Customer Reviews

UNDER THE SOUTHERN CROSS

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An excellent book. Very well written and made to order for those who have an appetite for more Civil War history. It is well-organized in content and truly a remarkable record of the Civil War written from the perspective of a Private in the Confederate army who was educated and had the ability to put his insights down in excellent form. Col. Johnson has done a superb job of editing the material left by Private Bradwell. It is a treasure-find for those interested in Southern history, in particular those of us in South Georgia.

I first read this book several years ago and it prompted my own interest in researching family history in the civil war. After doing so and reading many soldiers' accounts and their personal correspondence and diaries at the Emory University Manuscripts and Rare Books Library, I recently re-read Col Johnson's book. Under the Southern Cross stands up extremely well. Col. Johnson has done an amazing job of editing the various Bradwell papers into a very readable chronological narrative. The book makes no pretense of being a broadly researched history; it is a narrative of the war as seen through the eyes, experiences and opinions of Bradwell. The book rings with accuracy when read in juxtaposition with other sources. The details of an ordinary soldier's camp life in the early chapters and the matter of fact narrative of this soldier's experiences with the cold, heat, wet, hunger, sickness and battlefield experiences, from The Seven Days to Appomattox, are intensely interesting. There are many high altitude, all encompassing histories of the major civil war engagements but few books written from the perspective of a soldier on the front line. That this one was actually written by a soldier and delivered to us in a laboriously edited form by Co. Johnson is a real treat for anyone interested in civil war history, especially regarding the Army of Northern Virginia.

The editor has culled together a great number of articles written by Isaac Gordon Bradwell for the "Confederate Veteran," mainly after World War One. Bradwell was in his eighties when these were published and he perpetuates all the myths put forth by the Confederates as to why they lost the War Between the States. For example, Bradwell states that the greatest soldiers in the world are Anglo-Saxons, especially southern Americans. Their Yankee foes were a mongrel race who needed alcohol in order to make them fight. The few band of pure Americans took on the entire world; no wonder they eventually lost. While his stories of what he actually saw and did during the war are valuable, Bradwell fills in his history with stories about what he never saw, that fit the Lost Cause line. On page 68 he states that there is an urn in Cold Harbor containing the bones of 18,000 Yankees who were killed in the surrounding area (Gaines Mill in 1862 and Cold Harbor in 1864.) There actually is an urn-shaped monument in the Cold Harbor National Cemetery that commemorates some 800 inknown US soldiers buried beneath it. The editor does not bother to correct Bradwell's assertion. Two pages later he states that Confederate attacks at the Battle of Malvern Hill drove the Yankees from their artillery and captured the hill, only to be driven back by fire from the Yankee gunboats. The truth is that Federal artillery broke up each Confederate assault before they got halfway up the hill and that gunboat fire was as dangerous to the defenders as to the attackers. Again, the editor does correct what Bradwell says. In fact, the only editorial material is genealogical/military data on the Confederate soldiers mentioned in Bradwell's text. The editor simply does not edit. Therefore, Bradwell's narrative simply is not very useful, because the reader must be able to separate fact from fiction. Bradwell's style is entertaining and there is a lot of valid information in the text. It could have been made much better with an editor who actually edited the material. The editor was a career Air Force officer. As a result, Bradwell's stories are the ramblings of a childless old man who wants his version of history to be published. Given the racial tension of the 1920's, I'm sure he found an audience with the dwindling number of Confederate veterans and southern readers who had to validate the reasons for attempting to destroy the United States and establish a slave republic.