Soldiers of the South

SLAVERY, its immorality and its legacy, shape and constrain the image of America's most lethal conflict--its Civil War. Yet the Civil War served as more than the military midwife to abolition.

Some historians argue that the conflict blasted away the remaining social and institutional barriers to American capitalism. Others say the war lay the seeds for decades of Southern poverty and deprivation. Still others describe it as a long step in a national march towards homogeneity, toward a cultural state in which most regional differences have died, while the lowest standards live on.

In Confederates. Thomas Keneally slides around discussions of institutional change while clinging to the basic currency of fiction--the individual. Though Keneally depicts many of the war's most studied battles, he resists the temptaion to offer an overview. He plants characters in the battle of Antietam, where America lost as many men in one day as it did during its whole engagement in Vietnam, but he describes the slaughter only from the perspectives of individual soldiers. While the authors of other recent, successful war novels, such as Shogun, Trinity, and War and Remembrance, use the biography of a central character to hold readers, Keneally explores the Confederate experience with several sharply focused and intertwined vignettes.

CONTEMPORARY SOURCES often refer to the Civil War as the rich man's war and the poor man's fight. It is the heart and mind of the South's poor man that Keneally explores inConfederates. He describes the soldiers of Virginia in 1862--already accustomed to the lice which infest their ragged uniforms, to the diarrhea which attacks their bowels. They have established their own social hierarchy as new soldiers yield to crotchety veterans and all share a degree of good-ol-boy autonomy. They see their side as the "democratic army," in which the soldiers elect all of their officers except generals and orders drift down through the ranks only as vague suggestions.

But as Keneally's story, and the war, move on, stability and independence vanish. He illustrates the end of autonomy in the Confederate army by focusing on the draftees, men too poor to buy their way out of conscription. Soldiers in the Virginia regiments, suddenly no longer heroes for their land, become prisoners of the Confederate cause. Back home, the Southern women, who began the war as loyal and self-sufficient matriarchs, lose faith and strength. Keneally's heroine succumbs to lust and commits adultry.

FINALLY, DEATH overcomes Keneally's characters: the war consumes men entirely:

It was poor Hans Strahl, stumbling innocent in blue smoke, who happened to be fair in line with the mouth of one of those cannons just when a charge of grape went off into his chest...As one ball of grape tore Hans's head off, others burst it into fragments and hanks of his dark hair were scattered wide. His entrails were scattered over the hillside, his left leg sundered into small lumps and his right thrown away to one side amongst Texans and strangers.

Two of the book's central characters--a British war correspondent and a Confederate nurse--spy for the Union. Each believes that the South will fail and that the war is a pointless tragedy. Though they betray information on the size and location of Confederate forces, the Union army in Virginia fails to respond in time. The fighting plods on; the war captures the nation.

Keneally seldom discusses slavery, yet his book describes bondage. Confederates is about a war's ability to enslave, about bondage to a misguided cause which has long outlived the Confederate States of America.