The Guns of the South

HISTORICAL NOTES

If my portrayal of Robert E. Lee seems to bear only a small resemblance to the revisionist one offered by Thomas Connelly in The Marble Man, it is not because I am ignorant of the latter but simply because, in most instances, I disagree with Connelly’s interpretation. Lee’s own writings, I think, show clearly enough what sort of man he was. The fragment of a letter which opens this book is from letter number 610 in the collection The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, edited by Clifford Downey and Louis H. Manarin.

All persons stated to have served with the 47th North Carolina in early 1864 actually did so at that time, in the companies noted and with their proper ranks. There are only two partial exceptions to this rule: I do not know whether the slave George Ballentine still remained with the regiment then, and I do not know the actual company with which Mollie Bean served.

Mollie Bean did serve with the 47th North Carolina. She was, the Richmond Whig of February 20, 1865, tells us (as cited in North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster), picked up in uniform not far from Richmond on the night of February 17 and sent into the city for questioning. At the provost marshal’s office, she said she had been with the regiment for two years and had been wounded twice. The Whig story ends, “It will not, we presume, be pretended that she had served so long in the army without her sex being discovered.” But such cases, the Whig notwithstanding, were far from unknown among both the gray and the blue. I have taken a novelist’s liberty in imagining why she joined in the first place.

I have taken similar liberties in inventing occupations for a few minor characters from the 47th when those are not known, but the jobs of most of those who served in that regiment, along with their ages, home counties, and wounds suffered up to the time at which The Guns of the South begins, are authentic. The character I have ascribed to each man is a product of those factors and of my imagination (Billie Beddingfield’s nature is inferred from his habit of repeatedly gaining noncommissioned rank and then being demoted again).

The town of Rivington, North Carolina, is entirely fictitious, as is everything connected with it, including Mollie Bean’s residing there.

The men of the 47th North Carolina could not actually have looked across Washington to see the burning Long Bridge from the position in which I have them doing so. Geography occasionally has to bend just a little to serve the novelist’s needs.

The terms of peace between the United States and Confederate States are based upon those. set forth in a letter of February 8, 1862, from Confederate Secretary of State R. M. T. Hunter to his European commissioners James Mason and John Slidell, as modified by subsequent events both real and imaginary. Lee’s plans for measures limiting slavery are derived from Brazilian constitutional proposals (unfortunately not adopted) of 1823 and from Brazil’s free-birth law of 1871 (I concede the anachronism). Brazil’s Parliament finally adopted full emancipation in 1888.

For those who are interested in such things, I append detailed returns of the fictitious U.S. Presidential election of 1864 and Confederate Presidential election of 1867. The returns of the U.S. election in particular seem to require some further explanation. The two-party system was not so well established in the 1860s as now, as witness the four-cornered electoral struggle of 1860. Starting a new party and hoping for success was perfectly possible; the Republicans, indeed, had run their first national ticket as recently as 1856. In a country stunned by defeat, as the U.S. was here, new movements would naturally arise.

I might also note that, before I worked out the final tally, I did not know myself who was going to win this election. State-by-state returns were determined as follows: McClellan, the most conservative candidate, was given a percentage equal to half the total Bell and Breckinridge received in each state in the real election of 1860. In states where they had not appeared on the ballot, he was assigned a small, arbitrary percentage. The exception here is his home state of New Jersey, which seems reasonable, as he carried it in the real 1864 election (one of the two states, Kentucky being the other, which he did carry) and later served as its governor.

Lincoln and Fremont are considered to have split a vote percentage equal to the average of Lincoln’s 1860 and 1864 actual percentages. This method was designed to reduce the Republican total from what it actually was in 1864 with the war almost won, and in most states worked well. In Pennsylvania, however, where Lincoln’s actual percentage increased from 1860 to 1864, I reduced the percentage to be divided between Lincoln and Fremont. Fremont’s share of the total Republican vote varies by how “radical” I judged the Republicans of each state to be: he scores better in Kansas and New England than in the Midwest.

Horatio Seymour got whatever percentage was left in each state. The percentages for all candidates were turned into popular vote figures by using actual 1864 vote totals. While The Guns of the South is, of course, a work of fiction in every respect, I think these imaginary returns do reflect the confused political situation that would surely have existed in a United States that lost the Civil War.