Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 6, 1995 by Florence King

Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.

CULPEPER, Virginia, is thirty miles west of Fredericksburg where I live. To get there you drive out toward Spotsylvania Mall and continue on past other burgeoning retail centers at Chancellorsville and Wilderness. As these once-hallowed names attest, you are on what some developer sooner or later will call the "Civil War Strip": shop till you drop in the midst of dead where they fell.

Unlike the other places along our route, Culpeper does not have "battle of" in front of its name. No battle was ever fought in Culpeper, and unlike Atlanta it was never burned. A single, unequivocal event would have been easier to bear, but Culpeper remained the eye of the storm for over three years.

Situated on the southern bank of the Rappahannock river midway between Chesapeake Bay and the Blue Ridge, Culpeper with its fords was a natural invasion point, and the launch pad for some of the most important campaigns, starting with First Manassas. It was the place both armies went through to get somewhere else, where they retreated after battles, where they set up their headquarters and winter encampments. Cemetery, morgue, hospital; experimental station for Nurse Clara Barton, inspirational station for Nurse Walt Whitman, railroad station for Libbie Custer at conjugal-visit time. If CNN and Hard Copy had existed, they would have been in Culpeper, too.

This orgy of toing and froing is skillfully shaped and artfully dramatized by Daniel E. Sutherland, chairman of the history department at the University of Arkansas. Writing in the present tense from the viewpoint of a few representative Culpeper families, he infuses his vast scholarly research with gossipy immediacy and displays a gift for envisaged narration that most screenwriters would envy, not to mention most Civil War historians.

He wastes no time deploring slavery, but does show that its tensions had produced some interesting eccentricities. By 1860 some people refused to own slaves but did rent them; Culpeper had three auction houses that went unused as buyers quietly resorted to private transactions. Efforts at emancipation usually produced tragi-comic situations. A nice old lady freed her slaves in her will, but stipulated that they could be sold if the law at the time of her death prohibited manumission. A well-meaning planter spared no expense to colonize his freed slaves in Pennsylvania, but they came back.

After First Manassas, Culpeper received the Confederate casualties and some Union ones as well, sparking the first of many debates about how to behave toward the enemy. Anyone displaying too much kindness came under suspicion, but the town established a medical ward in its poorhouse for wounded Yankees.

Meanwhile, healthy Yankees camped across the river slipped over at night and raided crops and barns. The townspeople responded with guerrilla warfare, which led to Union General John Pope's notorious Order No. 11 providing for the execution of Rebel civilians. When Pope's forces invaded Culpeper in 1862, his men interpreted the order as carte blanche for wanton destruction of civilian homes and crops.

Captain Charles Francis Adams Jr. did what he could to control his Massachusetts company, but most officers were like the New York chaplain who wrote his wife, "We are so far into the heart of secessia now that we don't try to restrain the men much but let them forage to their hearts' content." He regretted only that they had demolished a church.

At the height of these depredations a Yankee trooper wrote home, "Secession is more rabid and bitter here than in any place we have been in Virginia." He was especially offended by female bitterness, expressed by a "contemptuous and disdainful sneer."

The disdainful sneer, a by-product of the region's aristocratic self-image, is the Southern woman's specialty. But she has another, even more celebrated specialty that cannot be long frustrated, else she will suffer withdrawal pains: she must flirt or die.

Two years later, as Confederate troops massed near Culpeper, an incensed patriot hauled some young ladies before Robert E. Lee and told him they had been overly friendly to Yankee officers and even attended parties at General John Sedgwick's headquarters.

Lee's unruffled reply shows to what extent the Civil War was one big West Point class reunion: "I know General Sedgwick very well. It is just like him to be so kindly and considerate, and to have his band there to entertain them. So, young ladies, if the music is good, go and hear it as often as you can, and enjoy yourselves. You will find that General Sedgwick will have none but agreeable gentlemen about him."

When Culpeper was occupied for the third time by General George Meade, it seemed that the Yankees would take permanent root. Officers' wives visited at Christmas of 1863, to the vicarious pleasure of the enlisted men. "It does seem so good to catch a view of the ladies occasionally," one confided to his diary. "It is a variety that softens the harsh, coarse, everyday life in the army, so full of everything hostile to society, and evils that blunt the finer sensibilities and feelings." That an ordinary soldier could express such mature ideas so well stuns a later age, but these troops were Victorians who revered the diarist's art.