This Civil War novel is certainly no Gone With the Wind. Dense, suggestive, and impressionistic in style, it focuses on the Fish family—Thatcher Fish, a traveling preacher and abolitionist from Delphi, New York; his wife Roxana, formerly of Redemption Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, who travels the lecture circuit with him; and their son Liberty, upon whom most of the action revolves. Dividing the novel into three parts, the author first recreates the atmosphere of pre-Civil War New York, with Liberty, as a child, absorbing his parents’ values, sometimes being ostracized by other children, and, in his loneliness, finding comfort with Euclid, an escaped slave who lives with the family in the root cellar. Liberty’s enlistment in the Union army at the outbreak of the Civil War, when he is sixteen, begins the second part of the book, filled with the carnage of battle, the devastating accidents of fate, and the horrors of hand-to-hand combat. His discovery of the devastated Redemption Hall and his crazed grandfather constitute the final section of this compelling novel, which achieves dramatic strength through the black humor, the pathos, and outrageous behavior of Asa Maury, Liberty’s grandfather.
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As the huge Union Army of General William Tecumseh Sherman burned its way from Atlanta to the Carolinas in 1864 – 1865, it was accompanied by a motley group of freed slaves, entrepreneurs, the dispossessed wives and children of landowners, and even a few turncoats, all of whom saw this army on the march as their protection from the hostile unknown. E. L. Doctorow, in his absorbing novel of this march, focuses on all the marchers—their varied interests, conflicts, fears, and goals—instead of focusing on battles and army maneuvers, creating a powerful and panoramic vision of how civilians, as well as soldiers, responded to the devastation of this terrible war.
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In New Orleans, the Civil War is raging, controversial Union General Benjamin Butler has just turned over his post to his successor, blacks are disappearing from their neighborhoods, horrific murders are occurring, voodoo ceremonies are taking place in the countryside, and terror is everywhere. Some white “philanthropists” have established a program for sending blacks back to Africa, where they will, supposedly, be happier, but many former slaves who wish to stay in New Orleans often seek out their former employers because they are unsuited and untrained for any other employment or they engage in illegal activities. Both blacks and whites are terrified at what the future may hold for them. Into this milieu comes Abel Jones, a major in the Union army who came to the US from Wales, by way of India, and whose rigorous moral code and strict adherence to the best values of the army have brought him to the attention of President Abraham Lincoln.
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