In 1861, James B. Griffin left Edgefield, South Carolina and rode
off to Virginia to take up duty with the Confederate Army in a
style that befitted a Southern gentleman: on a fine-blooded horse,
with two slaves to wait on him, two trunks, and his favorite
hunting dog. He was thirty-five years old, a wealthy planter, and
the owner of sixty-one slaves when he joined Wade Hampton's elite
Legion as a major of cavalry. He left behind seven children, the
eldest only twelve, and a wife who was eight and a half months
pregnant. As a field officer in a prestigious unit, the
opportunities for fame and glory seemed limitless. Griffin,
however, performed no daring acts, nor did he inspire great loyalty
in his men. Instead, he unknowingly provided a unique and
invaluable portrait of the Confederate officers who formed the core
of Southern political, military, and business leadership.
In A Gentleman and an Officer, Judith N. McArthur and Orville
Vernon Burton have collected eighty of Griffin's letters written at
the Virginia front, and during later postings on the South Carolina
coast, to his wife Leila Burt Griffin. Extraordinary in their
breadth and volume, the letters encompass Griffin's entire Civil
War service, detailing living conditions and military maneuvers,
the jockeying for position among officers, and the different ways
officers and enlisted men interacted during the Civil War. Unlike
the reminiscences and biographies of high-ranking, well-known
Confederate officers or studies and edited collections of letters
of members of the rank and file, this collection sheds light on the
life of a middle officer--a life turned upside down by extreme
military hardship and complicated further by the continuing need
for reassurance about personal valor and status common to men of
the southern gentry. In these letters, Griffin describes secret
troop movements in various military actions such as the Hampton
Legion's role in the Peninsula Campaign (details that would
certainly have been censored in more recent wars). Here he relates
the march from Manassas to Fredricksburg, the siege of Yorktown and
the retreat to Richmond, and the fighting at Eltham's landing and
Seven Pines, where Griffin commanded the legion after Hampton was
wounded. Throughout, as Griffin recounts these most extraordinary
of times, he illuminates the most ordinary of day-to-day issues.
One might expect to find a Confederate officer meditating on
slavery, emancipation, or Lincoln. Instead, we are confronted by
simple humanity and simple concerns, from the weather to gossip.
Monumental historical events intruded on Griffin's life and sent
him off to war, but his heartfelt considerations were about his
family, his community, and his own personal pride. Ultimately,
Griffin's letters present the Civil War as the refinery, the ordeal
by fire, that tested and verified--or modified--Southern upperclass
values.
With a fascinating combination of military and social history, A
Gentleman and an Officer moves from the beginning of the Civil War
at Fort Sumter through the end of the war and Reconstruction,
vividly illustrating how the issues of the Civil War were at once
devastatingly national and revealingly local.
General
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