WAR IN THE MOUNTAINS

A detailed history of a Confederate artillery unit.

In his nonfiction debut, Askew reflects on how he was first inspired to write a history of the Macbeth Light Artillery unit during the Civil War, due to his familiarity with his own family history: His great-grandfather had fought in the conflict and received a severe head injury—and, according to family lore, he’d been saved by a doctor who’d placed a silver dollar in the hole in his skull. The author eventually came to believe that much of what he’d learned about the Civil War was “half-truth and myth.” While doing some research, Askew came across a cache of newspaper articles that were pseudonymously written by Lt. Hazel Furman Scaife, a veteran of the Macbeth Light Artillery. After reading Scaife’s comment that the “Macbeth Light Artillery has an unwritten history that must be wrested from oblivion by the surviving members of the company,” the author decided to take it upon himself to write this history. The book offers a detailed account of the unit as it traveled around the Asheville, North Carolina, area in the last year of the war. Askew follows the men on boring marches, during their encampments in town and field, and into combat, always paying attention to the men’s moods and the weather. Askew also consistently echoes the point of view of his principal source: “Most stories of conflict depict good against evil, protagonists versus antagonists,” the author writes at one point. “While these concepts are blurred in war, the Confederates in Western North Carolina knew the villain in the drama being played in the mountains and his name was [Union Army Col.] George W. Kirk.”

The intensely local flavor is one of the book’s more notable qualities, as is Askew’s skill at bringing the day-to-day life of an artillery unit to life. Time and again, thanks to the author’s granular research, readers will feel as if they’re standing right there with the men of the Macbeth: “They followed an old mill road, quite steep and rugged and after struggling with the cannons to the mountain top had to secure the gun carriages with ropes gripped by teams of men holding the conveyances in check ‘to keep them from running over the horses.’ ” Askew thoughtfully adds an overlay of historical awareness to the account—noting, for example, the moment that the disbanded Confederate soldiers pass the Cowpens, a battle site where, as the author puts it, the soldiers’ “dreams of Southern Independence had been crushed.” His extensive research appears sound and careful, and his book joins a large bookshelf of similarly specific regimental histories. Readers of such histories will note Askew’s own argumentative stances on larger Civil War issues, and many will take issue with them; he asserts, for instance, that “slavery was an important factor in the War Between the States, [but] it was not the definitive cause of the conflict,” which he sometimes refers to as “WBTS.”

An exhaustively detailed account of the movements of the Macbeth men, as told from their point of view.