Four Brothers in Blue, Or Sunshine and Shadows of the War of the Rebellion, A Story of the Great Civil War From Bull Run to Appomattox

by Barbara Klaw

by Robert Goldthwaite Carter
University of Texas Press
537 pages, $15.00

The four brothers in blue were the Carter brothers of Bradford, Massachusetts, who served simultaneously in the Army of the Potomac. A loving family, they “wrote uncommonly often” to their parents and to each other. After the war, the youngest brother collected all the letters, wrote a connecting narrative, and in 1913 published an edition of two hundred copies of this book. Little known to the public, it has been treasured by students of the Civil War, especially Stephen Vincent Benét, who acknowledged in his preface to John Brown’s Body his debt to “that remarkable first-hand account.” For these articulate young men-Robert was only sixteen when he enlisted—so sweet natured and innocently dutiful, the misery and butchery they were thrust into seemed particularly frightful. They were willing to die for their country, but each dreaded ending as an unidentified, untended corpse. They had been raised to be clean, but they learned to live with lice, and to scrounge food from the knapsacks of dead soldiers. Although they were teetotalers, they found that a gulp of whisky could warm their mud-soaked bodies. They seldom knew where they were going, and they almost never knew why. By the time they get home, the reader is ready to cheer for j oy that they all survived.

The War, the West and the Wilderness

by Barbara Klaw

by Kevin Brownlow
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 608 pages,
350 photographs, $25.00

This lively, anecdotal book describes what happened when early silent-film makers, beginning in about 1905, ventured from their studios into the outdoors to make films about the wilderness, and historical war movies and Westerns. Sometimes a movie was shot so close on the heels of the actual event it depicted that real participants were hired to participate again. Such was the case in a movie about the Sioux that Buffalo Bill Cody made with the cooperation of the War and Interior departments. Officers who had once fought Indians and three troops of cavalry were borrowed for the picture. Its final scene, the “battle” at Wounded Knee, was tactlessly shot exactly where it all had happened, which so infuriated the hundreds of Sioux in the cast that it looked as though actual fighting might erupt again. Yet apparently the government found the movie too hard on the Army. For it was banned, and the only print “decomposed”—or so they said.

Lavishly illustrated with photographs, most of which have not been published before, this fine mélange of history and film making is great fun.

Benjamin West

by Barbara Klaw

by Robert C. Alberts
Houghton Mifflin Co., 525 pages,
75 illustrations (mostly photographs of paintings), $20.00

When Benjamin West, the revered painter and teacher of painters, died in 1820, he seemed assured of a secure place in history. Yet less than fifty years after his death, his canvases were bringing “only furniture prices,” and a prominent critic referred to him as “the monarch of mediocrity … this old pig-headed painter. …” In fact, Alberts says, “the critics slew him over and over again.” Only since the 1930’s has a calmer appraisal rescued his reputation.

This rich, leisurely biography, the first in 150 years, reveals an extraordinarily single-minded and generous man. West left America in 1760, when he was twenty-one, because he wanted to study art, and there were few paintings to look at or painters to learn from in America. He soon settled permanently in England, painting prodigiously, and teaching, succoring, promoting other young American artists who followed him abroad. He became King George Ill’s friend and official painter, and even managed the delicate feat of preserving that relationship during the American Revolution. He persuaded the art-minded King to sponsor a brotherhood of artists, the Royal Academy, and served twenty-seven terms as president of this talented and touchy group.

Albert’s biography—both solid and amusingly gossipy—should help to reinstate West as the “Father of American Art.”