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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Vivid picture of the embattled Confederacy, November 25, 2000
Anyone who either read "The Killer Angels" or saw the movie "Gettysburg" will remember Colonel Fremantle as the pleasant, urbane, mildly dweeby British officer hanging about the camp of General Longstreet. This is the diary kept by that British officer during the spring and summer of 1863. It was a popular success upon its publication, while the war was still going on, and has remained one of the most vivid, engaging portraits of the Confederacy as it struggled for its existence during the summer that all but doomed it. Fremantle entered the Confederacy through Mexico. The opening third of his diary recounts his travels from Brownsville to San Antonio, back east to Houston, and then north and east into Louisiana. Fremantle's portrait of raw, brash, violent Texas would be worth reading on its own, even if it weren't followed up by the account of his travels from there to Virginia. To reach the Army of Northern Virginia, Fremantle traveled the entire length of the Confederacy, noting its struggles, its privations, and its intense will to survive. He arrived in Virginia just in time to follow Lee's army into Pennsylvania and watch the battle of Gettysburg from tree top, camp fire, and horseback. Fremantle is a brisk, vivid, observant writer. He writes a lean, sharp prose, has a good eye for detail, and clips through his account at high speed. As a result, his diary is compulsively readable from end to end, as well as being frequently quite funny. Americans seen through aristocratic British eyes look often like Twain's wilder characters. His book also, however, serves to correct and refine commonly held perceptions of the South. He notes, for example, how furiously the Southern women wished the defeat of the Yankees; the women come across as more violent and implacable than the men in the field. He also corrects the tendency to see the Army of Northern Virginia as finished or desponding after their defeat at Gettysburg. In July 1863 the loss seems to have appeared to Lee's men as a temporary set-back, not at all the beginning of the end. "Lee's Miserables" entirely expected to come back later and return to their old habit of thrashing the Army of the Potomac whenever they met it. The Southerners appear in the diary, in fact, more worried about Vicksburg than about Gettysburg, and were forced to credit U. S. Grant with being a scrappy fighter, if no great tactician. They could not begin to see or imagine his decisive role in their future. The diary ends with the election of 1864 still in the future and Fremantle convinced that the South will live to win its freedom. Given how much Colonel Fremantle was able to observe and report in the few months he was on American soil, one can only wish, after reading his book, that he had arrived in spring 1861 and been able to hang around the entire four years. It is certainly one of the liveliest accounts of the Confederacy at war this side of Sam Watkins' unrivaled "Co. Aytch."
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by Edward Porter Alexander
by Winston S. Churchill
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