Z is for Zouave

At the outset of the Civil War, the familiar blue vs. gray color scheme hadn't been fully adopted. Northern troops had uniforms of various colors, including gray, and many Southerners had no uniforms at all. Some units had elaborate outfits, and none were more famous than the Zouaves.

The Zouaves took their colorful uniforms from North African French colonial troops. Most Zouave units were from the North, like the New York unit that wore the uniform pictured here. There were some Southern Zouave units as well..

Zouaves got a lot of attention for their flashy duds, and some fought as light infantry like their North African namesakes, rather than in the closed formations used by regular units.

Zouave units are popular at reenactments, and one of my fellow Osprey Publishing authors, Robin Smith, reenacts the Civil War as part of the 5th New York Duryées Zouaves. So. . .he's an Englishman pretending to be a New Yorker pretending to be a North African in the French Army! It takes a special breed to write for Osprey. :-)


Photo courtesy Matthew G. Bisanz.

Connect with me beyond this blog!

As the April A to Z Challenge winds down, I want to thank all the people who've started following me. I've found tons of new blogger buddies out of this! I'll be reading and commenting on your blogs a lot more closely in May. Right now I'm still trying to get through the list of 1500+ participants. If you're one of them, you know EXACTLY how time consuming (and fun) that is!

Anyway, I'd love to connect with you beyond this blog. We can talk books on Goodreads, follow each other's tweets on Twitter, and you can see all of my news and online articles on my Facebook fan page. If you want to chat privately, feel free to email me at the address on the sidebar.

Tomorrow: Z is for . . .?

Y is for Cole Younger

Thomas Coleman “Cole” Younger grew up on a wealthy farm in Missouri. When the Civil War started, he joined the rebel bushwhacker band of William Clarke Quantrill. In those chaotic days, his father was murdered by a Union militia, and this gave him a burning hatred of the North.

When the South lost he found he couldn't put the war behind him and was a founding member of the James–Younger gang with fellow bushwhackers Frank and Jesse James and other ex-rebels. He participated in the gang's first robbery, that of the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri, in 1866. Cole went on to a successful life in crime, sometimes teaming up with the James brothers and sometimes working with his two brothers, Jim and Bob, or other outlaws. The "gang's" membership was always fluid.

Cole hit stagecoaches, trains, and banks, and his activity included Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, Iowa, and West Virginia. He had a reputation for being practical and level-headed, which put him at odds with the impulsive and showy Jesse James. The gang came to disaster during the robbery of a bank at Northfield, Minnesota in 1876. During the shootout and ensuing chase, three robbers were killed and everyone else wounded. Only the James brothers escaped. Cole and his brothers were captured and sentenced to life in prison.

After serving 25 years, Cole was released. For a while he was a traveling tombstone salesman, then he co-managed a Wild West show with Frank James, and also took time to lecture on the subject of how crime doesn’t pay. In 1903 he wrote the book The Story of Cole Younger by Himself: An Auto-biography of the Missouri Guerrilla, Confederate Cavalry Officer, and Western Outlaw, a remarkable piece of self-puffery that's fun to read but shouldn't be taken as anything close to history.


Here's a weird bit of trivia: in the 1957 movie The True Story of Jesse James, Gilligan's Island Skipper Alan Hale, Jr., plays Cole Younger. Having that actor forever associated in my mind as the Skipper made his appearance in this western more than a little distracting! Here's another bit of trivia, the actor's father, Alan Hale, Senior, who looked much like his son, played Little John in two versions of Robin Hood: the 1938 Errol Flynn version and the silent 1922 version.

There, I've managed to link Jesse James and Gilligan's Island. My life is complete.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia. The entry for Cole Younger in Wikipedia is peppered with errors. Read a book about him instead.

X is for ex Civil War Soldiers who couldn't stop fighting

Yeah, this is a bit of a stretch for "X", but looking at some of the other participants in the A to Z Challenge it appears I'm not alone in this.

Anyway, as we all know, veterans can have some issues. This isn't a new thing, and in the nineteenth century psychology hadn't been developed and nobody knew the term "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder". Plenty of Civil War veterans had it, though.

Considering that such a high percentage of the American male population had seen some wartime service, and many of them had seen some incredibly bloody battles, it's no surprise that American history for the rest of the nineteenth century was seriously affected by wartime experience.

Take, for example, the rise in organized bands of outlaws right after the war. The James gang. The Younger gang. There were dozens if not hundreds of them. The majority of their members were former Confederate bushwhackers, those who had seen and committed the worst that war has to offer. It was hard for these folks to put the war behind them. Harder still, considering the laws that were put into place in some states that kept former Confederates from being fully integrated into society.

Then there were all those feuds in the Wild West. When you look at many of them, like the Baldknobbers or the Arizona War, you find that the bulk of the people on one side were former Union soldiers and the bulk on the other were Confederate soldiers. Violence begets violence, and civil wars are the most violent of all since the same nationality is both winner and loser, hero and villain.

W is for Waning Days of the Civil War

Robert E. Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, is often held up as the end of the Civil War. It certainly took the fight out of most of those rebels who still had fight left in the them. A string of surrenders came after that, most notably General Johnston's Army of Tennessee on April 26. Confederate President Jefferson Davis fled, hoping to somehow continue the Confederacy from Mexico, but got captured May 10.

West of the Mississippi River, things moved a bit more slowly. At first, many Confederates thought that news of the surrenders was a Yankee trick. Realization of the truth eventually dawned, however, and General Kirby Smith surrendered his Department of the Trans-Mississippi on May 26. The last rebel to surrender was General Stand Watie in the Indian Territory, shown in this Wikimedia Commons image, who didn't give up until June 23. By this time there had been several more battles and skirmishes in various parts of the South, although things were rapidly winding down.

Despite all this, President Andrew Johnson (who came into office after Lincoln was assassinated on April 14) didn't feel secure enough to issue a proclamation officially ending the war until August 20, more than four months after Appomattox!

A Fine Likeness gets its first public reading!

As I mentioned earlier this week, I had my first reading of A Fine Likeness. The city of Madrid sponsored me as part of their annual Noche del Libro (Book Night). On Monday I read at J & J Books and Coffee, a great little English-language used bookshop/bar that’s a popular meeting ground for expats and locals.

I was scheduled to read at 6pm, which is very early for an event in Spain, especially on a weeknight. When I got there, I saw only two guys quietly drinking at the bar and I got the feeling they weren’t there for me. A friend of mine was alone downstairs looking at the books. Meanwhile, I’m sipping on warm water and trying not to cough, a legacy of a rainy London pub crawl from a week before. Not an encouraging start!

Well, nobody expects you to start on time in Spain so I waited an hour. By that time, the bar had filled up nicely and so I started my reading. I read the entire first chapter, which is short, introduces several main conflicts for one of the protagonists, and gives a feel for the historical era. I then read a few shorter passages to give the POV of the other protagonist. When I finished I got warm applause that did my soul good.

Then I opened it up for questions. This is always a bit scary because you never know what to expect. I’d placed a ringer in the audience to ask a question. There’s nothing worse than asking if anyone has any questions and being met with dead silence. Luckily, several people had questions and some were quite good. One guy asked, “You mentioned you’re a history writer. How do you feel about using real historical figures in your fiction?” Damn good question, and one I’ll devote a blog post to later on.

In all I sold ten books, mostly to people I didn’t know, and I got to see some old Madrid friends I don’t see often enough. All in all, a great evening!

If you happen to be in Madrid, J & J’s has a stock of my books!

V is for Vicksburg

When the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg surrendered to General Grant on July 4, 1863, the Confederacy was cut in half. Vicksburg controlled the Mississippi River, and with it in Union hands, there would be little communication between the Confederate states to the east of the Mississippi and those to the west of it.

My special interest has always been the Trans-Mississippi Theater. By this time, the best Confederate troops from Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas had been mostly drawn off to the killing fields of the east, leaving behind a weak army that included many conscripts. You'd think this would make those states easy pickings for the North, but the Union high command was also drawing off troops from places like Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa.

So when they were cut off from the rest of the Confederacy, western Confederates did not give up hope. True, they were undermanned and undersupplied, but they controlled a huge swathe of territory and kept up raids and minor campaigns against the Yankees until the very end. At least some of them did. The loss of Vicksburg was a huge blow to morale, and desertions increased in the Confederate ranks. Some of the roving bushwhacker bands I've mentioned before were actually AWOL soldiers, sometimes even from both sides, banded together into roving gangs of thieves.

Painting courtesy U.S. Army Center of Military History.