“For your information,” Ernest Hemingway wrote to a literary critic in 1939, “in stories about the war, I try to show all the different sides of it, taking it slowly and honestly, examining it from many ways. So never think one story represents my viewpoint because it is much too complicated for that. . . . It is difficult to write about truly. . . . I would like to be able to write understandingly about both deserters and heroes, cowards and brave men, traitors and men who are not capable of being traitors. We learned a lot about all such people.”

Hemingway himself had served as an ambulance driver in the First World War, and at the time of his letter, the world teetered on the edge of a second one. War deeply influenced his worldview and his writing.

War influenced his contemporary, William Faulkner, too, although it was the Civil War, not World War I (Faulkner served in the Royal Canadian Air Force but saw no combat). Faulkner’s novels are saturated with the legacy of the Civil War on a decaying South. (For a wonderful exploration, read Michael Gorra’s 2020 The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War.) Hemingway said Faulkner “has the most talent of anybody.”

Each spring semester, I start one of my classes with Hemingway and Faulkner. The course, “Professional Writing II: Style,” examines those aspects of writing that make up the elusive thing we call a writer’s “style”: vocabulary, diction, sentence length, paragraph length, tone, and all sorts of other little goodies. Hemingway and Faulkner, when studied in conversation with one another, provide a master class.

Hemingway wrote in short, declarative sentences and punchy paragraphs. He presented material as if he were a fly on the wall, conveying what he saw and heard but without the privilege of getting inside the characters’ heads. Faulkner, in contrast, wrote long, complicated sentences full of clauses and phrases, and his paragraphs often feel a labyrinthine as the Mississippi delta. He shifts perspectives in time, space, and character, and his stories carry all the dead weight of the past.

Hemingway is lean and vigorous; Faulkner is packed. Hemingway is true; Faulkner is mythical. Both are wonderful. There’s a reason they each won the Nobel Prize for Literature, as opposite as they were.

If you’re looking for a break from Civil War history, I encourage you to check out Hemingway and Faulkner for a break. You’ll still see the influence of war in each of their works, but best of all, you’ll treat yourself to some wonderful writing.

— Chris Mackowski, Ph.D.

Editor-in-Chief

Jon Tracey made a quick stop at the "Return Visit" statue in Gettysburg, holding a copy of The Civil War and Pop Culture, his book co-edited with Chris Mackowski which features the monument on the cover.

Cecily Zander was on an episode of the UK-based podcast American History Hit -- talking about Zachary Taylor. It's available wherever you get podcasts -- here's one link.

ECW Bookshelf

Tonya McQuade’s new book, A State Divided: Civil War Letters of James C. Hale and Benjamin Petree, will be available on Amazon starting on February 1.

It presents fifty previously unpublished Civil War letters written between 1862-1865 and explains the context in which these two Missouri soldiers and their families found themselves living, both before and during the Civil War, as they watched discord, destruction, and bloodshed erupt all around them.

You can learn more here, and she will be sharing book excerpts in a 10-day countdown starting January 22 on her Facebook page.

Chris Kolakowski’s book on Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. will be released in the United States on February 1. It can be pre-ordered here.

Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. was a major figure of the Pacific War, both for his command in Alaska and in his key role heading Tenth Army during the Battle of Okinawa in the spring of 1945. Buckner was the senior U.S. officer killed by enemy fire in World War II when Japanese artillery cut him down on June 18, 1945, one month shy of his 59th birthday. The shelling ended a remarkable life – son of a Confederate Lieutenant General and governor of Kentucky, the “Child of the Democracy” in the 1896 Presidential election campaign, educated at West Point, myriad service as a student and instructor at various Army posts and schools from 1917 to 1936, command in Alaska from 1940 to 1944, and ultimately of Tenth Army from 1944 to his death.

Shrouded Veterans

Here’s the latest project from Frank Jastrzembski’s Shrouded Veterans project:

A headstone was placed for Colonel Mardon Wilson Plumly. 

The son of abolitionist Benjamin Rush Plumly, Mardon Wilson Plumly enlisted as a private in the 71st Pennsylvania Infantry (raised as the 1st California) on June 28, 1861. He participated in the Battles of Ball’s Bluff and Fair Oaks. 

In July 1862, Plumly was appointed a second lieutenant in the 40th New York Infantry or “Mozart Regiment.” He was wounded in the left side of his chest at the Battle of Second Bull Run on August 29.

Plumly resigned on November 23 “having been afflicted with chronic diarrhea for the past year, which has rendered me totally unfit for duty most of that time.” 

Through the influence of his father, who helped to raise colored troops in the Department of the Gulf, Plumly was appointed colonel of the 7th Regiment, Louisiana Infantry (Colored) on July 10, 1863. The regiment was mustered out after 60 days, but Plumly was appointed colonel of the 86th Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry. For a time he commanded a brigade but resigned when he discovered a board of examination would evaluate each officer in U.S. Colored Infantry units in the Department of the Gulf. 

“I feel that although I have received a common English education, and have served in the United States Army as an enlisted man and officer for more than three years,” he wrote Assistant Adjutant General George B. Drake on July 18, 1864, “I shall not be able to pass so rigorous an examination in all branches of education as is required by the General Order requiring my appearance before the above mentioned Board.”  

On March 25, 1865, Benjamin Rush Plumly, while serving as chairman of the Board of Education for Freedmen in the Department of the Gulf, wrote to President Abraham Lincoln. He had this to say about his sons’ service in the war: 

“Both my sons [John Longshore and Mardon Wilson] have been in the army from the beginning. They are in it, yet. They were ‘privates’ many months. I have never asked for them or for myself, or for any relative, promotion or advancement of any sort. 

One of my sons [Mardon] entered the Service, as a ‘private’ under command of my lamented friend Col. Baker of California, whose Regiment I helped to raise.

That son worked his way to a Colonelcy, and to an acting Brigadiership.

He served three years and four months, and left the service. Being out three months, he re-enlisted, as a private, and so I hear, this week, has been promoted for gallantry in action, and is on his way ‘up’ again.” 

On December 29, 1864, Plumly enlisted as a private in the 1st Louisiana Cavalry after resigning as colonel of the 86th Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry. He was promoted to sergeant but reduced again to private on June 13, 1865. He was honorably mustered out on August 28.

After the war, Plumly moved to rural Sonoma County, California, settling in the township of Salt Point. He served for a time as justice of the peace and wrote columns for the Sonoma Democrat under the pseudonym “Veritas.”

On November 5, 1889, Plumly died at his home near Fort Ross. “He was bright intellectually,” his obituary in the Sonoma Democrat noted, “but unfortunately the victim of a disease that carried him off at the untimely age of 45.” A member of Sea View Lodge No. 295, a local Independent Order of Odd Fellows chapter, Plumly was buried at Sea View Cemetery.

January 2024

24: Bert Dunkerly, “The Brown’s Island Explosion and the Search for the Victims” Fredericksburg VA Civil War Round Table

31: Kevin Pawlak, Jon-Erik Gilot, “John Brown’s Raid,” Civil War Talk (virtual)



February 2024

11: Chris Mackowski, “The Battle of Jackson, Mississippi,” Cape Fear Civil War Roundtable, Wilmington, NC

13: Dwight Hughes, “Rebel Odyssey: The Cruise of the CSS Shenandoah,” Civil War Round Table of Atlanta, Griffin, GA

15: Chris Mackowski, “Grant’s Next Chapter: Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and the Rise of Grant,” Houston (TX) Civil War Roundtable