Top Ten Reasons Why I Write Civil War Novels

I like to read “Top Ten” list type articles about almost anything, and I’ve sometimes used that format in articles written for the Civil War reenacting magazines.  So I’m going to try a Top Ten list for this week’s blog post:

My Top Ten Reasons For Writing Novels About the Civil War, instead of putting my characters in some modern setting.

In no particular order:

Number 1 - “The Past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” I think William Faulkner wrote that and he was fine southern writer. From my experiences traveling across the south over the past fifteen years, I’d say he pegged it.  Perhaps the south is still so interested in the past because the winners of a conflict find it easy to move on to the next thing, but the losers have long memories and need to rationalize why they lost. Face it: Americans are not good losers and a bunch of southerners don’t want to forget, even 150 years later. Whatever the reason, I find it easy to read a good Civil War novel as if the events are happening right now.

Number 2 - Ancestors: Many of us have great-great-great granddaddies who were soldiers in the Civil War. In this age of Ancestor.com research, Civil War novels provide a means to connect with those men who we’ve found on limbs of our family trees. In my case, since the day in 1994 that I first confirmed that one of my McBride ancestors was a captain in Hood’s Texas Brigade in the Confederate army, it was a done deal that any novel I would write would be about the Civil War. I wasn’t courageous enough to write about my Confederate ancestor, though, until Novel #2, after I wrote Novel #1, my “learning novel.”

Number 3 - It Happened Here, Not Over There:  The battles in the War For Southern Independence (my preferred name for the Civil War) reached from New Mexico to Pennsylvania, and the soldiers were recruited from California to Maine. Moreover, most of the battlefields are still places where Americans can walk the same ground their ancestor soldiers fought over. Many battlefields are now state and national parks, great places for family vacations.  (I’ve discovered that is not the case in Europe.)  On the flip side of the positive aspect of visiting battlefield parks, some southern cities and thousands of farms were utterly destroyed by the war. It’s not hard to uncover harsh family memories and attitudes that still exist not too deeply buried.

Number 4 - It Was All In the Family: We, as a nation, own the Civil War. It was us against us. Brother against brother and all that. We love family feuds, and boy, was the Civil War a doozy. Moreover, the conflict set the stage for 150 years of ongoing cultural fencing between north and south, urban and rural perspectives. Until recently, there was even a college football all-star game promoted as Blue vs. Gray.  

Number 5 - Language: Both sides more or less spoke English. It helps an author when all the characters can understand what the others are saying.

Number 6 - History: The Civil War was horrible, but it determined the path we’ve been on for the 150 years since it ended. Beyond the obvious fact that the Civil War violently settled the question of a state’s right to secede from the union, the Civil War drilled deeper than the geography question of borders. I don’t think anyone ignorant of the Civil War can truly understand our national culture or get a sense of our national identity. I don’t think anyone can appreciate our wonderful national racial inclusiveness, which exists juxtaposed in stark contrast to lingering racial strife, without knowing some history of the Civil War.  What better setting could there be for a truly American story?

Number 7 - Boyhood Infatuation with guns and soldiers: Some days I’m quite sure I’m still twelve years old, because muzzle loading muskets still are art objects to me, and uniforms are what real men wear. Yeah, knights in armor are pretty manly, too, but armor rusts. Real men in blue and gray uniforms didn’t rust. They got wet, dried out and soldiered on, and I’ve always wanted to write about them.

Number 8 - Slavery: No other issue has bedeviled our nation more than the “peculiar institution.” Evil incarnated. A relic of the barbarism of ancient times. How to rid our nation of slavery stumped the best brains of the colonial era, men like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, nearly a century before the Civil War. Any good book about the Civil War has to include slavery through characters who are enslaved, or at least include a setting that reflects slavery as an unfortunate reality in the south, a reality that was widely believed to be irreversible.

In my case, it was the discovery through reading census documents and city directories that my southern McBride ancestors owned slaves, slaves who were named and described in the documents, making them real people, not vague textbook references to an evil institution. I hated to learn that my family tree includes slave owners, but I was also morbidly fascinated by the discovery, and wanted to write about it.

Number 9 - Romance: From reading quite a few published memoirs of southern soldiers, it is apparent many young ladies of the south were not so personally shy or culturally constrained that they spurned the attention of the young southern soldiers. The soldiers’ memoirs don’t usually directly address romance, but veiled references are not uncommon. It’s a human condition that lusty young men and lonely young women will find each other, and that is wonderful grist for a novelist’s mill. Plus, the lack of a language barrier helps, not unlike our GI’s bringing home more war brides from England than France after WWII.

Number 10 -Heroic Acts:  War certainly brings many bad things to a country, but no one can deny that war also provides a setting for men and women to perform heroic acts of bravery and heroic acts of compassion and kindness. Those are gratifying things about which to write.

And a Bonus Number 11: Young grandson Jackson is already a reader J, and I want to him to read Grandpa’s novels someday, and how better to hook him than with a good Civil War tale?