The Sword in the Mountains

Confederate Veteran
Volume 19, Number 14, Page 90
February 1911

Alice MacGowan, who has written so much and so naturally of the mountain dwellers of our beautiful Southland, has just published through Putnam's a great Civil War story under the above title. Realizing that too many tales dealing with the great conflict have been written from a prejudiced view point, Miss MacGowan has made her story wonderfully impartial. This may be accounted for by the facts that Alice MacGowan was born in Ohio, brought up in Tennessee, and while her father was an officer in the Army of the Cumberland, the fathers of almost all of her associates and her dearest friends of childhood days were on the other side in that struggle. Colonel MacGowan was editor of the Chattanooga Times for more than twenty years, and thirty years editor in Chattanooga. The Sword in the Mountains deals with the siege and battles about Chattanooga, and perhaps no more picturesque war material was offered during the conflict of '63. Chickamauga, which is the great battle piece of the book, came very near being a drawn engagement, the advantage resting on one side and the victory on the other. The valor shown on that terrible field was American not confined to North or South. Pap Thomas, the rock of Chickamauga, who saved the battered remnants of the day for the Federals, was himself a Virginian. Abraham Lincoln's Confederate brother in law, General Helm, was killed on the field of Chickamauga. Altogether the author could not have selected a battle in whose heroic fighting both sides could have felt such equal pride. Her description of the battle, while historically accurate, is extremely picturesque, and survivors who know how the fighting went will find nothing to offend and much to charm them in her presentation. The same judicious intention to represent both sides is shown in the placing of her characters. The hero of the story, Champ Seacrest, an East Tennessee boy, who had gone West, is a young Confederate cavalryman, coming in with the Texas Rangers. But Champ Seacrest's father, Vespasian Seacrest. almost an equally important character in the story, is a mountaineer living on Walden's Ridge, north of Chattanooga, and an ardent Unionist. The boy had run away from home and gone with kin to Texas. The girl he loved still remained with his father on Walden's Ridge, and she too is profoundly attached to the Union, and helped Vespasian to get men through to join the Union army. Champ is cast out by his father in a moment of passion, and Delora, the girl, holds with the old man, yet the hearts of both follow the dashing young grayclad cavalryman, who rides with the 8th Texas Rangers, forming sometimes a part of Wheeler's "Ragged and Reckless," sometimes with Forrest or another. The loving touches with which the war time life in its old fashioned Southern elegance is delineated, as in the home of the Winchesters at Chattanooga, will be especially appreciated by those who remember those times. The scene in which Champ is taken for a spy in Mrs. Judge Winchester's house, the deathbed marriage between Evelyn Winchester, the lovely young Southern girl, and a young Federal officer who has fallen desperately in love with her these are things most of us could parallel in our personal experiences or in the stories that have come down to us. A romance is not expected to weigh ethical questions or set forth the right or wrong of a situation, and "The Sword in the Mountains" makes no attempt to argue the case for either side. The reception of the news of Lincoln's assassination in Chattanooga, the midnight court martial, the various skirmishes and rescues are all parallel from events in history, though no one character or incident is taken exactly as it stood. But the description of the burning of the Federal wagon train in Sequatchie Valley that was to sustain the besieged town when Wheeler's desperate band undertook what even Forrest thought they could not do, the figure of its gallant leader, with a mere touch of Braxton Bragg's personality, is accurate. In the preface Miss MacGowan expresses some little fear that her lack of prejudice may end by pleasing neither side, yet it would be a captious critic indeed who would wish to import even a touch of bitterness into a book which celebrates so enthusiastically the valor of Americans, the courage we draw from a common ancestry, and which we must all hope to bring to bear upon a common destiny. While the book does not portray that astute knowledge of military matters that the veterans expect, it will entertain those who are unfamiliar with them, and it is intensely thrilling.