This is a work of historical fiction that I think is trying
to pass itself off as something more historical than fiction. The afterword
makes mention of the novel’s characters as real people whose stories can only
now be told because of the release of their personal papers, but I think that’s
a con, because none of the people, texts, or foundations referenced stand up to
Google scrutiny. But that’s okay. I can enjoy some misdirection with the best
of them.
All in all, it’s an engaging story about people in Indiana
and Kentucky near the end of the American Civil War who are conspiring to
create a “Western Confederacy” to secede from the Union and the Confederacy and
force an end to the war. Fleming is first a historian, so he does a good job
grounding his characters and his story in the real issues of customs of the
day. Unfortunately, he is second an author, and many of the online reviews I
found of the book criticize him for being too heavy-handed with his prose.
That’s okay, too. I can enjoy some heavy-handedness with the best of them. It
wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the modern best-selling works I’ve read.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about (the historical
context, not the heavy-handedness). Janet Todd is the female protagonist of the
story, a white woman from Kentucky who was raised with a personal slave named
Lucy. At one pivotal point in the story Janet discovers that Lucy has been
spying on her, and revealing her role in the creation of the Western
Confederacy to the local Union authorities.
For a moment Janet saw the life into which she had been born
as an unjust sentence handed down by some malevolent invisible persecutor. She
had never asked for this black presence in her life. Any more than her mother
and father had asked for this plantation on which a hundred black women and
children were eating them into debt while their able-bodied kin worked at
half-speed because they knew they could join the Union Army any time they chose
and there was nothing Colonel Todd could do to retrieve them. The Todds,
Kentucky, the whole South were sinking into ruin because no one knew what to do
with these people. To free them risked anarchy, to keep them in bondage
produced betrayals like this one—and worse.
It’s a peek into a world in which slavery is a fact of life.
It’s wrong, of course it is. I’m not trying to argue it isn’t. But in 1864 it
was a fact of life, and a tremendous and life consuming war was being fought
over it, and Janet’s frustration with not being able to live with or without it
is both perfectly natural from a human perspective and perfectly foreign from a
modern one.
Another great tidbit comes from the following:
Henry Gentry gulped his bourbon. He wished he could pray to
someone for forgiveness. But he had no hope or faith in such a possibility.
Since Harvard, he had never been a believer in much of anything beyond Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s careless God, Brahma, the blind slayer of the evil and the
good.
I haven’t read much Emerson, so I had to hunt this one down.
It’s from one of his most famous poems, Brahma, which begins:
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Like a lot of poetry I had to read that a few times to get
the gist of it, and the line from Fleming’s novel certainly helped. It is well
known that leaders on both sides in the American Civil War thought that they
were acting in accordance with God’s will—at least early on. More and more of
them came to believe by the end that God, if he meddled at all in the affairs
of men, had a different purpose in mind that neither side could claim but which
both sides together were fulfilling. That purpose is usually seen as the noble
one—the eradication of slavery and the long-delayed punishment for those who
had perpetrated it. Fleming here raises the possibility that his purpose may
not have been so noble. It may, in fact, have been inscrutable—a notion that
certainly appeals to my sensibilities.
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