Bonus Quote of the Day (Stephen Vincent Benet, on Beauregard, Victor at Ft. Sumter)

“Beauregard, beau sabreur, hussar-sword with the gilded hilt, the gilded metal of the guard twisted into lovelocks and roses, vain as Murat, dashing as Murat, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard is a pose of conquering courtesy under a palmetto-banner. The lugubrious little march goes grimly by his courtesy, he watches it unsmiling, a light half-real, half that of invisible footlights on his French, dark, handsome face.”—Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown’s Body (1928)

As I searched for an appropriate quote to commemorate the recent 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter and the onset of the Civil War, I was surprised that the epics that centered around the war gave this battle relatively cursory treatment.

Well, let me amend that: in one case, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, I wasn’t that surprised—that novel deals with the impact of the war on a Georgian plantation, so, within that focus, it made sense that this event would be treated in conversation, as something happening offstage, if you will.

The real surprise was Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body. You can make a great case that this Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry is an American Iliad, an epic poem on the most riveting conflict in our history. And, to be sure, Benet devotes far more pages to his titular hero, or the Battle of Gettysburg, or Lincoln, or Lee, than to this siege that lasted less than 48 hours.

In contrast, the poet’s coverage of the siege is atypical. He disposes of it in three paragraphs, showing the aftermath rather than the battle itself. Moreover, as you can tell from the quote, it’s rendered as a prose poem rather than in verse like most of the rest of the book.

Yet I would argue that how Benet treats the battle mirrors what occurred off the coast of Charleston that day. Both the event and the literary treatment are unexpected and deeply ironic—starting with Benet’s focus here, Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard.

Some years ago, I spoke after a walking tour with our guide, an affable fellow who was doing his dissertation on Beauregard. I guess if you spend a long time with a biographical subject, you’d better like them, or you’ll go crazy. The guide fit the bill. He loved Beauregard, making sure I knew that the general had kept the North from capturing Charleston later in the war, when it was facing hopeless odds, because of his skill as an engineer.

Maybe so. But you’d never know from listening to the guide that Beauregard’s flaws—not just in confronting the enemy but in handling boss Jefferson Davis—would be exposed pitilessly before long.

Like the South in the early going of the war, everything seemed to go Beauregard’s way for awhile. Several months after Fort Sumter, he was co-victor with Joseph E. Johnston at the Battle of Bull Run. The two victories made him for awhile the toast of the Confederacy.

Slightly less than one year after Sumter, Beauregard would lose the Battle of Shiloh—a fight that seemed all but within his grasp by the end of the first day—and keep the winning streak of Ulysses S. Grant intact at a point when it seemed most vulnerable. When he went on medical leave without requesting Davis’ permission first, the Confederate President—who didn’t much care for the soldier known as “The Little Napoleon”—had an excuse to sideline him.

You can see the mixture of promise and vanity that vexed Davis and so many others in Benet’s description of the general. For every word suggesting his magnetism (“dashing,” “courtesy”), there’s another that undercuts it (“vain,” “unsmiling”). (And yet, had we wanted to do so, the poet could have added another detail that would have nailed the latter qualities even more strongly: it seems that the general did not share the frequent modern practice of calling himself “Pierre.” The name seemed too foreign, Beauregard reasoned. No, he preferred his middle name--Gustave.)

The men who won the war weren’t the cavaliers such as Beauregard, nor those, such as the general and his counterpart in the North, George B. McClellan, who also earned the nickname “Little Napoleon.” No, it was the dogged, weary men who endured everything--the ones to whom Benet paid tribute, in a brief description that contrasts sharply with the supposed hero of Fort Sumter, Beauregard:

“Their faces are worn and angry, their bellies empty and cold, but the stubborn salute of a gun, fifty times repeated, keeps their backs straight as they march out, and answers something stubborn and mute in their flesh.”