Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 11, 1994 TAG: 9409140030
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY ROBERT HILLDRUP
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The novelist Robert Stone, in "Dog Soldiers," turned out some lines which, if I recall correctly, ran something like this: "Of promising more than I can deliver, I am quite guilty, it is true. But I must promise more than what I can deliver in order to deliver what I do."
James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Princeton historian, may have done something similar in what promises to be an important revisionist interpretation of Civil War history.
It is McPherson's contention that most Civil War soldiers had a very good idea of the larger Constitutional and political issues over which the war was fought. This thesis flies in the face of such giants of Civil War history as Bell Irvin Wiley, and even later historians of the American fighting man such as S.L.A. Marshall.
As any former soldier will tell you, the closer one gets to the shooting, and to the frightful emotional exhaustion that goes with it, the more the soldier fights for his personal survival and, equally, for that of his immediate companions. If McPherson seeks to overturn that truth, he will surely fail.
What he has done here, and with wit and skill, is present a variety of anecdotes suggesting that the common soldier of the Civil War was, indeed, the most literate soldier to come along up until that date (which does not make him all that literate).
But illiteracy and intelligence are not mutually exclusive, as McPherson points out.
McPherson's got a long way to go to prove it, so perhaps judgment should be withheld to see how much he ultimately will deliver.
Robert Hilldrup is a Richmond writer and former newspaperman.
by CNB