Book Reviews

Book Review -A book review by Diane and David Clark

“We thrashed our way out of the thicket atop a promontory many rods short of the cow path.  From there, we could see a mass of our men, pushed by advancing fire to the very brow of the bluff. They hesitated there, and then, of a sudden, seemed to move as one, like a herd of beasts stampeded. Men rolled, leaped, stumbled over the edge. The drop is steep: some ninety feet of staggered scarps plunging to the river…. I crawled to the edge of the promontory and dangled from my hands before dropping hard onto a narrow ledge all covered with black walnuts.” –Mr. March’s description of Ball’s Bluff, October 21, 1861.

If you’ve read or even seen a film version of the much beloved classic American novel Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, you know that it is, among other things, the story of the impact of the Civil War on a tight-knit New England family. You may have wondered what the literary family’s high-minded father was doing when “Marmee” is unexpectedly called away to Washington DC with news of her husband’s grave illness. Well, wonder no more, Geraldine Brooks has answered that question in her brilliant novel, entitled March, the name of the father of the famous “little women”.

March is the story of a New England abolitionist, vegetarian and chaplain, who on October 21, 1861 finds himself barely surviving the horrendous defeat at Ball’s Bluff, when the Union troops are forced off the cliffs and into the cold swift currents of the Potomac by the Confederates. As Ms Brooks says, “I choose to put Mr. March in the battle of Ball’s Bluff simply because the terrain of that small but terrible engagement lies just a few miles from my Virginia home, and because many soldiers from Massachusetts first ‘saw the elephant’ there.”

The character of Mr. March is based on Louisa May Alcott’s father, the transcendentalist philosopher, A. Bronson Alcott.  As Louisa May Alcott modeled the March girls on herself (she, of course is Jo), so Geraldine Brooks employed the journals, letters and biographies of Alcott’s father Bronson as a basis for the main character in her novel. In flashbacks there are scenes from before the War, with Thoreau, Emerson and the New England Underground Railroad. The March house and Marmee are the driving force in one of the stops on the way to Canada and freedom for escaped slaves. This activity was against the law and a very dangerous game to play, with armed bounty hunters coming north to reclaim their “property.”

Bronson Alcott was a radical, even by the yardstick of nineteenth century New England, which was a hotbed of new ideas, from reappraising the nature of God to the dietary benefits of graham crackers.  Our Mr. March is a stubborn idealist and radical who often finds himself in opposition to the Union soldiers to whom he is chaplain.

One of the most striking sections of the book takes place at Oak Landing, a historical experiment in privately leased cotton plantations that employed former slaves, “contrabands”, to raise cotton in the Deep South. This portion of the book is based on Thomas W. Knox’s Camp-Fire and Cotton Field, with its tragic ending of a raid and destruction by outlaw Confederate raiders.

Well researched, March is a fascinating read and the author has used many primary sources to present a realistic and compelling novel of the Civil War. Geraldine Brooks became interested in the Civil War while exploring battlefields large and small with her husband, Tony Horowitz. Horowitz is the author of the well-known memoir Confederates in the Attic, and an extreme Civil War buff.