BICKERING
AND
CONFUSION:
"CHOOSING STRAWS" FOR A RUM DRINKER TO
LEAD
**********
"Man goes beyond his own
decision
Gets caught up in the mechanism
Of swindlers who act like kings
And brokers who break everything"
--The Scarlet Tide, lyrics from the movie Cold Mountain
Command confusion, conflicting, shifting orders,
bickering
at the leadership level, failure to forcefully lead advancing troops to
higher ground all played a part. After higher command of Generals Grant
and Meade at the last minute excluded the fresh and specially prepared
Afro American forces from leading the forward attack, Burnside took the
disastrous step of casting straws to chose an officer and command to
replace them.
He selected a man who turned out to be an alcoholic, General James H.
Ledlie. Who drank to ease his fear. Who was in no condition to
dynamically lead the battle weary unprepared men who would replace the
blacks. An officer who retreated to a bomb shelter to drink rum while
his troops stormed into "The Crater," instead of around it, as had been
part of the original plan.
We can build the most innovative of
plans, as did General Ambrose Burnside -- Rhode Island's most famous
native son. But without the power and coordination to carry them out,
we are trapped in the craters we blow open, trapped amidst the screams.
WHEN
EXPERIENCE BRINGS DEFEAT:
THE SCARED LEAD THE SCARED
This was the paradox of combat: the longer a unit was in the field
under fire, the more experienced it was, the more cautious, the more
hesitant to advance into the mouths of cannon and musket fire it
became. In such a unit the bravest officers and men might already be
dead -- leaving the scared to lead the scared.
Survival of the cautious, with younger, less experienced, less
courageous officers who took over after other officers fell. So it
seems that at "The Crater" badly led, battle weary troops lost the day.
Survival of the fittest? Perhaps. The other side of the coin: those who
survived sometimes were or became cowards.
Or deserters -- who wanted out of Hell -- like Inman, the Confederate
soldier seeking peace on Cold Mountain.
COLD MOUNTAIN
IN THE GREEK HOMERIC TRADITION;
SHELTER FROM A RAGING CIVIL WAR?
Cold Mountain is a modern retelling of the
Homeric legend of Odysseus returning from the Trojan war (set in Civil
War times).
Author Charles
Frazier put it this way:
"He (Inman) was my great great uncle. And
part of
the character was based on my great grandfather. Both of them went to
the Civil War -- volunteered in the first few months of that war fever
and went off to battle. This Inman was in some of the worst fighting of
the war. He was in Virginia and was in many battles in key positions.
But I knew so little about him. There were no photographs of him; he
wrote no letters home. It's just a little fragment of a family story
about this guy -- of his war experience, his coming home, and what
happened to him when he got there.
"When my father told me the story of this ancestor, that was one of the
first things I thought of -- that there were certain parallels to The
Odyssey that might be useful in trying to think of a way to tell
this story. A warrior, weary of war, trying to get home and facing all
kinds of impediments along the way, a woman at home beset by all kinds
of problems of her own that are as compelling as his.
"So I reread The Odyssey -- that was one of the first things I
did when I really began working on the book. There was a certain
temptation to write parallel scenes -- to try to have a Cyclops scene,
or whatever. But really quickly I decided that that would be pretty
limiting and kind of artificial. So I just let The Odyssey stay
in the back of my mind as a model of a warrior wanting to put that war
behind him and get home."
He has also explained it is the story of a people,
a region
caught in between in wartime as pawns in a distant battle.
"You had this slave/agricultural system in
the
South and a growing industrial capitalist system in the North, and then
you had people like Inman who lived in an older economic system, kind
of like subsistence farming. You had people like that in the North and
South, and one of the tragedies of the war to me was that those people
got caught up, caught in the crossfire of this war. Many of them died
fighting somebody else's battle."
This theme of an older, isolated lifestyle under
threat
from a distant war comes through much more strongly in the book than in
the movie. Both the book and the movie take us back to Odysseus
struggling to return to an idealized home which is under threat from
both within and from without.
In Inman's case the threats to home are both Federal raiders and
Teague's terroristic Home Guard dedicated to hunting down those who
refuse to fight for the Confederacy.
The peaceful, elegant horizons and deserted slopes and caves of Cold
Mountain become shelters against war for draft dodgers, deserters,
musicians and all manner of independent folk. They refuse to accept
outside authority and, although southern, refuse to give their lives in
defense of slavery.
A point of view expressed by the old goat herding hermit mountain woman
who treats Inman's wounds with laudanum on his way to Cold Mountain (Cold
Mountain, page 217):
"I've traveled a fair bit in those low
counties.
Nigger-owning makes the rich man proud and ugly and it makes the poor
man mean. It's a curse laid on the land. We've lit a fire and now it's
burning us down. God is going to liberate niggers, and fighting to
prevent it is against God."
For historical background on the Civil War in North
Carolina's Appalachians see The
Heart
of
Confederate
Appalachia:
Western
North
Carolina
in
the
Civil
War
by John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney.
This is the story of how the mountains became hiding places for
deserters, draft dodgers, fugitive slaves, and escaped prisoners of war
-- and of how the conflict in the mountains became a more localized and
internalized guerrilla war.
Deserters sometimes became bandits. Differing viewpoints on the war and
slavery could reflect deep and bitter family feuds. The people of
western North Carolina responded to the war in dramatically different
ways. Although Abe Lincoln apparently hoped western North Carolina
might rally to the Federals, the authors argue support for the Union
was never as strong as sometimes believed. These selections
give insights on how the war affected the region around Cold Mountain.
Mountain
Masters:
Slavery
and
the
Sectional
Crisis
in
Western
North
Carolina by
John
C. Inscoe also contradicts the belief that slavery
did not exist or was marginal in western North Carolina. Though the
patterns of slavery were different in many cases, this book argues the
institution was still very strong in the region and had a profound
impact on the politics, society, and cultural values of the people of
the mountains.
See also Bushwhackers
(Civil
War
in
North
Carolina) by William R. Trotter.
This spotlights the nastiness of the mountain conflict and the
difficulties the Confederates had in defending the western area of the
state, especially in the latter part of the war. Trotter also deals
with Confederate deserters and draft dodgers who flocked to the
mountains to hide out. Among the fighters was the Thomas Highland
Legion, including a remnant of Cherokee Indians allied with
the Confederacy in defense of western North Carolina from Union raiders.
MIXING A NEW
BLACK AND WHITE MUSIC
The place Cold Mountain also comes to symbolize the mix of
white and "nigger" musical cultures, speeded by the Civil War, which
produced the banjo and the fiddle/banjo tunes of the Appalachians.
A Charles
Frazier
interview recalls "stumbling upon something" while
researching the novel, something which symbolized both the importance
of music and the hardships of mountain people caught in the middle of a
great civil war:
"...I remember early on in writing the book, going for a walk in the
mountains and coming upon a grave -- it was actually two graves, side
by side -- in this lonesome hillside, five miles from the nearest road.
I found out later that it was an old man and a boy who had been killed
by federal raiders who had come over the mountains from Tennessee
looking for food.
"They killed these two guys that were just going about their business.
Near there is another double grave with a fiddler and a boy in it who
were killed by Southern Home Guard in much the same way. Looking at
those two graves, and seeing these people who were essentially farmers,
caught in that crossfire and killed in this utterly pointless way -- I
think did shape some of my feeling toward the war."
That fiddler's grave is the origin of the novel's key musical figure,
Stobrod. This wandering, rebellious, white trash former moonshiner
builds his own fiddle in the forest after deserting from the
Confederate army to shelter near Cold Mountain.
Stobrod and his music symbolize the stubborn independence of the
mountain region -- and the future crossover between the music of black
Americans and the ballads of Scotch Irish mountain people.
A classic study of this interaction among black and white musicians is
Cecilia Conway's African
Banjo
Echoes
in
Appalachia.
In the novel (but not in the movie) the wayward Stobrod develops for
the first time in his life an obsession to improve his music because of
the suffering he has seen in the war. He discovers (Cold Mountain,
page
233):
"that his main interest has become the musical niggers that often
played for the customers. Many a night Stobrod wandered from place to
place until he found a fellow working at a stringed instrument with
authority, some genius of the guitar or banjo. Then he'd take out his
fiddle and play until dawn, and every time he did, he learned something
new.
"He first spend his attention on matters of tuning and fingering and
phrasing. Then he began listening to the words of the songs the niggers
sang, admiring how they chanted out every desire and fear in their
lives as clear and as proud as can be. And he soon had a growing
feeling that he was learning things about himself that had never sifted
into his thinking before."
Unlike the novel, the movie shows no interaction
between
Stobrod and black musicians, no black influence on what he creates. In
both the novel and the movie, unlike in history, Stobrod survives his
wounding by the Home Guard, as a symbol of a mountain spirit that
survives the war.
