Fort Dick

Knoxville 1863

Description

Gettysburg held. Vicksburg has fallen. Now Rebel flags ring Knoxville in East Tennessee. Gen. James Longstreet, Lee's warhorse, means to wrench this railroad hub away from the occupying Union army. To do it his ragged and starving men, veterans of Gettysburg such as Barksdale's Mississippi Brigade, must climb the icy, red-clay walls of Fort Sanders. Inside are the remnant of the New York Cameron Highlanders who are on half-rations and have never won a battle. Yet they have special faith in the young West Point artillery lieutenant who leads them. In Washington, President Lincoln waits for news. He sees the struggle as one more key to preserving the Union, freeing the slaves, and victory in the Civil War.

Knoxville 1863 is as much history as fiction, drawn from the few available histories of the little-known, seldom-chronicled Battle of Fort Sanders, as well as the actual memoirs, diaries and letters of the survivors.

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-09-03
Summary: "The real deal"

Knoxville 1863 is a must-read for Civil War buffs wanting to relive the experiences of the various factions involved in this battle. Dick Stanley uses the unusual method of several first person narratives, fictional but extremely well researched, to provide a detailed and realistic account of the failed Confederate attack. His characters include the Unionist widow of a Rebel officer, Confederate privates from Mississippi and Georgia, a Yankee rifleman from a NY Scots regiment, a young Southern gun sergeant from the 'Boy Battery', and a sergeant from Massachusetts. Through these diverse eyes and thoughts, the reader sees the horror, despair, grit, and rare humor of that awful time.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-04
Summary: "Revealing the battle"

It is with some trepidation that I've opened Knoxville 1863. My most hated subject in school and afterward was history, especially the part dealing with specifics of various wars, their battle maps, their homicidal commanders and their no less homicidal leaders. The sentiment spread forth and, as a result, I rarely if at all read any books dealing with military history.

Anyhow, my trepidation had mostly to do with my fear of being obliged to go through another boring military history book and then feeling obliged to make appropriate noises in order to satisfy the author's ego and sensitivities. Boy, was I mistaken...

The book starts, surprisingly enough, with Leila Ellis (or Mrs. Clayton Ellis as was acceptable at the time), widow of a Confederate officer Clayton Ellis, visiting a First Lieutenant Samuel Nicoll Benjamin of the Union (!) army with an offering of a dinner. The plot thickens from the first page, I warn you.

And then the book, after a rather unhurried start, grips the reader. I know almost nothing about this specific war and I am not certain that I shall ever invest more time in its study. But there is no doubt that learning about the unimaginable level of deprivation and suffering and, at the same time, the valor and the sacrifice of the soldiers on both sides cannot be forgotten soon, if ever. And learning about a brilliant military mind opposed to amazing lack of military intelligence is a revelation to a layman.

Well, I wouldn't be the spoiler and, aside of saying that I enjoyed the book very much and learned from it a lot, so buy the book here and enjoy it!

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-01
Summary: "Entertaining, enlightening Civil War fiction"

Knoxville 1863 deals with the Battle of Fort Sanders, November 29, 1963. One of a number of battles in the Knoxville Campaign, a small number of Union troops occupying the high ground of Fort Sanders successfully repelled Confederate troops in a bloody, one day encounter, incurring few losses themselves, but inflicting many upon their assailants. It was hardly a turning point in the Civil War, but it is a good example of the type of warfare practiced at the time, and in Mr. Stanley's hands, a fine example of what the times felt like to those involved.

The chapters are narrated by a number of participants, civilians and soldiers on both sides. Meticulously researched as explained in an afterword, most of the characters and details of the battle are accurately portrayed. Only a couple infantrymen, artillerymen, and townspeople are his creations.

The result is a highly readable account of one of many brutal battles in a brutal war, the effects of which remain with us today. Scholars of the Civil War should enjoy this novel. For the reader with general interests but not necessarily a historian, Knoxville 1863 is an excellent, accessible way to deepen one's understanding of a crucial time in our nation's history.

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-07-30
Summary: "Knoxville 1863"

My wife and I had been on car trips. She read Knoxville 1863 aloud as we journeyed. We both enjoyed it. The novel makes that awful conflict very present and real. I've visited the book's website, knoxville1863 dot com, as well as Googling for info. Interesting to find that "Bleak House" still exists. Good work.

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-07-19
Summary: ""I was still young enough to be pleased by an officer's compliment""

Dick Stanley writes the history of a little studied battle from the point of view of several participants, both North and South, military and civilian. He writes in the vernaculars of the various people, sometimes with more success than others, but always with respect for the person and with a keen understanding of his or her motivations and experiences.

The quoted heading here has just the right touch, I think, of a old soldier looking back on one of the most important days of his life, still proud of his participation but with a touch of cynicism. Stanley brings the honesty to the regret of a Southern gunner that all of his efforts go to naught because of the poorly made shells he is forced to fire. Time after time in this novel I found myself cheering for one side, then the other, then regretting the horror and waste of the enterprise.

Stanley's afterword adds a very useful overview to the entire novel -- it benefits from the immediancy of each individual's point of view, but there is no overview of the entire battle during its course. Stanley is very thoughtful in describing not only the difficulties of his researches, but also the scant consideration the events of that battle received from other historians.

Stanley has continued to build on the honesty and accuracy of his novel by creating a very interesting blog, with photographs and other human interest elements. I was delighted to read other reviewers with much more military knowledge than my own writing that Stanley's accounts were well founded in fact.

The book works very well as a Kindle edition; the scale and topography are small enough that more detailed military maps are not really necessary to understand what happened.

Robert C. Ross 2010