Frances Hunter

blog of the author To the Ends of the Earth

 

Frances Hunter's Journal
January 2007

January 30, 2007: Love and War

Love and War by John Jakes is the sequel to North and South, which introduced readers to two young West Point cadets and their families. Orry Main is the scion of a South Carolina rice-planting family. George Hazard is heir to a Pennsylvania ironworks. The first volume was a ripping good time, following the two men through the trials of West Point, the Mexican War, and the sundering of the nation and their friendship by the onrush of the Civil War.

Love and War, which follows Orry and George and their families through the war, is just as exciting, with romance, lust, and amazing action sequences straight out of an old-time movie serial. But compared to North and South, the novel is fresher, more surprising, and much, much darker.

The book is massive—over 1000 pages—and includes by my count at least 10 major storylines, almost all of which are skillfully rendered and emotionally compelling.

George and Orry are now men in their maturity, grappling with the viciousness and folly of politics in both Richmond and and Washington. Other storylines take you inside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Wade Hampton's South Carolina cavalry, the C.S.S. Hunley submarine, a Confederate prison, the Union nursing corps, a schoolhouse for black orphans, and even an assassination plot against the president—Jefferson Davis, that is. By ferreting out lesser-known episodes of the war and then peopling them with passionate and realistic characters, Jakes brings the Civil War to life in remarkable degree.

The aspect of the book that struck me the most was how unpopular the war was on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. There is no hint here of the idealism of Glory or Gone with the Wind. Instead, Jakes writes of a cold, hard, brutal slog in the field, terrific blunders, greedy profiteers, and peace-at-any-pricers wearing both blue and gray. To the participants in the war, there was no hint that anyone would ever regard it as anything other than a disaster that should have been avoided.

Love and War isn't perfect. The book, like the war itself, gets off to a slow start, and a couple of the storylines are clinkers. One of the key villains, an old classmate of Orry and George's, is tiresomely evil, yet seems far too incompetent to pull off the mischief he creates here. And the one major African-American storyline is awkwardly drawn, with a saintly couple squaring off against a slathering villain straight out of Birth of a Nation.

Overall, though, I was very impressed with Love and War both as an amazing feat of storytelling and as an insightful and original look at the Civil War, with obvious relevance to today's political and military dramas. Love and War is simply an outstanding historical novel.

January 22, 2007: Roundup Magazine

We are walking on air after getting our latest review from Roundup Magazine, the publication of the Western Writers of America. Check it out:

Who shot Meriwether Lewis, His Excellency, Governor of the Territory of Upper Louisiana on the Natchez Trace in October, 1809, barely three years after he, along with his friend and co-captain, William Clark, were national heroes? Or did anyone shoot him? Was it murder or suicide? What turned a strong, beloved hero into a debt-ridden, fawning drunk? Did the ambitious, amoral James Wilkerson attempt to ensnare Lewis in his traitorous plans to form a separate empire, or is that another historical rumor that lacks an underpinning of fact? If true, how did Lewis react? Did he turn down Wilkerson and write Clark, warning his old friend of Wilkerson’s treachery against the United States?

This first novel is a blending of fact and fiction that can be described as a historical whodunit, but it is so much more. It is the story of a desperately ill, desperately depressed man who has accomplished great things, and who seeks his own redemption at a terrible cost. It is also the story of friendship between Meriwether Lewis and William Clark; friendship betrayed between William Clark and his slave, York; and love between William Clark and his wife, Julia. It is the story of bravery, of honor betrayed and honor redeemed, and the undeniable truth that great men possess great flaws as well as great strengths.

Frances Hunter’s characterization of Lewis, Clark, York, Julia, and Wilkerson are superb, truly astonishing accomplishments for a first novelist, or any novelist for that matter. Her settings are lovingly described, and the skillful plotting that blends the facts that we know, the facts that we suspect, and the fiction that is the mark of a great imagination, is remarkable. To Liz and Mary Clare, sisters writing under the name of Frances Hunter, bravo and welcome to two bright new stars of Western fiction!

January 18, 2007: Clark's Map

William Clark was the cartographer, or mapmaker, of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Like most people even of the gentleman class back in those days, Clark was largely self-educated. In the field of mapmaking, he possessed a gift that he developed into a series of remarkable maps.

During the expedition, Clark produced dozens of sketch maps of the terrain through which the Expedition passed. In 1804-05, while encamped for the winter at Fort Mandan in present-day North Dakota (brrrr!), Clark used his sketches to produce a comprehensive map that was sent back to Thomas Jefferson that spring along with the natural history specimens and Indian artifacts collected by Meriwether Lewis. Clark's 1805 map is much more than a recording of the Expedition's journey. It covers western North America from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean, and includes southern Canada and northern Mexico. Clark drew on information from earlier maps, traders, Indians, and "my own observation & idea." In this view, an easy water passage to the Pacific Ocean, long dreamed of by Jefferson, is a feature.

The following winter at Fort Clatsop on the Pacific coast, Clark drew another elaborate map updated with that year's findings.

In 1810, several years after the return of the Expedition and following the death of Meriwether Lewis, Clark spent a great deal of time drawing a master map of the entire expedition. This work, Clark's masterpiece, was engraved and included in the published account of the journey that finally appeared in 1814, long delayed by Lewis's tragic demise and then the war with Great Britain.

Clark's map was the first to show the complexity of the terrain of the western United States. Like all maps, it is a political as well as a geographic document. Clark's map acknowledges and documents the Indian presence in the West meticulously, as befits his role as primary American diplomat to the tribes west of the Mississippi. It also ignores all Spanish and British claims to the West. Other explorers and traders would rely on Clark's map, which he kept constantly updated, for the next fifty years.

There's a wealth of fantastic information about this aspect of the Lewis & Clark Expedition at Discovering Lewis & Clark. And Rivers, Edens, and Empires is a great online exhibit from the Library of Congress showing Clark's maps along with a number of others and discussing how the geography of the West was revealed and understood by Lewis and Clark.

January 10, 2007: Quakers and Vikings

Quakers were a much more prominent group in early America than they are today, and their influence shaped the country in countless ways. Like most people, I unthinkingly accepted the stereotype of Quakers as prissy do-gooders wearing gray coats and funny hats. So I was floored when I recently ran across the story of their origins in the book Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer's massive study of the cultures of early America.

The Quakers came to America from a place in the north of England called the Pennine Moors. This setting is familiar to most of us as the setting for the Brontë sisters' novels Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. In modern times, this area became home to gritty industrial cities such as Manchester and Leeds, but back in the 1600s it was a thinly settled, desperately poor land of small farmers and shepherds. These people ground out an existence on steep and forbidding mountain slopes that still held the last untouched forests in England. They were willing to tolerate the perils of wild wolves and boars and the notorious cold mists and deadly "wireglass" ice of winter. All they asked in exchange was to be left alone. Strangers were not welcome here!

It turns out that, more than any other part of England, this area had been heavily colonized by Vikings. The Norsemen here became second-class citizens after the Norman (French) conquest in 1066. Even after the Norse language died out among them, the people retained a distinctive manner of plain, blunt speech. They resisted the courts, schools, churches, and political institutions of their conquerors, preferring to retain Norse customs such as open assemblies, individual ownership of land, and relative equality of males and females. They even had their own manner of dress, consisting of homespun suits and dresses of a color called "hodden gray."

It was from this Scandanavian tradition in a poor and isolated region of England that radical sects multiplied in the 17th century. Among these were the Quakers.

I never would have guessed in a million years that the warlike Vikings were the ancestors of the Quakers, who became so well known for their pacifism.

January 3, 2007: Early Methodism and the Natchez Trace

One of the baddies in Ends is an outlaw named Tom Runion. While not a lot is known about the real Runion, we decided to make him a phony Methodist preacher, a type that had become well-known on the Natchez Trace by 1809.

Founded in 1744 by John Wesley, the Methodist church was a reaction to the conservatism and restraint of the Church of England. The Methodists pioneered big religious revivals. For example, they held a huge camp meeting in Kentucky in 1801, in which thousands of people listened to powerful, plain-spoken preaching and engaged in days of unrelenting singing, testimony, and prayer.

This movement was "of the people," and viewed by the establishment and tastemakers pretty much the way evangelicalism is still viewed today. Without a doubt, Lewis and Clark, Thomas Jefferson, and other gentlemen would have rolled their eyes at the ideas and behavior of the Methodists. For more humble folks, though, the movement had a powerful appeal. Methodism offered a personal God, salvation through your own efforts, and the preachings of unschooled ministers who were ordinary people, not upper-crust elite.

When they weren't having revivals, the Methodists had a system of circuit riders to travel around the hinterlands, minister to the faithful, and seek converts. Eventually, Methodism would be enormously influential in American history. It gave birth to a number of new religious denominations, utopian movements, and social movements undreamed of in Lewis and Clark's time, such as abolition, pacifism, and women's rights. As any follower of current events knows, the consequences of this religious revival are still playing themselves out.

Unfortunately, then as now, good-hearted people proved susceptible to phony ministers more interested in robbing them of their pennies than in saving their souls. A real-life "preacher" who helped inspire our portrayal of Runion was John Murrell. As detailed in Robert Coates's The Outlaw Years, Murrell was a slave trader, horse thief, and wanna-be revolutionary who once bragged of his time on the Trace, "I only robbed eleven men, but I preached some damn fine sermons."

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