Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades
Susannah J. Ural, Osprey
Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades words of Susannah Ural, “the story of how American families endured their nation’s is, in the bloodiest conflict.” The wide range implied in her topic gives Ural’s book emotional force: We hear the voice of every strata of American society—North and South, soldier and civilian, free man and slave— from Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis to unknown slaves and soldiers. Through the judicious inclusion of letters, diaries and newspaper accounts, Ural allows the participants to tell their own stories.
As South Carolina mobilized for war, for example, a 22yearold college boy boasted to his father of his new status, saying, “I am now Lieutenant Taliaerro Simpson, quite an honorable title for an unworthy junior.” Some Northern papers, such as the Democratic Times of Chicago, sounded more strident than Southerners. After Lincoln’s inauguration, a Times editorial declared that “Lincoln has resolved to force his doctrines upon the point of the bayonet….It must be civil war within thirty days.”
Kate Carney, a Virginian who was also an ardent secessionist, found herself regretting her prowar stance when she saw a boat carrying a company of young volunteers from Mississippi, writing, “I could not but feel sad when I wondered how many of that number would return to home & friends….”
Ural unfolds the story chronologically, and our anxiety builds as the conflict drags on. But she occasionally introduces a dollop of wit to ease the ever-increasing tension. “I have heard,” President Lincoln wrote to his new commander of the Army of the Potomac, “Fighting Joe” Hooker, “of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.”
Ural’s selections are earthy and distinctive; a novelist might draw rich material from many of them. Some soldier’s primary fear wasn’t dying but shooting other men; one parent explains the paucity of Christmas fare to the family by saying that “Santaclause had gone to war”; a newspaper reporter is driven to find the family of a soldier who died without identification on his body (the reporter succeeds).
Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades is handsomely illustrated with nearly 60 photos and images, some in color. Throughout, Ural’s well-crafted narrative complements her subjects. “They fought,” she points out, “as Hector had, for a world where a son could be ‘a better man than his father’ and ‘a joy to his mother’s heart’….They waged America’s Iliad, embracing the fate that ‘no one alive has ever escaped,’ with a hope that their children and their children’s children could live lives of peaceful freedom on either side of Mason’s and Dixon’s line.”
Originally published in the April 2014 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
