Tigers in Franklin
I couldn’t say how many Civil War regiments there were. It’s probably into the thousands, and I could have picked any one of them. So why did I plump for the 125th Ohio, Opdycke’s Tigers as they came to be known, as a home for my fictitious Private Shire? And how then did their glorious story – more fully revealed to me on a visit to the Carter House – bounce me from penning what was planned to be a standalone novel into writing a trilogy?
When I first conceived of Whirligig, it wasn’t ‘Book One of Shire’s Union’, it was just Whirligig. I knew I wanted it to be an odyssey of sorts: an English boy, Shire, obliged to join the Union Army and fight his way into the South to keep a promise from his childhood. So the regiment he joined certainly needed to be Union. I also wanted to include an event which fascinated me; the fight up Missionary Ridge outside Chattanooga, a spontaneous charge where the Union rank and file surprised not only the Confederates atop what was thought to be an impregnable 300ft crest, but also their own command who hadn’t ordered it at all. Any regiment I used was obliged to have fought on that day.
That narrowed it down considerably, but a quick count through the order of battle lists over two-hundred and twenty-five infantry regiments present for the Union that day. I set about finding a new home for Shire by going through the blue regiments one by one. I don’t think I’d tried more than a dozen before I hit the Tigers. It was love at first sight. Not only did they have a proud record, but also a wealth of contemporary sources. I quickly discovered the regimental history, Opdycke’s Tigers, by Charles T. Clark, Captain of Company F. He detailed not only the great battles but also the day-to-day life and events of the men in the regiment – so important to a historical fiction writer - from their formation in Cleveland late in 1862 to mustering out in 1865.
Better still were the letters of the 125th’s irascible colonel, Emerson Opdycke. Here was a civilian soldier with a hugely high opinion of himself (some of it justified) who had poured out his thoughts and experiences in letters to his wife, Lucy, which she’d preserved following his death and ultimately for Glenn V. Longacre and John E. Haas to publish in The Battle for God and the Right. They are wonderful letters, full of the sort of unbounded American self-confidence that fuelled the officer class on both sides. Perhaps only letters to a wife could be so shamelessly forthright. Sadly, Lucy’s letters back are lost, but I imagine in most of them she would have told Emerson to calm down, to stop putting the noses out of joint of officers and generals more senior than himself. Opdycke became my eyes and ears in the army. Well-connected beyond his rank, he would always know so much more than Private Shire who often needed to be a suitably disorientated hero.
The time came for me to fly across the pond and go to the places that mattered to the 125th in Whirligig. I’d planned a road trip from Chicago to Atlanta. An early stop was Dover, Tennessee, where as a green regiment the 125th arrived a day after a battle, in time to see the bodies still on the field. Quite a shock for Shire. Then it was on to Franklin where the 125th’s first ever action was to push Rebel cavalry out of the town in February of 1863. I was interested by their time there that spring, so well recounted by Charles Clark and Opdycke. How did Union soldiers get by in a largely Confederate town? I visited Fort Granger which the regiment had helped to build. Then I arrived at the Carter House. No Civil War buff can go to Franklin and not visit the Carter House. It changed everything for me.
At the time I knew very little about the 1864 Battle of Franklin except that Opdycke and the 125th were in the thick of it. The battle was, until relatively recently, not so widely written about as other battles less bloody or less critical to the end of the war. I took the guided tour of the Carter House and, standing in their cellar come dining room, listening to tales of Tod and the Carter family, it became clear as day to me that I had to write more than one book. I didn’t know then that my first novel would take three years to complete. Otherwise, I might have run screaming from the cellar. But I was hooked. After their time in Franklin in the spring of ‘63, the 125th eventually came full circle back to Franklin after almost two years of hard fighting further south. They were christened the ‘Tigers’ for their service at Chickamauga, fought their way up Missionary Ridge and right through the brutal Atlanta campaign, only to first shadow and then run from Hood all the way back to Williamson County, until they throw themselves into the climax of the battle at Franklin.
The trilogy, now complete, launched me on many other trips to the States, to all the battle sites where the 125th fought, to Trumbull County where the regiment was raised and where Opdycke is buried, to Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie where Tod Carter was held prisoner, back again and again to Chickamauga and back to Franklin. I never tire of it and thank my lucky stars that a cocktail of happenstance and serendipity led me to the 125th, and to the Carter House.
Shire’s Union
Reference books for the 125th Ohio Infantry.
Opdycke’s Tigers – Charles T. Clark – Spahr & Glenn – 1895
The Battle for God and the Right – The Civil War Letterbooks of Emerson Opdycke – Edited by Glenn V. Longacre and John E. Haas – University of Illinois Press - 2003
Yankee Tigers – Ralsa C. Rice – Edited by Richard A. Baumgartner & Larry M. Strayer – Blue Acorn Press 1992
Yankee Tigers II – Edited by Richard A. Baumgartner – Blue Acorn Press – 2004
Tigers in Blue - Closing the Trilogy
On my laptop, the 27th of June, 2013, shows as the last edited date on the original draft of the first chapter of the Shire’s Union trilogy. Putting pen to paper (or more likely pencil to notebook) will have preceded typing the words into Word, so the effort will have started long before then. I couldn’t tell you the conception date of book one, Whirligig, though I do know that the trilogy was first imagined in the Carter House basement in Franklin, as far back as 15th May, 2011.
Suffice to say, that with the publication of the third and final book of the trilogy, Tigers in Blue, on the 8th December, 2023, Shire’s story has taken well over a decade to imagine, craft and refine. It’s a long time to live with my characters, real or imagined. And they haven’t wandered far since I dotted the last full stop. There are faces, vistas and looping scenes that live alongside my memories of family days out, of our three daughters (my non-fiction trilogy) of holidays and weddings. Chapters from the books are spliced with real memories of my visits to the places that mattered to the story, recollections of my trans-Atlantic jaunts themselves a little jumbled as I’ve criss-crossed Ohio, Georgia and Tennessee so many times. I visited Franklin, Tennessee, in the course of writing each book, central as it is to the trilogy which weaves in and out of the true adventures of the 125th Ohio. And Chickamauga, Georgia, draws me back every time I’m stateside, as do the never-ending ridges of the Appalachians, their fading horizons the inspiration for the book covers as much as they were for the stories.
There is a parting of sorts, though. I’ll never again sit down with the squad around their camp fire waiting for someone to tip the whiskey bottle, or drift with Tod down the Ohio River; no more journeys for Clara along the Copper Road; no more rides for Opdycke and Barney. But once in a while, recollected banter between Shire and Tuck will doubtless still draw from me a smile or an inner chuckle, as if they were old friends of mine. I guess they are.
Shire’s Union
Back with the Tigers
The stop wasn’t on my itinerary, but I find my way here nonetheless. It’s four years since I was in America and eight years since I was at Chickamauga in the very north of Georgia, just across the Tennessee line from Chattanooga. I’ve finally made it out to check details for my third book, Tigers in Blue, the last in the Shire’s Union trilogy. The battle of Chickamauga is the epicenter of the first book, Whirligig. It’s where the 125th Ohio were christened the Tigers. This place matters to me, but I still wonder at being drawn back here.
My itinerary took me on a clockwise loop out of Nashville, on to Knoxville and then down to Decatur in Alabama, where the fastest route was via Chattanooga. Why not stretch the extra ten miles south and overnight close to the battlefield? It would be rude not to. I’d digitally booked my motel at short notice and gone bargain basement to keep down the trip cost. It was mostly basement. They had no knowledge of the booking, but there were a couple of rooms left. There was a comical series of visits to the desk to get in, get a cleaner room, understand the wi-fi code (3 trips) and finally to confirm would they like the fridge in my room left open to defrost, as I’d found it? It didn’t affect my mood. I dined at Sonic Burger and looked forward to walking the battlefield in the morning.
The weather had been in the nineties so I’m out early. There are more deer than dogwalkers out under the low sun. Aside from one 30mph state road and the smaller tour roads themselves, the battlefield is more of less as it was. Though there’s an argument to say it was even more unspoiled before 120,000 soldiers turned up to do battle here in September of 1863. The Widow Glenn, whose tiny house was commandeered as a headquarters and burned out during the fighting, would certainly have thought so.
Familiar with Chickamauga, I have no particular agenda and just enjoy the time. Like visiting an old friend. I find my way to the places that mattered to the 125th, but otherwise let my mind wander. It gets extra roving privileges in a place like this and I begin thinking on my connection to both here and to America. But for Covid I would have been here two years ago. Despite all the changes in the world, America seems to be having the same arguments as when I was last on this side of the pond (this based on my scientific sample of news outlets and talking to strangers in Nashville bars). It’s still Trump vs the establishment, race-relations more than ever, still the gun lobby verses the glaringly obvious (just a different school massacre). We have our own protracted issues in the UK, some very similar, and it makes me think how poor we are in our western societies of actually reaching a point of decision. The arguments have long since taken precedence over solutions. Exhibit A: Our clown minister was recently pictured raising a glass and toasting a room full of other drinkers on a date where he had confirmed to parliament that there was no illegal party during lockdown. After seeing the photo for the fiftieth time that day, I watched a news anchor proceed to ask the question, ‘Did the PM therefore lie to parliament?’ Well, yes. Of course he did. You just showed the proof! He’s bang to rights. Yet we’re now so trained to consider the other point of view that we’ll entertain it even if it’s plainly false and patently ludicrous. Whole nations are now confidently basing their propaganda on the fact that western media will listen and broadcast lies as often as you want to tell them. No decision, no move forward.
Maybe it’s why I find history is so attractive. We can debate on the finer points, but for the most part it’s a done deal and you can see the outcome. Chickamauga, in and of itself, settled little, except for the 37,000 men killed, wounded or missing. But put together with the thousands of other civil war engagements (mostly not on Chickamauga’s scale) two things that mattered were decided. The Union would be preserved, and state-sanctioned slavery would end. Given the war cost an estimated 750,000 lives, it makes you wonder if a little prevarication is such a bad thing. As a decision-making process, war is clearly flawed. But decades of arguments, compromises and elections failed to deal with the fundamental wrong of human bondage.
The historical resolution I enjoy while walking the gentle slopes, touching the cool stone of the monuments, finding a bird’s nest in one of the cannon, is all from a safe distance. During the long years of the war, people would have been as we are now. More so, in fact. Frustrated, frightened, angry, wanting the world to move on. When I leave Chickamauga for the three-hour drive down the Tennessee Valley to Decatur, I avoid the news channels and listen to sport instead, something else that usually ends in a result. Unless it’s cricket.
Disaster Emergency Committee – Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal
Shire’s Union, books 1 and 2.
I can't Imagine
It’s an unsettling time. The true meaning of that depends on where you live. For me, in England, every time I think about the news, my gut feels like it’s been dropped from the white cliffs of Dover. In Ukraine, it’s more literal. They are giving up their homes, losing their lives, facing bleak choices we’d believed consigned to the last century. It forces me to ask, why write about a war in America that started over one-hundred and sixty years ago? There is war now.
My workshop group met this week and my contribution was a chapter from Tigers in Blue. I’ve just completed the second draft of the final novel in the trilogy. When I sent them the chapter to review, Europe was still at peace. Two families have to think whether to stay or leave as Hood’s Confederate army crosses into Middle Tennessee and sweeps north. Their emotions are difficult, for each a mess of attachments to people, to place, to their own tangled pasts. Of course, as a writer you go hunting for those emotions, set scenes where they are most raw and exposed. What to leave and what to load in the wagon, a tearful farewell at the end of the drive, the sound of the first cannon in the distance. I’m attached to my characters, and in writing about those partings – some which I know to be fictionally final – I might get a little watery eyed. It’s all so safe from one-hundred and sixty years away.
I don’t have to imagine those scenes any more. I can watch them every day. Ukrainian men in Krakow, saying goodbye to their families and climbing onto an air-conditioned bus to go and fight. A bewildered mother with her children stepping down from a twenty-first century train in Berlin, nervously approaching a couple who hold up a sign: Room for three. Stay as long as you need. The forlorn wagons that clogged the river crossings in Tennessee are replaced by Hondas, Volkswagens, Skodas, but they’re still more composed of desperation than hope. In 1864 the Confederate government passed its third conscription act, for all men aged seventeen to fifty. The war was three years old by then. The Ukrainians asked men 18 to 60 to stay and fight within a matter of days from the Russian invasion.
Many people tried long and hard to avoid the American Civil War. They really did. It had been lining itself up for decades: conflicting vested interests, misaligned hopes and dreams, juxta opposed views of what constitutes a human being. In the end, those differences firmed up on either side of the young states’ borders and the fighting began. I’m not so sure the current war was as inevitable. It’s rooted in one sour man. We shouldn’t beat ourselves up over our incredulity that war could come to Europe in this century. That was a view based in hope. Where would we be if we planned based on despair? We should know evil when we see it though, whichever century it’s living in.
The workshop group were positive about the chapter, my friends citing how it chimed with the here and now. I’d rather it didn’t. I’d rather be left with the challenge of evoking the past, summoning it ghost-like into the reader’s mind to fade gently away when they close the cover and go about their peaceful lives. I’d rather be left to imagine.
Disaster Emergency Committee – Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal
Shire’s Union, books 1 and 2
Writing from the Soul
In modern, popular culture, the word soul is used at least as often in its musical context as it is for considering an eternal life beyond the earthly realm. The idea of a soul, the precious core of our being has, in many places, fallen out of fashion. But I would argue that, regardless of your religious outlook and what you write about, taking the time to consider the wellbeing of your character’s soul can lend extra depth to your writing.
I’ve completed the first draft of the last book of my Shire’s Union Trilogy. As I approached the last few chapters it became increasingly emotional for me. Not only was I looking to complete story arcs for Tigers in Blue, I was also finishing character arcs that span all three books. I have spent eight years with some of these characters. Their outcomes matter to me a great deal. Not all of them have made it this far. Whether or not those remaining survive to the end of the story, I have to do my best to understand their state of mind this far into the war. For my real historical characters that means working with what can be gleaned from the historical record and putting myself in their well-worn shoes. For my fictional characters, it feels just as important to be true to the people – to the souls – I have created on the page.
Of course, to most people of the mid-19th century, looking after their soul would have been a daily preoccupation, as natural as we today might look to eat well or to exercise. Prayer and religious service, in preparation for the life to come, would have been part of their routine as it still is for many. Life was seen as a burden or a trial for what was to come, and here was a civil war – an extreme time. For the soldiers, death was a daily companion, whether from conflict or more often disease. Civilians could see their towns burned to the ground or find the aftermath of a battle left rotting on their doorstep. They lived in constant fear of a fateful letter arriving to tell them a husband or son was dead. It was a time of great displacement. Homes were lost, lives were inverted. Living such a precarious existence, my characters would have an overt and spoken concern for their souls. I intend to reflect that as I review my first draft and begin the enjoyable process of revising the novel.
Understanding how they would act and what they would say is part of what we do as authors, but beyond that, I believe that consciously considering the health of every soul can allow a writer to reach deeper into their characters. Whether you think of the soul as a concept or as a real thing, it allows you into the core of a character, to their essential self, to the centre of their shaped being from where they look out onto the world. If you can touch that as a writer, then you’re about as fully in their perspective as it’s possible to be.
All stories are about how people are changed by their life-experience. Without change, there is no story. My characters have been in a vicious, fratricidal, all-enveloping four-year war. None of them can remain unaltered. They have buried friends and family, lived through the chaos and bloodshed of battle, gained love and lost love. If they were the same people at the end of three books as they were at the start, then I’d be a poor writer. Shire, my main character, has steadily amassed a collection of physical scars. He has a tear shaped burn on his cheek gained from a riot in New York; a pink dot on his chest from a spent bullet at Missionary Ridge; a healed wound in his calf taken in the winter of 1864. But what are his scars on the inside? Today we might talk about mental health or PTSD. Back then they might have talked about a wounded soul. How much of the simple-hearted boy who left England is left when Shire lines up for his final battle? By this time, the soldiers were exhausted, both in body and spirit. Some were no longer prepared to fight, too damaged to face going home even if they could. Others were prepared to throw themselves recklessly into death rather than survive a lost war. People were shaded towards good and towards evil. None were unscarred. They had come to know both the savage and the better angels that live in men’s souls.
Once more unto...
It’s not easy writing battle scenes (as Kermit might sing). They are a crisis in the story; possibly the piece of history that inspired the book; the climactic moment of danger for the characters I’ve sent into the breach. I’ve reached this point once more while writing Tigers in Blue, my hands held anxiously above my keyboard, like a soldier with an itchy trigger-finger before the charge. Well, sort of.
There’s a danger as a writer when you hit the action button. It’s as true of suspense or horror genres as well as historical fiction. You’ve spent fifty-thousand words crafting your characters and their story arcs, intertwining their lives, getting the reader to love them or hate them or both. You’ve even managed to set up the visuals, subtly familiarising the reader with the setting where it’s all about to kick-off. The tension is at breaking point. Then you describe one googly-eyed monster or get lost in the blood and guts and everything dissipates in the unreality you’ve just described.
At a line-by-line level it’s hard to portray an epic battle without falling back on the same descriptions. There’s only so many ways you can say bang. The tenth time you talk about ‘sheets of flame’ or the ‘thunder of cannon’ it ceases to have an impact. A good thesaurus helps. I spill words onto my whiteboard from historical accounts to fit in as and when they suit. And I’m constantly reaching for a new way to describe using emotion that will connect, or detail that will engage, the reader.
You might think the solution is to describe it as it really was, and certainly that’s always been my intent. But there are problems there too. For a start, how the hell would I know? I’ve done my best. Flown to battlefields, dressed up in Union blue, camped under the stars, learned to load and fire a Civil War rifle, chased Rebels through the woods. I got pretty excited in a twelve-year-old sort of way. But I never feared for life or limb, never watched my friends bleed out. And there were only a few dozen of us… Also, if described how it really was, I’m pretty sure my main character Private Shire would have next to no idea what was going on, not in the smoke and the chaos and the hand to hand fighting where his universe is the man in front who’s trying to kill him. If you attempt and give a broader view of events, some level of detachment can sneak in. You have to be inventive. Find moments for characters where the big picture is on show and then zoom back in to their immediate world.
I’ve read no end of personal accounts but annoyingly, when it comes to the real nitty-gritty, they often use words like ‘indescribable’, or say that the ‘vivid impressions and terrifying scenes were indelibly stamped on the minds of the participants.’ It’s understandable why their minds may shy from the detail, but it doesn’t help me get to the reality. Do readers even want the true reality or would they rather look away or watch with one eye closed?
Ethically, you can tie yourself in knots. I’m writing about real events, sometimes using characters who lived through these extreme moments in history and a fair number who never made it to the other side. Do I know how they felt when they got up for breakfast that day, as they got into line, as they killed or were killed? In some cases, I’ve spent years with the ghosts of these people. I’ve visited their homes and their graves. I owe them a debt of respect. I want to get this right.
In the end it comes down to best endeavours and trusting my imagination. If I’ve done all I can as a life-long civilian – removed from the time I’m writing about by a century and a half – then I’m as prepared as I can be to step off into my personal writing battle. You have to turn it around. I’ll likely get some things wrong, but by entering their world, portraying the sort of challenges they faced, trying to reach for their possible emotions, I am honouring them, becoming a part of the collective effort to understand.
I must go. The trumpet has sounded, the flags are unfurled and waving high. The first cannon has boomed!
Shire’s Union, books 1 and 2.
Battle Town (short story)