by Burke Davis Random House Photographs, maps 320 pages, $12.95
On November 16, 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman, with sixtytwo thousand men, set off “on a thousand-mile foray through the heart of the reeling Confederacy that would leave a path of destruction eighty miles wide” and for the first and only time, Davis writes, expose Americans to “the terrors of total warfare.”
The basic facts of Sherman’s fearful march are well known—the foraging, the senseless looting, the joyous slaves and brave Southern women, the acts of hideous cruelty and individual kindness, and so much burning that the marchers could follow those ahead of them by watching the billows of smoke in the sky. But the literally hundreds of participants and witnesses on whose previously unused testimony Burke Davis has based his new account give a shocking immediacy to the story.
For their task of destroying the South’s will to fight, Sherman’s men had some technically advanced equipment. Union regiments carried portable pontoon bridges, but what dismayed the Rebels most were the enemy’s new repeating rifles. “They say we are not fair,” a Federal soldier wrote, “that we have guns we load up on Sunday and shoot all the rest of the week.”
Sporadic efforts were made to control looting, but it was a hopeless task. To many of Sherman’s tough young soldiers, rioting, stealing, and bullying their way across the countryside was a “lark” they wished “would have no end. ”
South Carolina was the state that suffered most. Sherman felt that the South Carolinians, the original Secessionists, bore a major share of the blame for the war. In that state, he said, “the Devil himself couldn’t restrain my men.” He would not stand for killing civilians, however: “I don’t war on women and children.”
Davis depicts Sherman as a puzzling and fascinating man. Erratic, touchy, kindly and ruthless by turns, stubborn and brilliant, he was a man, as a friend said, who “never acknowledged an error and never repeated it.”
On the Road With John James Audubon
by Barbara Klaw
by Mary Durant and Michael Hanvood Dodd, Mead and Company 130 photographs, maps 576 pages, $19.95
“I have a rival in every bird,” Lucy Audubon once told her sister. She did indeed, and in every tree, animal, insect, river, taste, and smell. For nothing could keep her husband, John James Audubon, connubially content at home. He loved his wife and children, but reading this lyrical travel biography makes it clear that experiencing the whole American outdoors was his compelling passion. Lucy was left to take care of herself.
The authors covered 35,000 miles and spent thirteen months tracing Audubon’s wanderings from Labrador to the Dry Tortugas, from the Atlantic west to Montana. With his voluminous writings at hand, they located his camps and found where he had discovered new birds. They tracked down descendants of settlers he had met. They found that wild areas he had loved (“the darling forests”) had been cemented over or manicured into state parks, often named Audubon. Even in 1833, Audubon had worried about the disappearing wilderness. “Where can I go now, and visit nature undisturbed?” he wrote.
The legend Audubon left behind, the authors found, is far from accurate, spread deliberately to disguise his illegitimate birth and to create for himself a romantic aura. An art critic wrote that “Audubon was one of those men who has never been born at all, but was erected—like a public monument.”
However he chose to imagine himself, this obsessed man produced a prodigious body of work. As artist, ornithologist, naturalist, he helped us learn about and appreciate our continent. This unusual, lovely journey through his life is a book to savor.
Gold Dust by Barbara Klaw
by Donald Dale Jackson Alfred A. Knopf Illustrations and maps 361 pages, $13.95
The California Gold Rush was not only a scramble for riches; it was also a national adventure. It had its anthem—“Oh, Susanna,” in dozens of cheerful and raucous versions—and its own terminology. Those taking the interminable sea routes to San Francisco referred to seasickness as “casting up accounts.” And when a forty-niner had endured great hardship, and learned from it, he had “seen the elephant.” For several hundred thousand young American males, the thought of missing the adventure was intolerable. “A man had to go, to take part somehow, lest he wonder forever what might have been,” Jackson writes.
There was plenty of gold to be had in 1848. In fact, to fail at the mines that year “required an extraordinary combination of ineptitude and bad luck.” But few of those who came in the next two years went home with bulging gold sacks, and many died of cholera before they ever got to the gold fields.
An astonishing number of the survivors kept journals about their experiences—a bonanza from which Donald Jackson has mined this lively history.
