Book review: The Class of 1846

[redeye]

My “book under the bed” these weeks has been “The Class of 1846” by John Waugh. It is already very satisfying that I bought it second-hand on Amazon, not really knowing how it was, and got a hefty volume with lots of pictures and a really well-done bibliography and index. A good bargain!

Anyway, I had been attracted by the premise of following a group of illustrious West Point graduates, among whom Jackson and McClellan, through their career before and during the Civil War. Being very much a novice, I thought it was a good way to have an overview of the war. I was fairly satisfied; it covers only a part of the war, but enough to whet the appetite with highlights, mainly about West Point, the Mexican War, Fort Sumter, Jackson’s Valley Campaign, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Appomattox. The scope is limited but each event is told with clarity, impartially and in detail, full of quotes, each quote painstakingly documented (something that I miss now that I’m reading “The Killer Angels”, but more on that in another review). The anecdotes are sometimes well-known and it often gets very sentimental, but I found the narrative well-knit, engaging and peppered with outrageous remarks (“Several dozen pairs of Major Anderson’s woolen socks had already been hurled at the Confederates.”)

The “West Point 1846 classmates” device sometimes gets a bit stale, and sometimes it’s only a thin excuse to describe famous events: Gettysburg is supposedly in there to talk about Pickett and Gibbon, but there’s relatively little about him. However the author manages to keep a common “brothers in arms” theme throughout the book, mentioning also graduates from other classes and academies and showing what an impact the war had on these classmates, and conversely how they brought their academy experience to the war. I was glad to learn more about Stonewall Jackson especially, and McClellan, and also Ewell and A.P. Hill, and the parts about West Point and Fort Sumter. All in all, probably nothing new, but a great read for a beginner.

[blue_zouave]

Redeye, we read this book in my real-time military history book group several years ago. What I appreciated about it was that it acknowledged that all of these fellows had a life before, and after, the Civil War. Being from the Western US, I enjoyed the part about their postings in the Pacific Northwest.

As for "The Killer Angels," don't forget that it's fiction, based on fact. God save us from novels with footnotes!

Writing a novel myself, with no footnotes whatsoever,

Zou

[redeye]

Yes Zou, it's good to get a hint of the private lives of these people, and I also forgot to mention that a good part of the book tells about their wives, how women had to bear the war and the distance from their men, and how many had to bury them.

Lol, footnotes! Actually it's a dilemma for me. I'd never want to read a novel with actual footnotes at the bottom of the pages, too distracting. But, I don't know... If I needed to publish a historically based novel I'd like to give at least a hint of what is fictitious and what is true. I once read some fan fiction, I don't know what it was, that at the end had a little "diary" chapter by chapter, explaining "this is true, this I made up"... It was entertaining, a glimpse on how the author had worked. But I'm really not sure whether I'd like to do it.