we are all living in the great flow of history, and we will all, while trying to follow our own, personal interests, also contribute in smaller or lesser degree to the wars, famines, depressions, inventions, laws, elections, and trends that change the world for everyone. No life, no matter how much one may deny the political, can ever really be apolitical, and no political event, no matter how grand, is anything more than the sum of the millions of individuals creating that political moment, many of whom created the great political event without much caring about politics.

Some of the most compelling literature interrogates this tension between the political and the personal. War and Peace is one well known example. To keep it closer to America in the mid-19th century, Dickinson and Whitman are often seen as prophets of the primacy of the individual over society (or the private over the public, to use another terminology pair often used in place of personal/political). Having just re-looked at Whitman a few months ago, I think he may have just as often been interested in merging political and personal into one as he was with putting his own self ahead of the body politic, but in any event, he certainly did not seem to think that politics came first.

Or did he?

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!

Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,

Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,

Into the school where the scholar is studying,

Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,

Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,

So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.

That was Whitman's reaction to the Civil War. Nothing you had going on in your personal life was anywhere near as important as what was going on politically, he thought. At least in this one poem, Whitman saw no conflict between public and private, because the critical public moment mattered more than the private moment anyone could be living. Shepard's Civil War tale is going to announce its stance on public/private tension with far fewer bugles and drums than Whitman did, but I think it'll be equally strong by the end. 

Lovable and frustrating correspondents

I said a reader in 2019 cannot fail to notice that the letter writers are all from the South. That's because the South has political resonance again here in 2019, thanks to the resurgence of folks suddenly loud and proud again about their Southern heritage. The letter writers in "Day of Grace" don't talk a lot about politics. They aren't very loud about their cause or their way of life. Their interests are almost entirely provincial. They are concerned for their loved ones. They think about the cold and whether their loved ones are warm. They worry about whether their loved ones have eaten--a very valid concern, as by this time, the entire Confederate pantry was close to bare. 

Just for clarity's sake, here are the letter writers in order, along with the person to whom they were writing, and when:

Letter One: William, an enlisted man in Hood's Army in Tennessee, where he is in the same unit as "CW," writes to Lucy, his sweetheart back home he hopes to marry when the war is over. November 21st.

Letter Two: Hattie, the wife of CW (whose letters William thinks are a little dull when CW reads them out loud), writing from Virginia to CW. November 21st.

Letter Three: William to Lucy again. November 23rd. 

Letter Four: Lucy to William, writing from North Carolina. November 22nd (the letters are not arriving with any reliability, so them being out of date order for us is how the characters themselves would often have to deal with them).

Letter Five: William to Lucy. November 26th.

Letter Six: Hattie to CW, November 25th.

Letter Seven: Lucy to William, November 25th.

Letter Eight: William to Lucy, November 28th

Letter Nine: Hattie to CW (distraught that she gets no letters from him; we know he is alive, because William writes about him, but CW is getting near his Apocalypse Now! moment of abandoning all civility during war, and so it's no wonder he doesn't write the missus much). November 28th.

Letter Ten: Lucy to William, November 28th.

Letter Eleven: Hattie to CW, November 30th (the day before the battle starts)

Letter Twelve: William to Lucyy, November 30th, getting ready to head off for a useless and losing battle. 

It's easy to forget about the terrible casus belli of the South and want the letter writers to find food, to find a warm place to ride out the winter. It's easy to laugh when they are being witty and to admire their fortitude under trying circumstances. It's also easy to forget there is only one mention of slavery in the entire story, and that is just an oblique complaint about Northern refusal to return escaped slaves. 

Maybe that's to be expected. Most southerners didn't own slaves, of course. In Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson traces how Southern politicians managed to convince poor southerners that slavery was in their interests, because if blacks became free, that would degrade the value of poor white labor. They also played to the white terror of black men and what they would do to the virtue of white southern women if freed. It worked, at least at the beginning of the war, although over time some poorer counties in the South began to support the war less and less. In any event, the point is that William, Lucy, C.W., and Hattie weren't unusual if they didn't own slaves. But it does seem unusual that they don't talk about slaves or slavery, since that's the real cause of the suffering they're enduring. 

So how do the characters come off?

There are basically two ways we could read this story, in which so much of what the characters have to say while the Confederacy is in its death throes is focused on their daily, private lives. We could read it as a statement of the basic primacy of the individual, private life over the corporate, political realm. C.W. is quoted as saying that someone who can make you smile is like bread and beef, and to some extent, the characters do realize through war that the people around them are more important than political causes. Or we could read the focus on the private as an indictment of these characters for not realizing the meaning of their actions within their larger context. William jokes at one point that he and his companions are like Belshazzar, the Biblical character from whence the phrase "see the writing on the wall" comes. But they don't seem to see the writing on the wall.

One key to unlocking how to judge the characters comes from the few political-leaning statements they make. We aren't getting full treatises of the political views of the characters so much as indirect reflections of their political assumptions.

William: William got into the war for the same reason most soldiers on both sides did: it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened, and he didn't want to miss out. However, he was also goaded on by "fire-eaters," those who had been anti-compromise with the north and fiercely for independence. Now, he's got a typical soldier's cynicism about the war. He thinks that "if the question were left to the contending armies we would restore the peace tomorrow & hang both Presidents' cabinets at our earliest convenience."

William is deeply influenced by C.W., who has gone a little feral during the war. C.W. killed a young Northern soldier who was asking to surrender because that soldier had killed a young Southern soldier. C.W. then desecrated the body by laying it on the road for the ambulances to "turn into jelly." C.W. believes the war has made virtues scarce, and that "it requires the faith of a prophet to see any good resulting from so much mayhem, & that perhaps both nations must be destroyed when we consider how much corruption runs riot in high places, & that it may be that our country's day of grace is passed."

On the eve of the battle, as he dashes off his last letter prior to the campaign from which he may not survive, he starts to see the writing on the wall that has eluded him: "I see that Hope calculates its schemes for a long & durable life, & presses us forward to imaginary points of bliss, & grasps at impossibilities, & so ensnares us all."

Lucy: Lucy is a smart young woman who castigates herself constantly for being educated but not useful. She complains of a conversation she takes part in one evening, "Since at the close of the debate we each retained our original positions." This could pretty easily be seen as a comment on all political discussions ever in all periods of history, but it could also be seen as a sly reference to a few characters in the book. Here we are at the end of the Civil War, and the South is suffering mightily for choices it made a few years earlier, but nobody in this story seems to have greatly changed their minds. William is less ardent, but he still thinks they were right to join.

Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, suggested that perhaps the nation's suffering was God's justice for centuries of slavery:

Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether"

This guy gets it. 

Lucy, and the other characters, for all their self-criticism, are not able to transcend to that level of introspection, the kind that leads to a real repentance. Instead, Lucy passes by the subject of blame, moving right on to her feelings for William: "It may be that this national separation that wreaks its passion in slaughter is proof that what was once the best of all human governments was but an experiment and a failure, but I refuse to concede that your heart and mine are not as linked as they have ever been." So the best government on Earth failed--but WHY did it fail? She is not looking this question in the mouth.

Hattie: Hattie is a loving wife. She thinks C.W. is charming, and that people naturally like him more than her (this is the same C.W. who left a boy on the road to be turned into jelly). Coming back from a neighbor's house, she recalls how, "She compared our Republic to Hercules attacked in his crib, and I said all we sought was to go our way alone, and she reminded me that Dr. H in his sermon this last Sunday gave the most excellent discourse on "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord," and we agreed that we liked his views with regard to retaliation very much."

What are those thoughts and vengeance, one wonders? That the north deserves vengeance for what it has done? That the south is reaping God's vengeance? That vengeance is beyond either of them to mete out?

It may be the last. Hattie comes close to the same sentiments as Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address at one point: "We can only hope that the God who shows us how little we know of what's good for us will help resign us to His will." Compare this to Lincoln: "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes."

Hattie seems to understand something of how hatred and intolerance can be taught. When Yankees come to her farm and take a few things from her and lodge there, she hears one of them talk. "The Yankee Captain remarked to us that everywhere he goes he encounters people eating with their hands, and that he assumes the further south he proceeds the less learning he will find. Father said after they left that the majority of the Federals have been recruited from the lowbred immigrant classes and induced to fight by sign language. He sees the breach between us and them as so wide that by the War's end the South can only be all Yankees or no Yankees at all."

Nonetheless, her ability to understand has limits. That "go our way alone" was a pretty common refrain from Southerners. It had some appeal--at the beginning of the war, even pro-war Northerners didn't know how to justify war, because the Constitution literally had nothing to say about states leaving the Union. But how could people so intent on going their way alone not see that their human property also would have wanted the same thing?


C.W. We don't ever hear from C.W. directly. But he is the most compelling character in the story. William credits him for deciding to go to war: "We all signed up 2 years & 2 months ago now, goaded on by the fire-eating elements of editors & preachers & politicians. & C.W., who still tells one & all he despises the North for flouting the law requiring the return of fugitive slaves & for making a martyr of the likes of John Brown, who took an oath to murder Southern women & children."

This is the only mention of slavery in the story, and it's to complain about how the North didn't respect the South's right to get their escaped slaves back.

C.W. is brave. He is charismatic. He saved his companions at Peachtree Creek. Hattie says everyone apparently liked him better the whole time. But he also brutally killed someone trying to surrender and desecrated his body. Everyone likes him, but they're also missing something important about him. C.W. is still holding on at the end to the will to fight it out over abstract principles.

I think the weight of evidence comes down on judging them for moral indifference

You could read a line like Lucy's "even though the country is going to the dogs, I still love you" as a triumph of the personal over the political, but I think it's meant to be more of an indictment of her for missing the real point. The point isn't that the "government failed," it's that the people of the South failed. The point isn't that God has judged both countries, it's that God has judged YOU.

The story is weighted toward the importance of the political over the personal. It doesn't efface the personal; it merely subordinates it to the political for the duration of the war, like Whitman did. 

I'm fairly sympathetic to Southerners in 1861. I don't think most people would have behaved any differently. You're only as broad as your surroundings let you be, and it just wasn't within the imagination of most Southerners to consider opposing the war effort. Shirking the war effort, maybe, but not opposing it. So even though the story comes down a bit on the side of judging these characters for moral indifference, I'm not that interested in judging them. "Judge not," as Lincoln reminded us.

Perhaps, however, it is fair to use this story as a reminder of why, here in 2019, we can judge those blithely throwing around their failed Southern heritage as a reason to fly a traitor's flag. The grapes of wrath have been trampled out enough for that failed ideology. I don't give people today the same slack I'm willing to give the characters in this story, who don't have the benefit of hindsight we do to have learned from the war.