A month or so ago I won an advanced copy of Michael Hemphill’s and Sam Riddleburger’s STONEWALL HINKLEMAN AND THE BATTLE OF BULL RUN from 100 Scope Notes.
The premise of this book for the 5th-8th grade set is that 12-year-old Stonewall, who’s less than enamored of his parents’ Civil War reenactment obsession, gets sent back in time to make sure the war turns out more or less the way it actually did — despite the interference of a time-traveling neo-Confederate. (No, really.)
So it’s basically a fun way to explain to kids what happened at Bull Run. And it is a fun, and well-done, book in a lot of ways — particularly, in Stonewall’s voice and his sardonic commentary on the reenactments.
The problem, though? It’s fundamentally trying to eat its cake and garner congratulations for its abstinence from dessert, too.
What I mean is, Hemphill and Riddleburger make a big point of putting their book on the side of the Union army’s ultimate victory. Well, uh, that’s good. And actually, the most interesting part of the book is probably the slave boy character. The authors have Stonewall try to interact with him like any other 12-year-old, and the slave, whose name is Jacob, just patronizes him like he does every other white person around, which is, of course, how he survives. I’m really glad they didn’t go for some lame feel-good development where Jacob comes to understand that Stonewall isn’t like all the other white people who are casually determining his future.
But. The book’s real hero is… Stonewall Jackson. A Stonewall Jackson who has magically lived through the intervening centuries and turned into a hippie who sees how wrong he was… so we also see what a great guy he was, even though he was really wrong on this one little issue of slavery that was the defining question of his time, and killed a ton of people defending it and other details like that.
And I’m all, come on.
Because I think what Hemphill and Riddleburger (Virginia residents both) are really trying to do is attach themselves to some piece of Confederate nostalgia for Southern “heritage” while disclaiming its racist implications. And I just don’t think they can do that. I’m certainly not saying they’re racists… I’m just saying they’re liberals who are against racism but also seem to want to avoid pissing off some frankly racist parts of the book market and get their book taught in Southern classrooms. Which is, though not just as evil, at least a little bit as annoying.
-->Feed me text
April 14, 2009 at 11:57 am
http://dibblyfresh1.blogspot.com/2009/04/one-lovely-blog-award.html Hey, left you guys an award.
April 14, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Hey, thanks, Sadako!
Emily and I are outrageous blog award recipients who keep forgetting to pass them along to others. Mostly it has to do with the difficulty of coordinating between the two of us. Although, considering that in real life I am someone who is less than stellar at responding in kind to gifts, letters, etc (and Emily is not), you might also just blame this on me.
April 14, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Thanks Sadako! Its true, we’ve been terrible recipients and I feel quite guilty about it. I am willing to partly blame Elizabeth, but it really is absurd how awful we are at managing to talk to each other, given that we both manage to be on the blog all the time.
April 14, 2009 at 7:12 pm
I hear your skepticism about Stonewall Jackson being presented as a sympathetic character… but I’ve recently read 3 biographies of Stonewall Jackson (courtesy of School Library Journal – catch my article in Series Made Simple! No, I’m kidding, really don’t!), and it’s kind of consistent with his background and personality that he might come out as an abolitionist after all was said and done.
Slavery was not the issue with him – he joined the Confederacy out of loyalty to his state. I think on the Southern side it was all about states’ rights – even on the Union side slavery wasn’t the pivot issue until well into the war.
April 14, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Aw, no problem, guys. I love all the interaction on your blog, and b/w yours and mine.
As for this book…yeah, this sounds a bit…awkward. A bit like they are trying to make it uber PC. Like…look, we can still love the South! Hmm.
April 14, 2009 at 11:04 pm
your neighborhood librarian: Thanks for the comment. I’d actually love to read a biography of Stonewall Jackson (and despite your disclaimers, I think I will check out your article in Series Made Simple!). I’ve been wanting to read more about the Civil War; there’s a John Brown biography coming out very soon that I am very psyched about.
I guess at the core of the Stonewall Jackson question is a substantive issue of how to interpret the Civil War, and what does it mean to say it was “about slavery.”
It’s true that early in the war, participants often didn’t express it as being about slavery. I think, though, that there’s no other way to really make sense of it. You had two increasingly different economic and political systems side by side — an agricultural one based on slavery and a wage labor, increasingly industrial system in the North — and compromise increasingly tenuous as the competing interests of each expressed themselves in more and more battles (for example, on whether new states in the union would be slave states or not). Slavery was totally central to this divide, even if that is partially disguised by the reluctance of the North, at first, to give up on the idea that compromise was still possible.
There’s actually been this reaction by some Lefties — I think it’s a reaction to the lionization of Lincoln and the U.S. government more generally — to swing hard in the opposite direction and sort of cynically reject the idea that slavery was the major issue in the war. Emily’s and my ninth-grade history teacher, who was left wing, taught us that the war wasn’t really about slavery at all. In my opinion, that’s a totally misguided way to understand what happened.
So, I suppose my inclination is to judge the historical actors by what side they ultimately put themselves on, more than by the way the way articulated that (especially early on). Along those lines, I really liked this article on Lincoln’s birthday; I’ve always loved Marx’s line about Lincoln being “a first rate second-rate man.” If you judge Stonewall Jackson in the same terms, then I’m not sure how much it matters that the way he expressed matters to himself was from a framework of states’ rights. What do you think?
This is, however, making me see that these questions are sufficiently complicated that I may have been too hard on Riddleburger and Hemphill. But the Stonewall Jackson character does still make me feel deeply ambivalent about the book.
Man, I have to stop writing these dissertation-length comments… (and every blog reader, and especially Emily, says, “YES, yes you do.”)
April 15, 2009 at 10:33 am
Elizabeth: I was partway through reading your comment, and I thought, “which teacher was it that taught us that the civil war wasn’t actually about slavery,” and then I got to your next paragraph. My recollection, though, is that his interpretation was that it was all about economics, and while this definitely didn’t occur to me again, I now think those are actually compatible views, in that slavery was an economic system in the South.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand (the book, I mean), it souunds like there are real flaws, but it also sounds like an interesting book, and any kids’ book about the civil war that portrays something other than the simplistic “north good, south bad, Lincoln freed the slaves” that I recall getting a lot of is welcome. For example, it wasn’t until junior year of high school that I remember learning anything at all about the experiences of southern civillians during the war, or about the divisions among different classes & geographical areas within the south.
April 15, 2009 at 11:02 am
I now think those are actually compatible views, in that slavery was an economic system in the South.
Yes, totally. But that doesn’t change, in my opinion, how wrong he was to insist that “the war had nothing to do with slavery!” It sticks out in my mind because I now think there is a trend sometimes among left-wing people (especially very frustrated left-wing people) to be really cynical about movements in the past. Like, I’ve had people tell me the Civil Rights Movement didn’t change much because there’s still racism today! But I feel like (as a lefty myself — Emily knows this but for any blog readers who don’t), while it’s right to reject the narrative of basic American goodness and progress, you have to start by understanding just how deep the changes have been to even be able to understand what hasn’t changed.
Anyway, the above was going to be all preface to another aside about that teacher, but I think I’m going to make it its own post in the break between my classes this afternoon…
April 16, 2009 at 2:42 pm
[...] Stonewall Hinkleman, or: Can this possibly work? [...]
April 21, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Very cool to see you had a chance to review this one. It never fails to interest me how people have different reactions to books. A thoroughly interesting critique. Keep em coming.
April 21, 2009 at 10:06 pm
Thanks so much, Scope Notes! Your blog is one of my favorites, so it’s nice to hear from you.
By the way, I just started another one I first heard about on your blog — Fran Cannon Slayton’s When the Whistle Blows — and it’s great so far.
May 11, 2009 at 4:16 pm
[...] wrote a rather negative review of Stonewall. What’s good about it is that it resulted in a string of comments which are exactly the sort of comments the book is supposed to generate … especially in [...]
May 11, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Stonewall Jackson — like the Civil War — is pretty complicated. As my co-author Michael Hemphill likes to say … it’s not all black and white, but shades of gray.
For instance, did you know that an African-American church in Roanoke has a stained glass window of Stonewall Jackson?
Here’s the explanation courtesy of my alter-ego, newspaper columnist Tom Angleberger, who tackled this topic in March, 2006, in the Roanoke Times:
—
The… window, as several readers told me, can be found in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church.
This is particularly surprising because Fifth Avenue is a historically black church.
How is that possible, you ask. Reader Graelen Stike has the answer to that, too, with some help from Pam Young at the Roanoke Library’s Virginia Reading Room.
The church’s first pastor, the Rev. Lylburn Downing, wanted to honor Jackson, who had created a Sunday school for slaves and free blacks, Stike explained in an e-mail.
Downing’s parents had attended the Sunday school and, later, Downing was able to go to college thanks to the assistance of Jackson’s in-laws, John and Margaret Preston.
To honor both Jackson and the Prestons, Downing dedicated the window in 1906. (Stike recommended the book “Civil War Tales” by Gary Walker for more information.)
–
Now, personally, I’m not ready to absolve the real Stonewall Jackson … however, in a fictional work, with the aid of time-travel, I was able to give him a “shot at redemption.”
To do this, Jackson is, with Hinkleman’s help, trying to make sure the South loses.
May 12, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Hi Sam,
First of all, thanks for taking the time to engage with my criticism of your book.
On the substantive issue, unfortunately, I remain unconvinced. It doesn’t do much for me that a single black church celebrates Jackson. Bill Cosby’s tirade against black men some years back was enthusiastically cheered by most of the NAACP leaders in attendance, but that doesn’t make it any less of a concession to racism, in my opinion.
More generally, I can see that you’re clearly on the side of the South losing the war (I mean, good!), but I continue to be uncomfortable with the idea of a morally resuscitated Stonewall Jackson, because I think it feeds into attempts to absolve celebrations of “Southern heritage” from their racist content.
Those attempts have become mainstream in U.S. politics, which I think is really backwards and destructive. Howard Dean’s argument about the Democratic Party needing to be the party of “guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,” for example, is to me a clear message that it’s okay to mouth words against racism but craft the message so that it appeals to racists.
It is hard for me to see how a book in which Stonewall Jackson is the hero — even on opposite terms than those for which he actually fought — doesn’t legitimize efforts like this with the idea that he was “really” a good guy who just got it wrong on this issue. I actually think the first paragraph of your reply makes my point; lots of things about the Civil War are complicated, but the question of which side to support, and how history should view the Generals of the opposing side, I think, IS black and white.
I thought your book was very well-written and funny; I wanted to like it, and I would be open to reading other things you/your coauthor wrote. But this is why I can’t really recommend Stonewall Hinkleman.
May 13, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Disclosure: Sam Riddleburger graciously sent me an ARC of “Stonewall Hinkleman” and I was a participant in the recent blog tour promoting the book.
Still, some things to consider …
The authors do take on the “Heritage, not hate” bit. That’s where Senator Dupree gets his start, and he’s still linked with it. It’s pretty clear that the CSA is still being cast as the bad guys.
The redemption of General Jackson is a decent piece of fiction, and it does come with him admitting to having been wrong. He didn’t just survive and become an advocate for equality — he admits to Stonewall that he was on the wrong side and he sees that now. He’s still dealing with the sins of his past.
I don’t see the character of Tom as granting Gen. Jackson a pass on what he supported as a Confederate general, but rather putting forward the notion that a man as intelligent and wise as Jackson could turn from his old ways and embrace change. (I suspect foreshadowing of the Dupree story arc over the future books.) His straightforward confession that he was wrong to back the Confederacy says to me that they’re not dodging the issue, but rather taking it on directly.
May 14, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Hi wickle,
Thanks for your comments. As was further clarified in a brief email exchange, it seems like the Stonewall Hinkleman authors and I actually probably do have a very similar take on the civil war, “heritage not hate,” etc.
I didn’t get that from their book, unfortunately. I’m glad you did, though. Particularly after this exchange, I’ll be very interested to see what develops in sequels. Your Depree arc idea is an interesting one. Could be cool, but I think it’d be hard to pull off well. I’d read it, though.