Stories of home and war

The Battered Stars by Howard Coffin; published by The Countryman Press of Woodstock, Vermont; 415 pages with bibliography and index; $30.

reviewed by Paul Lefebvre

Several months ago the noted Civil War historian and battlefield guide Edwin  Bearss told a meeting of the Northeast Kingdom Civil War Roundtable that from an old infantry man's point of view there are only two types of people in the world: those who have been shot at and those who haven't.

The adage is kin to the often repeated generalization that no one who hasn't been in combat can understand or describe it. Modern war, unfortunately, frequently  blurs the distinction between soldier and civilian, and the American Civil War from 1861-1865 is arguably history's first total war in that it targeted civilians  and their property as in Sherman's march through Georgia and the Union's destruction  of the Shenandoah Valley.

While the North never suffered such depravation, the modern war came home to  civilians there in photographs and in lengthy casualty lists published in newspapers  that made them wince and grieve and sometimes question if the price was really worth it.

Thanks to Howard Coffin, we now have a sense of what the war meant back home  to these folks who never heard a shot or fired a gun at an advancing battle line or had their barn and crops burned by enemy troops. The ebb and flow between homefront and battlefield is dramatically portrayed in Coffin's new and ambitious book, The Battered Stars. The book deals with Vermont's role in the fourth  and bloodiest year of the American Civil War: 1864. Moving back and forth between  soldier and citizen, relying primarily on letters and journals, Coffin takes us into a time in history when the face of modern war is just beginning to emerge.

"Jane we have got to make up our minds to give up our friends that have gone into the army," wrote Olive Cheney of Stowe in a letter to her daughter on May  22. "It will be a miracle if their lives are spared," she added, speaking of her four sons and her daughter's husband, all whom had gone to war for the Union.

"We are expecting to have to make another charge on the breastworks today, but the boys do not crave the job at all," wrote Private Edwin Hall of the Tenth Vermont to his parents on May 13. "This is the 10th day of the fight and we have been under fire every day. There was a Reb bullet just whizzed past my head. Guess I'll lumber to the rear..."

By the spring of 1864 roughly 25,000 Vermonters had gone to soldiering, leaving  about 300,000 of their kinsmen behind to tend the cows, labor in the factories, and do whatever was in their power to do to make a soldier's life away from home bearable. While farmers became soldiers, women became providers seeing  to the needs of their households and their loved ones, off in the distant South and often fighting in strange-sounding American places like Antietam, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor. They did this by providing the soldiers with articles like the 21 pair of flannel drawers made by the ladies of Brattleboro in the winter of 1864 or the 80 sewing kits complete with New Testaments that were gathered by  the women of Burlington and sent south.

The Battered Stars is the third book Coffin has written about Vermont's  role in the Civil War. Only this time around, Coffin, an ardent preservationist  of Civil War battlefields, shows how amidst the great sacrifices of war, life  trundled on back home.

"A rough, scrawny, coarse, ill-shapen cow is often a noble milker," he quotes from a 1864 newspaper article on "How to Choose a Cow." "Long legs make too  long a gap between udder and milk pail, and long legged cows are seldom quiet  feeders, but wander about too much."

Still news of the war crept into every nook and cranny, even those as taboo  for the day as a gay relationship between two men, one of whom in this instance  keeps a diary.

As he lay with his head in his lover's lap, William Henry Harrick of St. Johnsbury  — who served as a band member in the Third Vermont and sings at soldiers' funerals back home — listened to his mother worry about the possibility  of a military draft and thought: "Oh dear, I wish she could see something more than the dark side of war."

By 1864 the war had become very dark with little of the dash and glory that lit up the skies when the flags first unfurled three long years ago and every  young man, north or south, feared it would be all over before he could enlist. Three plantings and three harvests later and the war was still going on with  no end in sight. For Vermont, May of 1864 would bring the darkest days of all. They would come during two back-to-back battles that were as savage and as cruel as anyone then or now could imagine a battle to be. The first was called the Battle of the Wilderness and was fought in northern Virginia on May 5 and 6.  It was followed by the Battle of Spotsylvania, fought only a few miles east  of the Wilderness on the eighth and continuing in varying degrees of intensity  until the thirteenth.

The battles represent the opening rounds of what is known as the Overland Campaign, under the command of the country's highest rank soldier, Lieutenant General  Ulysses S. Grant. Coffin's book follows that campaign from it opening battle, the Wilderness, to the stalemate and siege at Petersburg 40 days later. The campaign cost the Union some 50,000 casualties, but despite the enormous losses for so little apparent gain, Grant succeeded in trapping the Confederates behind  their fortifications. Roughly nine months later the strength of his arms would prevail at Appomattox.

For the Vermont soldiers and citizens, no victory would assuage the price they paid in May 1864. And here Coffin provides a memorable glimpse into what must have been for all Vermonters — whether they laid among the dead behind  earthworks or waited at the general store for the Boston Post's latest casuality  list to come in by the stage — a time of terrible uncertainty and anguish.

"We are having a hard time and we have been under fire for 8 days and am liable to be as many more before we whip Lee's forces but we are gaining a little the balls are flying over my head as I write but I have been lucky so far," wrote Private Tabor Parcher in a note to his wife in Waterbury on May 13.

From Weathersfield Helen Wheeler wrote to her husband in the Tenth Vermont: "I am feeling anxious about you at this time but God will protect you if it  is his will. Oh my darling think of us talking and thinking of you and praying, be of good cheer God will have it all right in the end."

After three weeks of fighting, Vermont's losses in killed and wounded came in at roughly 2,250, according to Coffin.

"It is impossible to tell how long the fighting will last," wrote Lieutenant Chester Leach to his parents, "but if we keep at it much longer as we have,  there will be nobody left to fight."

In rendering the story, Coffin has adopted the questionable style of providing  no footnotes. But in fairness to him, his primary sources are always introduced  by name, and he has compiled an ample bibliography and index. As a writer Coffin  is a first-rate narrative historian, and those who enjoyed his first book, Full Duty: Vermonters in the Civil War, may be disappointed that he doesn't provide more of a narrative in his most recent work. Still, these quibbles aside, Coffin has delivered a genuine read that captures the dread and apprehension that modern  war instilled in Vermonters both at home and in the field during a spring in 1864.