The past is not dead,” wrote novelist William Faulkner. “In fact it’s not even past.” And sometimes on the Vineyard this feels true. Drive along a windy, up-Island dirt road and imagine making the same journey (at a not-much-reduced speed) on horseback or by carriage; it’s not difficult, the scenery would hardly be different. And yet, in most ways, Vineyarders today live nothing like they did a century ago. That’s why the artistry of Seen the Glory, the new novel by West Tisbury’s John Hough Jr., is so remarkable. The first historical fiction to be published about the Vineyard during the Civil War, Seen the Glory vividly and skillfully re-creates the American era of abolitionism and secession.
John first envisioned his latest novel, his eighth book, when he was recovering from knee surgery a few years ago. “I was listening to the sound track from Lonesome Dove [the movie based on Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning western novel], and thinking how much that novel meant to me. I wanted to write something like it – something epic and significant. My mind went to the Civil War, because it truly was a righteous war.” Gettysburg, the turning point toward the Union victory, was a natural focus.
John drew on his long knowledge of the Vineyard – he grew up in Falmouth but frequently visited family on the Vineyard (Henry Beetle Hough, the late editor of the Vineyard Gazette, was his great-uncle), and moved permanently to the Island in 1980. Before starting to write, John also made several trips to Gettysburg. D. Scott Hartwig, chief historian at Gettysburg National Military Park, proved an invaluable resource, promptly responding to John’s multiple requests for details about life in the army and on the battlefield. “For instance,” says John, “Scott told me, ‘You’ve got to imagine the noise when all the Confederate guns were firing.’ The soldiers couldn’t hear anyone speak or yell or shout. He helped me capture the total chaos.”
Seen the Glory is primarily the saga of the Chandler family of Holmes Hole (today’s Vineyard Haven): eighteen-year-old Luke, sixteen-year-old Thomas, their physician father George, and Rose, their proud, Cape Verdean housekeeper. The book follows the Chandler boys from their first encounter with the evils of slavery to their enlistment at the Mansion House to the Gettysburg battlefront, but also tells the story of their complex relationship with Rose. The excerpt that follows shows what the boys’ new life in the Union Army is like and introduces key characters, including their former classmate Elisha Smith.
John based his Smith on a real Vineyarder of the same name, who was raised on a farm at Head of the Pond, is buried in a cemetery off Barnes Road, and who was one of the few Islanders to fight at Gettysburg. (Many Vineyarders enlisted, but most served in the Navy.) John learned of Smith from an off-Island historian who had copies of Smith’s wartime documents and letters. “He was so very sweet and so very naive,” says John, reading from a letter in which Smith beseeches his family for “all the news of the Vineyard” and instructs his little brother to “be a good boy.”
Despite his obvious affection for Smith, John knew he couldn’t use him as his lead character. “I wanted to draw in the issues of the day – Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lincoln’s election, John Brown.” To do that, John needed fierce abolitionists: educated people who would more naturally study and debate the issues of the day. So he created the Chandlers.
Released by Simon & Schuster on the July anniversary of the Gettysburg Battle, Seen the Glory started garnering notice and rave reviews before it came out. The Book of the Month Club is featuring the novel as an alternate selection in both its history and military divisions. Booklist calls it both “epic” and “heartrending.” It is also, certainly, a must-read for anyone who loves the Vineyard and its history.
From chapter one of Seen the Glory:
The land had been cleared by loggers on both sides of the river and what the loggers hadn’t cut down the two armies had, leaving only the occasional tree or grove for shade. The ground was generally low along the river and in some places the river not more than five rods across, and in the evenings the pickets would come out and converse back and forth over the water. There’d been little shooting since Chancellorsville; orders to the picket details forbade firing unless fired upon, and with the river between them the men saw no point in driving one another to cover, let alone giving or taking casualties. The generals didn’t like the fraternizing, but the field officers and sergeants didn’t much care. No one doubted that the men would fight when the time came again.
The Union pickets came down from the heights in details of seven from each company, a sergeant or corporal and six privates. You were responsible for a mile of river and the men took turns walking the beat, two at a time, while the rest of the detail sought the shade of a willow oak, locust, or catalpa, and played cards or checkers or wrote letters or just talked. The days, eventless and reiterative under the fierce Virginia sun, dragged by slowly. The river flowed right to left, muddy, opaque, sliding noiselessly around crags of iron-gray stone. Lord it was hot.
At night the river found its voice and seemed to quicken. Now you could hear its swirl and rustle, hear the sudden splash of a fish jumping. Cool vapors rose from it, but so did the mosquitoes, and the men slapped their necks and ears and cursed them.
Damn bugs’re as big as crows, they said.
Secesh bugs, they said.
Rebel bugs.
They’re big as alligators.
Where’d you ever see a alligator?
They’re big as seagulls, Elisha Smith said, and thought of the gulls wheeling over Lagoon Pond, and heard their tattered shrieks, wind-borne above the dark blue water. When they’d left the Vineyard – Elisha, Peleg Davenport, Bart Crowell – gulls had followed the steamer, coasting alongside her roofed deck, hovering just out from the rail, expecting or at least hoping someone would offer a scrap of bread or cold cut, reaching out for the gull to pluck it from their fingers, a trick these gulls had mastered following the side-wheelers back and forth from New Bedford. Elisha and Peleg and Bart were in their Sunday clothes, nice shirts and checked and striped trousers and polished boots, worn this day for the last time. Lieutenant Macy stood at the rail at a distance from them, dourly eyeing the birds.
A crowd had come to Union Wharf to see them off and a fat woman named Mrs. West, who taught the piano and whom Elisha had known only by reputation, had given them twenty dollars, paper notes, donated by the citizens of Holmes Hole and Edgartown, to be divided among the three of them. Elisha’s family was at the front of the crowd. Mother, Father, Sarah, Katie, Georgie, Tommy. This Mrs. West had waddled halfway up the gangway of the Canonicus and turned and summoned the boys up to present the money. Then she unfolded a piece of paper and made a speech, the crowd pressing around, shading their eyes against the morning sun, bonneted women, men in straw boaters. We will follow you in our hearts and with our prayers, she said, reading from her paper, her voice surprisingly sonorous, musical. You are to go forth to the conflict to strike for our noble cause, the great cause of human freedom. My young friends, the eagle of American liberty from her mountain aerie swoops down on spreading pinions and goes perched on your shoulders.
Lieutenant Macy watched the gulls for a while, and the wooded shore of West Chop sliding by to port, then moved closer to them by the rail, the four of them leaning on their elbows looking out. The wind blew smartly, the golden smoky southwester, riffling the steel-blue water and putting a coppery sheen on the world.
What’s the matter with this goddamn island? Macy said. I signed thirty recruits on Nantucket, did you know that?
Maybe, Peleg said, it was on account of they know you over there.
Maybe sir, Macy said.
Sir, Peleg said.
He was the oldest of the three, twenty-three or -four now, Elisha and Bart but sixteen. Peleg naturally spoke for them. The twenty dollars were in his pocket.
No, Macy said, it’s because they don’t listen to shit like what was being spoken back there. The eagle of liberty and so on. This war, boys, is being fought for one reason: to put the country back together again. To make it whole. You’re going to hear some talk in the regiment about abolitionism and slavery and so forth, and I want you to stay clear of it. Hallowell and Holmes and Putnam and those fellows.
Who, sir? Peleg asked.
Macy looked at him. Some of our officers. Freethinkers, utopians. They’d free every nigger if they could. Me, I wouldn’t give a nickel to free a slave, and I hope you wouldn’t either.
Peleg and Elisha and Bart Crowell looked at one another. Peleg, looking away from Macy, smirked, made a face. The engine rumbled far below and they could hear the flag snapping and the great wet sweep of the wheels.
Sir, Peleg said, why not?
Why not what?
Why wouldn’t you give a nickel to free a slave?
Your name again? Macy said.
Davenport, sir.
Davenport. Well, Davenport, this is just the kind of thinking I’m trying to eliminate in the regiment. This idea that we’re fighting to free the slaves. Because when the shooting commences, what white man is going to risk his life to free a nigger?
The question was rhetorical, or so the boys thought. A silence followed it, during which they gazed through the smoky southwester, a hint of autumn in its textured coppery light, to the woods-shrouded slope of the Chop. They’d enlisted for three years, but no one expected the war to last that long. Lieutenant Macy doubted it himself, in spite of what had happened at Bull Run.
You boys enjoy the sail, Macy said, and went below.
Think he’s right? Bart Crowell said.
About what? said Elisha.
About the nigger question.
I hear they treat em awful bad, Elisha said. You said it yourself, Peleg.
I seen it, Peleg said. Charleston, Savannah. Niggers in chains. And that runaway I helped, stowed away on the Lizzie Freeman that time. Been whipped real awful. His back had been laid right open. Not just once either.
You never got in trouble for that, did you, Bart said.
Time it got around, I was to sea again. And there warn’t no one gonna arrest Dr. Chandler. I’m glad I done it too.
I’d free em, Elisha said.
You want em living alongside of you? Bart said.
Some I would, Elisha said.
We got to win the war first, Peleg said, then have this argument.
The boys thought this over.
Lieutenant’s mean, ain’t he, Peleg said.
It was one thing they all agreed on.
From Seen the Glory by John Hough Jr. Copyright ©2009 by John Hough Jr. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Inc
