Died to Make Men Free

Books read this week: The Killer Angels 7/10 (Michael Shaara)

As is usually the case over Christmas, I've been pretty busy, and as I've received quite a few books over the holiday period, I've been dipping into several of them, with the net result that I've only finished one of them so far. The Killer Angels is a historical novel about the battle of Gettysburg; it was adapted (very faithfully) into the film Gettysburg, and it's a fairly entertaining read, if you can get past the bombastic pomposity that seems to afflict a huge proportion of American historical works; it's almost as if they feel that because they don't have very much history, it all has to be treated with massively exaggerated respect, and they have to make palpably absurd claims about it (like calling the American Civil War "one of the greatest wars the world has ever seen" - a statement which is self-evidently false to anyone with even a passing knowledge of European or Chinese history).

What I found most irritating about the book was that it buys into the (unfortunately very popular) narrative that the Confederacy were somehow worthy and noble opponents fighting for a way of life, rather than the Nazis v 0.1. This is a common flaw in treatments of the American Civil War, but I was surprised to see it pop up in such an (otherwise very well researched) book: the sequence where the Joshua Chamberlain, the Union colonel and the escaped slave is particularly infuriating - the African-American is presented as having been recently brought across the Atlantic, and therefore having no command of English. Not only is this extremely improbable (the Royal Navy had swept the slave traders from the seas thirty years prior, and any slave trader bringing slaves into the South would have to evade not only the Royal Navy, but also a (very efficient) Union blockade), but it is a literary sleight of hand designed deliberately to deprive the slave of a voice: we get a lot of white men telling us what they think he thinks, or what he should think, or why what he thinks doesn't matter, but we can't actually hear his voice. Of course, the reason for this is very simple: once you have read the histories of ex-slaves it's impossible to feel even the slightest sympathy for the Confederacy, in much the same way that once you've seen pictures of Bergen-Belsen you can't feel any sympathy for the Nazi regime.