Franklin Pierce, ghostwriter

Franklin Pierce faced a personal dilemma that affects few men. As an ex-president, his inclination was to stay above politics. But a century and a half ago, when President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation became law and Union war efforts reached another low ebb, he couldn’t hold his tongue.

On Jan. 2, 1863, Pierce was in Andover, Mass., at the home of his wife Jane’s sister. Jane was sickly and often stayed there. The proclamation had taken effect the previous day. Pierce took pen in hand to write to John H. George, his political pal back home in Concord, N.H.

When I found this letter to George in Pierce’s papers at the New Hampshire Historical Society, I was excited to see such candor from the ex-president, even though his opinions seemed intended only for George’s eyes.

Pierce took a harsh view of  Lincoln's proclamation

But something about the words and phrases seemed familiar to me. During earlier research, I had copied many articles expressing the editorial views of New Hampshire newspapers about the proclamation. The Democratic New Hampshire Patriot loathed Lincoln and attacked the proclamation without quarter; Republican papers either favored it or, fearing its unpopularity in their closely divided state, kept mum about it.

After finding the Pierce letter, I went back to these articles, and great was my reward. There, in the Patriot of Jan. 7, 1863, under the headline “Emancipation Proclamation,” was Pierce’s letter. It was unsigned, and I originally took it to be the editorial position of the Patriot. But now I knew who the author was.

So Pierce found a way to have his cake and eat it, too – to have his say while appearing to keep the respectful silence about public policy that is traditionally the duty of an ex-president. Later in 1863, he became so incensed with Lincoln’s presidency and the conduct of the war that he spoke out openly. For the moment, however, he was content to ghostwrite his opinion.

Here is the heart of the letter and subsequent Patriot story:

“The last proclamation of the President caps the climax of folly and wickedness. No ingenuous man can say hereafter – ‘If the administration means this’ – ‘if the administration contemplates that.’ The demands of civilization, the most obvious dictates of humanity, honor and common honesty, to say nothing of patriotism, commands the withdrawal of support promptly and irrevocably.

“We know what Mr. Lincoln means, so far as he can be said to have a meaning of his own – We know what Mr. Sumner & the whole band of abolitionists throughout the land mean and Mr. Lincoln has been and is to what his limited ability and narrow intelligence [allow] their willing instrument for all the woe which has thus far been brought upon the country and for all the degradation, all the atrocity, all the dessolation and ruin which is only too palpably before us.

“It is not that the Constitution, which the abolitionists have for twenty years & more denounced as ‘a covenant with death & a league with Hell,’ is now at the bidding of that party, deliberately violated & defied by the national executive sworn to maintain it. It is not that the people have been made to contribute to the overthrow of institutions which from childhood they have respected & revered by being taxed presently & prospectively to an extent hitherto unknown. It is not that five hundred thousand men have been induced to take their places in the ranks of the Army under false pretences of a purpose solely to uphold the Constitution and preserve the Union and that one hundred thousand of them at least have poured out their life & blood for the consummation of an object to which they never did give & never could have given their approbation.

“All this would have been sufficiently replete with a degree of wrong, disgrace & honor which admits of no expression. But what will the world say of a proclamation, emanating from the President of the United States, not only in defiance of the fundamental law of the Country for the upholding of which he ought to have been willing to pour his own blood, but in defiance of all law human & Divine which invites the black race in six entire states and parts of parts of several others to use and with all the barbaric features which must be inseparable from a successful servile insurrection to slay & devastate without regard to age or sex, without any condition of restraint except that the homes smouldering in ashes shall be the homes of the descendants of men whose fathers fought with our fathers the battles of the Revolution, and whose fathers with our fathers formed & adopted the Constitution now scoffed & defied; yes, and one other, that the women and children brutally violated & slaughtered shall be white women & children.

“What will the civilized world say when they read these words sent forth by the President of the United States and countersigned by the Secy of State! They will say, and the bitter thing is that they will say justly, that a crime so fearful as that proposed was never before contemplated by any nation, civilized or barbarous.

“If it be not too late for the people of the United States to utter a voice which shall terrify duplicity and overcome fanaticism – if it be too late to rescue the Republic from ruin financially & politically – is it too late to stay the restless march of barbarism, to save such remnants of honor as may warrant as to claim & deserve a place among the civilized peoples of the earth.

“But I will say [no] more now. My heart is sick of the contemplation.”

Check this out

Dave Morin shared this link with me. Good tale of a Barnstead soldier of the 8th New Hampshire regiment.

Dear readers

The little girl was maybe 11 and had pigtails and big brown eyes. I was sitting at the signing table just inside the door of the Water Street Bookstore in Exeter on Saturday when she dragged her father in by the hand. She glanced at the small poster about Our War on the table. She turned to her father and said, loudly and with conviction: “Daddy, we’ve got to buy this book for Grampa!”

Her father was more circumspect. He pulled out his cellphone, took a step away from the table and called someone, possibly his wife. No one answered, it seemed. The little girl pulled him back toward the table. It was three days till Christmas, and the father gave in. Before I signed the book, I asked the girl if her grandfather liked history. Yes, she said, her eyes beaming. I felt okay then. At least there was a good chance he’d read it.

The encounter with the girl and her father stuck with me from a two-bookstore swing in which I signed 30 or 40 books and talked with several prospective readers.

I worked on Our War for years, most of that time searching in quiet archives or writing and revising in front of a computer. Although I shared chapter drafts with trusted readers, the act of writing a book is in some ways like Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. You’re alone, you think you’ll make it but aren’t sure, and you hope there’s a big crowd waiting at the other end.

One difference is that the crowd, in the case of a book, comprises readers, not mere spectators. Since Our War came out, I have made maybe a dozen author appearances. I’ve spoken at libraries, bookstores, a church, a school and the New Hampshire Historical Society. I’ve emerged from the hibernation of my Lone Eagle fantasy to engage potential readers in conversation about why they should read my book.

This is the author’s dream come true. I am out to sell the idea of my book – a very human history of the war as it was lived by soldiers and civilians – and the book itself. But what I am really after is a sense that is out of an author’s reach during the months and years of research and writing. Then, one day, a stranger says to you, “I read your book, and . . .” Until that happens, the book isn’t really finished.

It made my smile yesterday to think of the little girl with pigtails giving Our War to her grandfather and telling him she had met the author. I hope she was right that this was the perfect book for him. Above all things a writer cherishes readers.

A Christmas to remember

Good news sometimes arrives during the holiday season in Our War: homecoming for a soldier blinded in battle and imprisoned at Andersonville, the return of a prisoner of war who walked hundreds of miles through enemy territory, kisses and sweet nothings (at last!) for a couple who had fallen in love by mail.

Col. Edward E. Cross

But my favorite story about Christmas during the war involves a party in the camp of the Fifth New Hampshire regiment in 1861. The Fifth had yet to fight a battle and was living in an already desolate patch near Alexandria, Va., known as Camp California. The timing of the move there had spoiled the men’s plans to celebrate Thanksgiving, but for Christmas their colonel, Edward E. Cross, renewed and enhanced the celebration plans.

Mark Travis, my co-author of My Brave Boys, wrote the scene. He is more recently the author of Pliney Fiske, a novel based on the Fifth’s experiences. Here is the way he described the 1861 Christmas festivities in his “Winter’s trials” chapter of My Brave Boys:

Drill was canceled for Christmas Day, and Cross ordered athletic entertainment in its place. It was the regiment’s first day off duty since gathering in Concord. At ten o’clock, there was a five-hundred-yard footrace, with a first prize of four dollars and a second of two. A wrestling match followed, with prizes of its own. Dinner was oysters and bread, followed by a visit from the Fourth Rhode Island, which produced a contest, too. “The R.I. Regiment gave us a treat of fun in the shape of a ‘Race in a Bag,’ ” Lieutenant [William] Moore wrote his father. “Five men from each wing of their Regiment were placed in a large bag which was made fast around their necks. – Taking their places in line, they started for the goal. Some went to the ground, ‘heels over head,’ to the amusement of all present. Only two reached the goal and were declared worthy of prizes.”

At three o’clock, the Fifth formed for the day’s main event: the chase for a greased pig, provided by the colonel himself. “We formed in a square,” wrote Sergeant John McCrillis, “and poor piggy was let loose. After a few minutes he was seized by Pat Rowan, but escaped. Soon he was seized and carried away by a member of Company I.” A jumping contest concluded the day.

It was difficult to be so far from home on a holiday – “Oh, how I should like to be with you tonight,” Lieutenant [James] Larkin wrote his wife Jenny – but this was a Christmas that drew the Fifth together. Moore approved because the men never got out of hand. “There were no drunken broils or fights so common among a large concourse of men,” he wrote home. The regiment’s camp song would be dated to this Christmas Day, twenty verses long and sung to the tune of “Camptown Races.” One verse went like this:

Our Colonel, he’s a perfect brick, du da, du da,

And with him the boys are bound to stick, du da du da day

Our major, too, his name is Cook, du da, du da,

Is a first rate man with an ugly look, du da du da day.

We’re bound to march all night,

We’re bound to march all day,

We’re the boys from the Granite State,

Some hundred miles away.

My friend Chester

Chester McMullen and I on his dad's boat off Grand Bahama Island in 1963.

A high school friend of mine died on Nov. 28, and I have been thinking about him. His name was Chester McMullen. We lost track of each other long ago, when he went to Vietnam. A Marine courier, he got caught behind enemy lines during the Tet Offensive.

I learned this from a mutual friend – Tim Ohr, also aVietnam veteran. A few years ago, when Tim wrote a novel based on his war experience titled Under the Gun, he used an excerpt from Chester's letter during Tet as his epigraph. Here it is:

Phu Bai February 7, 1968

Please. I do not

wish to hear

anything

anymore

and I

have nothing

to say

to anyone.

 

Chester and I emcee the 1964 senior assembly
Behind us are Wallace Charles and Sarah Brown
and Bob Biles and Cindy Darling.

In our high school in Clearwater, Fla., Chester was a brilliant kid who did not necessarily apply himself to classwork. Possibly that is why we were friends. He was an ace debater and public speaker, and he introduced me to Catcher in the Rye, On the Road and other books considered subversive in those days. His dad took us on a boat trip to the Bahamas when I was 16, and together Chester and I emceed the senior assembly at school. I know little about his life after his discharge from the service except that it was difficult.

I mention his death here because I think the snippet Tim Ohr used from his letter says a great deal about my generation’s introduction to war. I was in the army from 1966 to 1970. I was a cold warrior, managing to stay out of Vietnam, but in the last few months of my hitch, I served on the funeral detail in a support company at Fort Gordon, Ga.

I fired the 21-gun salute at funerals in Georgia and South Carolina where we men in uniform were not a welcome sight. This was especially true in African-American cemeteries. The war had been lost by then, but young men were still dying in Vietnam and coming home in body bags. Wives and mothers wailed as the slaps of our rifle fire echoed in the distance and the concealed bugler began blowing Taps. These rituals may have brought some closure to the families in the short term, but losing husbands and sons to a lost cause cannot have been easy.

In the many years since then, I have visited the D-Day beaches and cemeteries in Normandy, the battlefields at the Somme and Verdun, the trenches at Ypres, the American cemetery at Belleau Wood, a dozen or more Civil War battlefields and thousands of soldiers’ graves. From the Civil War through the current war in Afghanistan, I’ve seen a similar arc in the public reaction to war. It invariably runs from enthusiasm to despair.

The bitterness of Vietnam does not color my view of all wars, but I remain skeptical of the spin that war is a glorious enterprise. Whether at Cold Harbor or Belleau Wood or the Bulge or Heartbreak Ridge or Hue or Kandahar, war breaks the human spirit.

In researching Our War I read the wartime letters of dozens of New Hampshire soldiers. Many couldn’t wait to fight and defeat the enemy in 1861. Without exception the realities of war stilled these first stirrings of their hearts. Those who survived the carnage would have understood just where my friend Chester McMullen was coming from when he wrote home in 1968.

Exeter's Civil War general

[You might also like this entry.]

When I go somewhere in New Hampshire to speak about Our War, I try to include a bit of local Civil War history. While writing the book, I purposely named the hometowns of most of the characters. Especially early in the war, soldiers from one city, town or area tended to volunteer together and to serve in the same company or regiment. This created both cohesion in the ranks and a link between the companies and the people back home.

On Saturday at 11 a.m., I’ll be at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter for a signing. This is a great independent bookseller in a bookish town. The last time I was there, in 2009, it was to sign Abraham Lincoln in New Hampshire, my update of Elwin Page’s classic 1929 history. My most important addition to the story was a recently discovered newspaper story about Lincoln’s speech in Exeter. Page had found no contemporary account of this speech.

As I sat in the store on a lovely autumn day, I watched how the light of the afternoon sun played on the red brick of the building across the street. About halfway through the session, I realized this was the Exeter town hall – the building where Lincoln had spoken.

In Our War, the most prominent soldier from Exeter is Gilman Marston. He had been a lawyer in town for 20 years and was a sitting congressman when the war began. He and another congressman, Mason Tappan of Bradford, commanded the first two regiments from the state, Tappan the First, Marston the Second. The First fought no battles, came home and disbanded after three months. The Second became one of the hardest-fighting regiments in the Union army.

Marston figured prominently in the regiment’s first battle, at Bull Run. For my chapter on this, I drew mainly on what the men wrote about it at the time. There was a lot to choose from. A day or two before the battle, Marston told a visitor to the Second’s camp that he had only one complaint about his men: “They are too intelligent. They are constantly writing home.”

The Second changed positions often during the battle before joining the ignominious stampede back to Washington. Mainly the men found themselves targets of an enemy they could not see to fire on. It was frustrating, not to mention dangerous. Marston was shot just below the right shoulder during the battle and fell on his face. Despite the pain of this wound he surprised his men by returning to battle after it was bandaged.

Nevertheless, many officers blamed Marston for the Second’s miserable experience that day. “Our commanding officers didn’t seem to know what to do,” wrote Ai B. Thompson, a lieutenant from Concord. “Marston is plucky and rash but he was not born to command.” Doubting that Marston knew a single thing about military tactics, Capt. Simon G. Griffin, a native of Nelson, joined the other company commanders in signing a petition calling for Marston’s ouster.

Griffin later regretted the petition, calling it “an outrageous act of insubordination.” And Marston proved himself to be a capable leader, rising to brigadier general and leading men in many major battles before the war’s end.

After the war he returned to the U.S. House, served as a state representative and filled out a U.S. Senate term for 3½ months. He died in 1890 at the age of 78 and is buried in Exeter.

         

Better late than never

One worry when I started working on Our War was that I would find too few women’s voices for the stories I wanted to tell. One of the first large letter collections I examined eased my mind. These were the letters of Samuel Duncan and Julia Jones at the New Hampshire Historical Society.

Jones makes several cameos in the book and plays a lead in one chapter. She met Duncan, a Dartmouth College tutor, only once, and briefly, before he went off to war with the Fourteenth New Hampshire regiment. They fell in love by mail. I wrote about their romance in a chapter titled “Waiting for Cupid.” It is dated Christmas 1864, when they finally got together and realized their love was real.

Jones had no dearth of suitors. She lived with her family in East Washington, N.H. Her father Solomon was a prosperous merchant and prominent Republican. Julia was educated at the New London Literary and Scientific Institution, a forerunner of Colby-Sawyer College (that’s appears to be her 1861 graduation picture to the right). She taught school and became a principal. Early in the war, her brother Amos was an aide to General John C. Frémont, the 1856 Republican presidential nominee, and Julia knew many major political figures of the day. In the Duncan-Jones letters, the couple often joked about the famous faces in her fat photo album. Several officers had eyes for her, including Col. Edward E. Cross of the Fifth New Hampshire.

Jones was an astute observer of war news – far more so than Duncan, who tended to think each new commanding general was the great leader the Union army had been lacking. Jones shot down his Pollyanna pronouncements, preferring to wait and see how McClellan or Burnside or Hooker performed in battle before draping them with laurels.

Between the lines she also expressed frustration as a woman in being barred from political participation. On the day of the critical 1863 gubernatorial election, she looked out her window in East Washington and saw the men heading for Town Meeting to vote. “All morning long I’ve been watching them pass – the voters – traitors and loyalists, ’Publicans and sinners, for this never-to-be-forgotten Town Meeting Day,” she wrote Duncan. “Being a woman, I must quietly fold my hands & wait the issue.”

Unfortunately, I found no picture of Julia Jones for my book. This was not for want of trying. I located what I think was the Jones house in tiny, remote East Washington but could find no one to ask about her. Later, on a drizzly summer day, I toured the charming Washington Historical Society museum and asked volunteers there and in the society’s headquarters next door about a picture of her. No luck.

Now I’m kicking myself for giving up. Our War had hardly been out for a week when Thomas Talpey, a Washington resident, contacted me. Within days, he had forwarded me photographs of Jones. The keeper of the photos is Samuel and Julia Duncan’s great-great-granddaughter, Nancy Grandin of Simsbury, Conn. On the left Julia poses with her brother Amos. The ones at the top of this post appear to be 1860s CDVs.

Jones turned out to be the first of many strong women who became characters in Our War. I’m grateful to Thomas Talpey and Nancy Grandin for sharing these pictures. I wish I’d had them before the book came out, but I’m pleased now to put a face to Julia Jones’s name.