The Battle-Ground / by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

[Kim Allen Scott]

This book is part of a new series by the University of Alabama Press that purports to be reprinting the “classics of Civil War fiction.”  The problem with that lofty goal is that there are very few works that rise to the level of “classics” beyond Andersonville and the Red Badge of Courage.  The Battle-Ground certainly falls short of classical stature, but it is an easy read from a bygone era; not the Civil War era, mind you, but America’s gilded age of 1902 when people began to look back at the orgy of fratricide of 1861-65 with a strange sense of romanticism that in many ways continues to the present day.  This novel tells the story of two Virginia families living on adjacent plantations, and the love of Daniel Mountjoy for his neighbor Betty.  Daniel is the spoiled grandson of the Major, who was estranged from the boy’s mother when she ran away to elope with an adventurer years ago.   Betty is the accomplished sister of the lovely Virginia, whose physical beauty initially attracts Dan until he realizes his infatuation was based on nothing more than her looks.  It takes four years of war, with Dan serving as a suffering, gravel-crunching infantryman, for him to realize that Betty is his gal.  The whole story is filled with stereotypes, including the rendering of black characters speech in an almost incomprehensible phonetic dialect, but there are at least faithful historical references that give it an air of authenticity.  This would be a good book for anyone interested in how forty years later Americans chose to remember the worst thing that ever happened to them.