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.”

This Day in Civil War History (John Brown’s Attack on Harper’s Ferry Fans Sectional Discontent)

October 16, 1859—John Brown—failed businessman, domineering father, scourge of slavery—didn’t come close to succeeding in sparking a slave insurrection with his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va.

But he forced North and South to confront their different attitudes on “the peculiar institution,” and he provided a template for direct, violent action that would be copied by the Unabomber, anti-abortion forces targeting doctors, and others who deemed that bloodshed was necessary to stop a heinous wrong.

I first became intrigued by the ongoing controversy surrounding Brown through a class I took nearly 30 years ago at Columbia University with American history professor James Shenton. Virtually every seat was taken in his large lecture hall, because this particular class had a well-deserved reputation as the most dramatic Shenton would give for the entire course.

You would think that the passage of 150 years would settle questions about the longtime New York state resident. Not a chance.

Earlier this week, I received a glimpse of these impressions when I visited the New-York Historical Society. The centerpiece of the museum right now is a major exhibit on Abraham Lincoln and New York (something I’ll comment on at a future date). The Brown exhibit is small by comparison, but it’s worth walking upstairs for a nice complement to the one on Honest Abe (who, in the run-up to the GOP nomination in 1860, was careful to denounce Brown’s raid).

The exhibit focuses most heavily on the 1850s, when Brown not only led his group of 21 armed followers at Harper’s Ferry but also executed several pro-southern settlers in Kansas. (The image accompanying this post was inspired by the latter action.)

You might argue that Brown’s raid preceded Fort Sumter, usually deemed the official beginning of the Civil War, by a year and a half, so the above title is not really accurate. In another sense, though, that headline is completely appropriate. Over the years, debate has raged about whether or not Brown was insane, but nobody excelled him as prognosticator when he predicted just before his execution several weeks after the raid that Americans would have to “purge this land with blood” to rid the nation of slavery.

If you want to consider why opinion divides on Brown even to this day, consider the following two points made at the New-York Historical Society:

* Unusually among abolitionists, Brown believed not only in equality for African-Americans but also in integration; and
* Despite his fierce Calvinist convictions, he was unafraid of the injunction, “Thou shalt not kill.” The exhibit includes a poignant letter from Mahala Doyle, who, in Kansas, had pleaded in vain for Brown to spare the lives of her husband and two of her sons. Brown had “arrested my house at midnight,” Mrs. Doyle wrote after he was captured, “and arrested my husband and two boys, and took them out of the yard and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearting. You can’t say you done it to free slaves. We had none and never expected to own one.”

Oh, another thing: three major actors in the drama that would unfold following Fort Sumter were featured in the arrest and execution of Brown: Robert E. Lee, who led the federal force that caught him; Jeb Stuart, an aide to Lee; and John Wilkes Booth, a witness to the execution.

This Day in Literary History

March 13, 1943—As war raged in Europe and the Pacific, poet and fiction writer Stephen Vincent Benet—author of the Civil War epic poem John Brown’s Body, and himself the son and grandson of career army men—died of a heart attack at age 44 in New York City.

Poor eyesight kept the poet out of the armed forces, but family tradition—a father who rose to colonel, a grandfather who served in the Union Army in the Civil War and rose to chief of ordnance afterward—left him with a fund of stories and understandable fascination with war. Benet put all of this to good use in John Brown’s Body, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929. (War was just one strand of the family tradition—the other was writing, since brother William Rose and sister Laura also became poets.)

Benet wrote in a variety of genres—novels, short stories, screenplays, radio broadcasts, and a libretto for an opera—but if you’re like me, you encountered him first in either some scattered short verse or the much-anthologized short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1937), adapted for film four years later with a script co-written by the author himself.

In the 1980s I saw this movie on the big screen, the way audiences in Benet’s time would have done, at the Biograph Theater on 57th Street in Manhattan, one of the revival houses that flourished for awhile before giving way to the VCR (now itself experiencing the agony of obsolescence in the face of the DVD).

Next time you have a chance to see this on Turner Classic Movies or on DVD, catch it. The burly character actor Edward Arnold, usually typecast as a villain (as in Meet John Doe), finally with a chance to play a hero, ran with the role of the titular senator, and Walter Huston does a delicious, wink-in-the-eye turn as “Mr. Scratch” that avoids the kind of scene-chewing used by Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate.

Believe it or not, the actor-director Charles Laughton adapted John Brown’s Body for the stage in 1953, with Raymond Massey reprising his acclaimed screen roles as John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, Judith Anderson playing a southern matriarch and northern girl; and Tyrone Power appearing as both a Yankee and Confederate soldier. I was lucky to see a June 1989 version of this at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in the Berkshires.

The big draw for the play was Christopher Reeve, who received his start as an actor with the festival and continually repaid the debt by appearing here as long as he was healthy each summer. It is poignant now to think of Reeve then, commanding the stage with his 6-ft.-4-inch frame, before the terrible equestrian accident that changed his life forever.

Despite the affection the audience had for Reeve, the actor who stole the show that night, judging by the periodic applause that broke out, was Robert Lansing, who made his mark principally as a TV actor. Reeve had assumed the Tyrone Power role, while Lansing was reading the Massey parts of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, and he endowed the Great Emancipator’s lines with simple but unmistakable authority.

Around the same time as the Williamstown show, I bought a copy of John Brown’s Body in a Montclair, N.J., antiquarian bookstore that I dropped in on by chance. This edition was part of the Heritage Press, the more affordable version of the Limited Editions Club, which featured slipcased, heavily illustrated volumes that once made me part with my hard-earned money in a heartbeat. This edition appealed to me for an additional reason: it was an inscribed association copy, i.e, either it had once belonged to the author or been signed or annotated by the author to someone closely associated with the author of the book or the book itself in some way.

This particular “associated person” was a gem all his own: Douglas Southall Freeman, the Virginia editor who became the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of George Washington and Robert E. Lee.

In small but precise print, the famed biographer had written in the front of the book: “If I think I have any right to autograph this book of my friend Stephen Benet –and that right is highly doubtful—I could do it for none more gladly than for W. Otis Fitchett. Douglas Southall Freeman, March, 1953.”

My heart leapt when I read the date. Freeman had signed this only three months before his own death. (He is buried in Richmond’s famed Hollywood Cemetery, not far from many of the Civil War heroes he wrote about.) Moreover, the inscription told me something that his preface to the book had not revealed (though his admiration for the book’s artistic and accuracy was obvious): that he was a good friend of Benet.

But who was Otis Fitchett? For years, I had no way of knowing—until the onset of the Internet, that is. There, I discovered that the University of Virginia holds seven letters between the distinguished historian and Fitchett, who is identified as a friend of his from Caldwell, N.J., and “an employee of the General Electric Co.”

For many—myself, anyway—Stephen Vincent Benet has been almost as mysterious a figure as Fitchett. What was he like? A 1923 Time Magazine profile gives a hint: “Stephen Benét has a large head, indefinite hair, wears huge glasses, carries an entire desk-full of papers, gum, candy, cigarettes and a book or two constantly about his person. His military ancestors, among them a Chief of Ordnance, have not given him precision of movement.”

This “simple, honest, retiring” poet won a second Pulitzer Prize for his posthumously published Western Star. I never read any of his works in high school or college. There are several reasons for his relative neglect by academe: his lack of experimentation, a productive but short career, and an earnestness about his artistic purpose and his country’s past and potential that mark him as middlebrow. Our loss.