“The most dreary 4th of July I ever saw. We Southerners will not celebrate it anymore but will celebrate the day forever afterward when we whip the Yankees.”
Enduring War approaches the arc of the Civil War through a non-traditional lens: while it never loses sight of the battlefield and the generals who commanded it, this is a narrative of average men and women, everyday men and women, real men and women who stood to lose everything -- and did.
A map of Eastern Virginia, commissioned for this book, showing the home towns of many of the main characters. Click the image to pop out.
“As William Aylett tells it: ‘Not content with making and selling candles, Bob has gone into the soap making business and has a large rendering tub dripping at the chimney cover of my hut.’ Bob faces little competition, but things are far different on the Union side. A small Cincinnati firm is honoring its contract to supply soap and candles to the Army of the Potomac. From William’s glowing accounts, Bob is just as enterprising as William Proctor, a candle maker, and James Gamble, a soap maker. Bob, however, has no freedom, no education and no capital, while Proctor and Gamble have all of the above.”
“Well, brother, what do you think of peace now? I fear we are not to have it as soon as some think...God grant that the war may soon end for it seems its horrors increase.”
The young men the reader meets -- William Aylett; Benjamin Farinholt; William Morton and his brother Tommie; Rawley Martin; the Fleet brothers, Fred and Benny -- all grow real and fully realized through their letters to their loved ones. These letters were returned in kind, and these writers on the home front -- Alice Aylett, Leila May Farinholt, Bet Morton, Beckie Martin, Mary Louisa Fleet -- become just as vibrant and alive as the soldiers on the battlefield. As a work of history, no facts are invented and no dialogue is fabricated: rather, the characters tell their stories with their own words, and the paths of their lives are followed across the years of war, from the certainty of victory to the acceptance of the end.
“We were all very glad to see Meredith, and we all made a fuss over him as if he had been a white man.”
But the lives of the white men and women of Virginia are only part of the tale being told; this is Bob's story too, and Peter's, and Meredith's. This is a story of slaves and the society that profited from their labor, and no attempt is made to excuse or exempt the main characters from their roles in perpetuating the horrors of slavery, nor is any attempt made to soften the casual racism and open brutality of the 1860's South -- or North.
Readers are granted a glimpse into "scientific" manuals on the proper punishments for slaves. They are taken into the shadow of Union fortresses where black men and women, considered the "property" of a slaveholder, found refuge as human contraband. Readers, finally, are brought out to the front lines where the owned served their owners -- fighting within sight of the soldiers whose presence in Virginia offered an end to enslavement.
“Negroes go off about as easily now from Richmond as they do from the country. I believe the whole race to have become thoroughly worthless and unreliable, except for Bob...if he shall continue faithful to the end, I am determined he shall know to his profit my appreciation of his fidelity and good conduct.”
Slavery was a complex evil for all those it touched: for the slaves who ran, for the slaves who stayed, and for the masters who saw themselves as strict but fair overseers of loyal "servants" with no capacity to fend for themselves. Enduring War confronts this complexity head-on through the letters of William Aylett, whose relationship with his slave Bob evolved in remarkable ways as the war progressed.
But the society William Aylett was fighting for, the society he and all his comrades in the 53rd Virginia were prepared to die for, was disintegrating around him -- and this story brings its readers into the ruin, and its aftermath.
“Scarcely a day passes that someone in this brigade is not killed or wounded. Many are low-spirited at the signs of the times, and the weak hearted all over the land are crying for peace, but I still say the issue is in the hand of God...”
Society's Fall
The End of the South
The Civil War's devastation touched the main characters of Enduring War in different ways -- but all shared in the loss of the society they'd been born into and that they'd taken up arms to preserve.
Looted homes, fallow fields, failed crops: one war had ended and another was beginning. The reader is taken through the slow death of the slaveholding South that began with the retreat from the Gettysburg battlefield and in this book runs out into the 20th century, as the narrative follows its surviving characters into a post-Civil War world.
Some would find success in this new age. Some would not.
“Remember me to Bob.”