Readers' Review: "The March" By E.L. Doctorow
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2013-02-27/readers-review-march-el-doctorow
Engraving depicting Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea.
(Source: Library of Congress)
For February's Readers’ Review, E.L. Doctorow’s historic novel about Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s path of destruction through the deep South near the end of the Civil War. The title is “The March.” Diane invites listeners to join the discussion.
Guests
Adam Goodheart
author of "1861: The Civil War Awakening" and director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
Faye Moskowitz
professor of English and creative writing at George Washington University, and author of three memoirs, "A Leak in the Heart," "And the Bridge is Love," "Peace in the House" and a collection of short stories, "Whoever Finds this: I Love You."
Dana Williams
professor of African American literature and chair of the English department at Howard University.
Related Items
Read An Excerpt
Excerpted from "The March" by E. L. Doctorow. Copyright © 2005 by E.L. Doctorow. Excerpted by permission of Random House Trade Paperbacks, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Comments
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Speaking of Sherman's March not about the book: it is perfectly exemplary of the idea that war is like a raging person who must spend that anger before it can end. But it wasn't the North's rage - yes the Union felt the need for revenge, the need to end the war but until the South's anger was expended - beaten out of them, the war would not end. It was the Civil War's Hiroshima and Nagasaki and fire bombing of Germany. I'm a Southerner and grew up with hearing how evil the North was - I see it differently now.
The morality and necessity of Sherman's March is difficult to judge. It is in part similar to Truman's decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. How many more people would have died if the war continued for an indefinite time? Grant and Sherman were convinced the war would continue in the absence of something like Sherman's March.
That was not the only reason for Sherman followed this strategy. There were two other reasons behind it. First, Sherman's troops were going deep into enemy territory. If they left behind them the infrastructure to continue the war, the union troops would be in deep trouble; they could become surrounded in enemy territory and with no possibility for relief from the rest of the Union Army. The second reason is that Grant was still fighting Lee in Vicksburg. By destroying this infrastructure Sherman was also hoping to disrupt Lee's ability to get reinforcements and supplies.
Did we discuss the number of freed slaves left on the banks of the river in South Carolina where they were recaptured as Sherman wanted to rid himself of the burden.
We always speak of the north as freeing the slaves, we hear very little about the genocide of the native americans by the same people.
FROM ALICE, Silver Spring
The March:
Two of its finest contributions to U.S. history via literature:
1. Miscegenation in all its complexities. White-Black mixing is one of the most significant aspects of slavery and the Civil War, but is minimized in our discourse so often that it seems deliberate. Yet, no one can say definitively where white ends and black begins.
2. Doctorow connects this novel to its great predecessor "Ragtime" AND illustrates the contempt and cruelty of the Union Army toward "contraband" runaways through the story of Coalhouse Walker's parents.
Having read Doctorow from "The Book of Daniel" I consider him as much historian as novelist.
There's what the Army did, and there's what Sherman ordered:
"V. To army corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, &c., and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility."
Sherman orders a proportional response. If the neighborhood isn't hostile, the structures are left alone; if the inhabitants are hostile, then the army is to destroy what we today call infrastructure.
Now orders are one thing, but as we have seen in Iraq & Afghanistan, what troops actually do is something else. You can't divorce the soldier from his feelings. He has seen friends and comrades die. He has been separated from his own family and he has now seen that the south has been largely untouched by the war. We may not excuse, but we can understand behavior that seems uncivilized on the part of the individual soldiers.
Speaking of knowing people who date to Civil War, my great-grandfather was a child during Civil War and lived until the 1950s when I was an adolescent.
Four of his uncles fought with a Minnesota Company and died in Andersonville prison.
I grew up in Missouri and did know as a grade school student why I was a Northern sympathizer getting in fights on playground over the Civil War with my peers.
"not soldiers now, they were daemons" watching the suffering and burning in celebration of their triumph. A Post-9/11 novel where destruction descended on the populace, in a great dark cloud of dust, visible for tens of miles. I put these concepts together in describing 9/11 as a false-flagged attack by highly placed traitors. Consider if the South had been stronger or luckier and that Washington and Philadelphia had been burned instead of Atlanta. Then the cruel feudal slavocracy would have reigned, kind of like global militarized corporatocracy today. People gave their all for freedom and ended up debt peons and wage slaves. It was difficult to comprehend. There were the seeds of 9/11 in both camps of the Civil War. Stop and realize the milieux of our existence are strange and dwarfed when compared to collective human potential. Conclusion: Today we are ruled by daemons (corporate sociopaths seemingly banal in their rationalized evils).
I am disappointed that the panel did not mention that the Confederates could not feed their prisoners at Andersonville. The Federal navy was blockading the South and it was very effective. General Lee could not even feed his own troops. Furthermore, Northern prison camps were just as bad. My great-great-great grandfather's brother died of typhoid fever in one of them; and the North was NOT under anyone's blockade!
The North and Lincoln were far too kind in my opinion. Executions for treason were in order.That didn`t happen.We would NOT be reliving their 1860`s stupidity still today.. In my opinion,it`s the reason why politicians today are unafraid of current treasonous acts being committed by some in Congress . To disavow the oath of office taken,with hand on bible,in favor of someone who believes in insurrection,and bringing our Nation down,IS HIGH TREASON...AND THESE FOLKS DESERVE AN 1860`S NOOSE..
@ Blueneck BillyBob : I usually allow others to have their opinions and grant people the benefit of the doubt. However, I simply cannot let your statement regarding the issue of secession/insurrection as being tantamount to treason. I would recommend that you go back and read some of the Founding Father's writings on the principles under which the States would agree to becoming a Union. Thomas Jefferson's letters in which he clearly advocates that the States would be within their rights to secede would be a good start for you. A second good step would be to pick up Irwin Chemerisnky's book on Consitutional law and read a little on the background of the Consitution/Ratification and the 10th amendment. Unfortunately, we have grown up in an era in which the Federal Government has FAR exceeded the authority granted to it. Also, I would prefer to keep politics out of this discussion so I would ask you to refrain from making analogies to today's Tea Party. I am simply arguing a poiint of historical fact. I admit that we are better off than we would have been if the Confederacy was successful - but that is an argument based on practicality and not supported by the historical record at the time of ratification.
Everything is political to the left, any controversy is just another opportunity to find ways to claim the United States was illegitimate from the start and needs to be punished.
Grand show. I read the novel three or so years ago and was taken. I was hoping one of the panelists would read Pearl's soliloquy on Freedom in the cotton fields of South Georgia.
I referenced that passage last week in a blog (asfoxseesit) I submitted to the Upstate SC History Museum in conjunction with a project of my alma mater, Furman University, which I share with the great social justice journalist of the last half of the 20th Century Marshall Frady, a biographer of George Wallace and Billy Graham and Martin Luther King.
I hope the likes of Spielberg goes for the film treatment of The March. It would be expensive for sure, but if done right, an epic of the stratosphere of Dr. Zhivago, even bigger.
This review got me stoked. I linked, emailed, facebook messaged lot of folks on this one.
Recently a book came out with the old idea that "slavery wasn't so bad." What an insane idea! Where ther many people signing up to become slaves. Indentured slaves maybe but they nad a "pathway out."The idea of a benevolent slavery has been brought forward before but I'm sure it was from southern history revisionists. I should be saiid that not only were black people slaves but also Native Americans & Gypsies. To some degree the after affects of the long period of slavery are still felt in the U.S.