Why Read another Civil War book ...
Terrible battle frames lives both extraordinary and ordinary in this elegant social history ...
This is NOT a military history book. While there are moments of deep immersion into this terrible battle, the fighting serves as a backdrop for a moving, uneven but original mosaic of social history. At times I felt the use of the battle as the pivot for the remarkable and the less remarkable people Matteson focuses on was a bit of a stretch. But stretch marks and all, Worse Place Than Hell is a literate tour of the world that was torn apart by the Civil War. It is a montage of character portraits moving from one to the other, some connecting, some involved and others brief. Each represents a part of the social fabric drawn into the war witk Fredericksburg being the spot where death, revelation and heroism emerge. It is history that feels more like jazz than Bach but it works. You will discover …
· How the war (and his father) shaped the famous jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr …
· That Walt Whitman’s greatest poetry sprung from being among the great caregivers of the war …
· That Walt Whitman’s brother was a war hero …
· That Louisa May Alcott’s place in literature and among women was forged in the hell of Washington DC hospitals …
· What shaped the bravado and mad courage of the Confederates …
Outside of these major characters, the minor ones include compelling descriptions of Lincoln, Emerson, Union & Confederate generals, wounded & dying soldiers, the Alcott family, and the Concord literati. It all works. The ties that bind this slightly too long (of course) book are those familiar to us today and ones that resonated in that romantic and turbulent 19th century. Matteson knows of what he writes. His critically acclaimed book, The Lives of Margaret Fuller, not only laid the groundwork for this book but brought back to us the tragic story of one of America’s most gifted 19th century public figures. To add another plug … he won the Pulitzer for his biography of Louisa May Alcott. Clearly,
this is not your standard bit of military history.
Worse Place Than Hell
How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation
John Matteson
2023 429 pages