A book about America's most uncivil Civil War.

GODS AND GENERALS is another Civil War book that sat on my shelf too long before I pulled it down and read it. Written by Jeff Shaara, it is a prequel to THE KILLER ANGELS, the Pulitzer Prize winning historical novel written by his late father, Michael Shaara. The latter was an account of the battle of Gettysburg through the eyes of the officers and men who fought it; the son’s book follows a group of men from the years just before the Civil War through the battle of Chancellorsville just prior to Gettysburg. The men, two of whom—Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson—fought for the Confederacy, while the other two—Winfield Scott Hancock and Joshua Chamberlain—remained loyal to the Union. Shaara attempts to give the reader a ground level view of history as it unfolded day by day through the eyes of the participants, who grappled with events without a shred of the hindsight we enjoy in the present day. Shaara has done his research well, and does a good job of presenting the world views of Americans very much of the mid 19th Century, and they saw things very differently than their modern descendants. Robert E. Lee’s sense of duty and honor, as he understood it, would not let him take up arms against his home state of Virginia, even when men with whom he disagreed made the bad choice to lead the Old Dominion into the Confederacy. Jackson’s deep faith in a God who willed all things in accordance with an unknowable plan led him to take up arms against men with whom he trained and served beside in years past. Hancock was a supremely competent career officer with no qualms about what side he was on, while Chamberlain, a teacher at a college in Maine, felt compelled to go and fight alongside the young men he taught. Lee and Jackson have been the subject of many other books, both fiction and non-fiction, and I was familiar with the course of their lives, but it was great to learn about General Hancock, who commanded troops at nearly every major engagement of the war in the East. The Hancock Shaara presents is a man who grieves for the friendships severed with Southerners, but who never shirks when it comes to making war upon them, but whose biggest obstacle were the incompetent superiors whose greatest talent was to lose battles where the Union had the most advantages.

The parts of the book dealing with the armed clashes between Union and Confederates were my favorites, as Shaara has a talent for giving the reader a real sense of what it was like to be caught up in the moment, and carried on the chaos of a battle where the side who is winning or losing changes from one minute to the next. Though he glosses over the battle of Antietam by showing it mostly through Chamberlain’s eyes while his unit is held in reserve, the bloody engagements at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville are vividly portrayed. So too the anger and anguish of officers like Hancock, who had no choice but to obey orders they knew would lead to military disaster, and the frustration of commanders like Jackson who reach for a total victory that is just outside their grasp. It is a true lesson on the definition of “the fortunes of war.” I like Shaara’s writing style, especially his command of character POV. Most of the chapters are relatively short and to the point, and there is a lot of attention given to detail—descriptions of uniforms and landscapes being most prominent—that may not be to everyone’s liking.

And this book—published in 1996—may not be for every reader of history, for it is an example of a kind of historical fiction that would not find favor in many quarters in the 21st Century, where in the eyes of some, American history is solely the story of oppressors, the oppressed, and a few hypocrites who might fall in between. There is no doubt that Shaara’s treatment of Jackson, mainly at the end of the book, falls into outright romanticizing. The issue of race and slavery is barely mentioned, and the one Black character who appears is an emancipated slave who respectfully approaches Lee about buying his brother’s freedom. It comes off as an awkward scene, written to address the underlining and dominant issue of the Civil War, and then be done with it. But it does go the reality that the people of the time lived under a very different moral code, and did not debate the great issue of the day endlessly in every conversation. They were who they were, and not who a modern America thought they should have been. And Shaara makes it very clear that the Civil War was fought by men who very much did not want to go war, and who very much did not want to kill each other on a battlefield.

So, GODS AND GENERALS will certainly “trigger” some, and this book is not for them. But for those interested in a fighting man’s perspective on the Civil War, this is a good book that makes flesh and blood out of some of the dry facts so many of us leaned in American History class. It proves that good history is a good story, one that can be retold endlessly time and again.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
and on Smashwords at: https://bit.ly/3kIfrAb

My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
and on Smashwords at: http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH

Visit my Goodreads author's page at:
http://bit.ly/2nxmg

Visit my Amazon author's page at: https://amzn.to/3nK6Yxv