The Civil War [antikvár]

On a muggy July night in 1862 a brigade bugler sounded "lights out" and quiet settled over a Union encampment beside the muddy James River. Calls of other buglers in distant units drifted over the Virginia countryside, melting into the stillness. A Union general, Daniel Butterfield, watched from his tent as darkness swallowed the flames of candles and cooking fires. As the last sharp notes of the bugle had sounded, they seemed harsh to him and inappropriate for the hushed mood at day's end. Soon afterward Butterfield summoned his bugler and told him he wanted a new, more fitung call. Moreover, he would compose it! Butterfield began to whistle; the bugler played, finally writing the melody on an envelope. Then he substituted it for the official version. It caught on. Other buglers copied it, and some carried it to distant fields of batde. Today we know that call as Taps, part of a legacy from a century past and from a war that split our Nation. In this book Robert Paul Jordan reveals much of that legacy, taking us from the bitter prewar disputes over principles to the armed clashes over battlegrounds. Beginning at his Maryland home, not far from Manassas and Gettysburg, Bob traveled with his family —as others of us may wish to do after reading this book —to study well-known major batdefields, now serene and parklike. He also went to many of those hardly remembered, some of them swampy and overgrown with brush, just as they were when Rebels and Yankees tore through brier patches and thickets — and at each other. With candor Bob Jordan strips away the romanticism so often associated with the war and exaggerated with time, bringing us up quickly to the reality of it all: the anguish of President Lincoln searching for a general who would fight, the gnawing hunger of a shivering and shoeless Confederate soldier, the fear in once-proud cities besieged and bombarded for weeks. We see the tenacious U. S. Grant, capable of demanding unconditional surrender and of giving such generous surrender terms at Appomattox that history ranks him one of the most magnanimous men of the war. We stand near a somber Robert E. Lee as he struggles in his great personal dilemma, finally affirming with deep sorrow that duty calls him to his state and ultimately to the South. We watch him emerge the most revered losing general in history. We meet the lesser-known, but equally noble in spirit; Union Pvt. Leónidas Jordan, the author's great-uncle, who wrote his mother: " if I ever geet home again I will apriciate religious things more"; and Rebel Sgt. Richard Kirkland, who risked enemy fire at the Battle of Fredericksburg to carry water to the dying Yankees whose screams he could no longer bear. Such intimate glimpses into the lives of the men who fought the war pervade this book-experiences we share through letters, paintings, photographs, diaries, and newspapers of the day — all brought together in this story of the great national tragedy that Lincoln's Secretary of State once called the "irrepressible conflict." Robert L. Breeden, Editor