Volume 52, Number 16 · October 20, 2005
Patriotic Gore
By Christopher Benfey
The March
by E.L. Doctorow
Random House, 363 pp., $25.95
Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, the men with the exotic names who turned the Civil War decisively in the North's favor, are sometimes credited with putting an end to the romance of war. The once popular Southern novelist John Esten Cooke lamented that in modern warfare as conducted by the Union forces, 'where men are organized in masses and converted into insensate machines, there is nothing heroic or romantic or in any way calculated to appeal to the imagination.' One looks in vain among the Northern victors for the flair and dash of the Confederate heroes—the wily guerrilla raider John Mosby, celebrated in a poem of Melville's, or Jeb Stuart sporting an ostrich plume in his cap.
Review, 3721 words
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