My friend Dan Philips, a wine importer, likes to drag me into discussions of the Civil War. Though he lives in California, Dan has roots in the South, eats and drinks his way through the region often, and reads voraciously. Dan is smart. And he asks great questions. But I rarely take the bait. The reasons are complicated.
As a boy, the Civil War was too much with me. I grew up in the home of Alfred Iverson Jr., a Confederate brigadier general. On summer afternoons, my friends and I dug for Confederate relics in the side yard of our Federal-style farmhouse, beneath the stooped shelter of a magnolia. I shoveled into the red clay, sure that I would find a rusted saber, a disemboweled pocket watch, a pitted brass button from the great man’s butternut waistcoat. What I found mostly were marbles made of marble, left behind by some other child, from some other time.
A dull bronze historical marker, commissioned by the state of Georgia and erected alongside our gravel driveway in the mid-state hamlet of Clinton, told the story of Iverson’s Civil War exploits. According to the text I memorized when I was seven, he fought for the Union in the Mexican and Mormon campaigns, served the Confederacy with valor at Gettysburg, was wounded during the Seven Days Battles, and, in a brilliant feat of deception at the Battle of Sunshine Church, tricked Union General Stoneman into believing he was surrounded, capturing the officer and more than 500 of his men.
Only recently have I learned that the Iverson narrative was, like many of the history lessons Southern schoolkids like me learned in the 1960s and ’70s, a Redemption-era whitewash of a far uglier reality.
Iverson claimed early career victories. Another success came late. In between, it was mostly briars and bullets and ignominy. At the battle of South Mountain, Federal troops forced his brigade to retreat. At Antietam, his troops turned tail and ran. At Chancellorsville, Iverson took a spent minié ball in the groin. He hit bottom at Gettysburg in July of 1863. On the first day, Iverson sent his North Carolina brigade to battle without cover from skirmishers. Crossing a field of ripening timothy, they stumbled on opposing troops hidden behind a stone wall. The Federals rose and fired so quick and heavy that at least one of Iverson’s soldiers took five shots through the head before he hit the turf.