Book Description

James Street has a gift for sifting the ashes of history, adding a portion of romance and adventure, a pinch of this and that, and compounding his own formula for historical novels. This is his best and he uses the battle for Vicksburg, the saga of the Confederate ironclad Arkansas and the Union ram Queen of the West for a story as big as the Mississippi. The epic of the Arkansas, built in the wilderness by men who hauled her iron and guns hundreds of miles by ox wagons, is one of the most amazing and little-known dramas of history. She struck terror from Illinois to New Orleans and became a ship that men whispered about; a ghost ship whose guns kept blazing although there were no men aboard her. Mr. Street gives us a galaxy of characters in this book. Most of the action revolves around three Confederate sailors; Wyeth Woodward, gunner's mate, who hates war; Simeon St. Leger Granville, a British soldier of fortune whose lust for battle is exceeded only by his lust for drink, and Vespasian Gillivray, the lovable Cajan, a descendant of the Creeks of Mr. Street's Oh, Promised Land. The fourth member of a quartet you never will forget is Dolly — fat, cold, deadly. She is a nine-inch Dahlgren gun on whose breech is engraved By Valour and Arms. There also is Gar Rivers, an inspiring Negro, an artist of sorts who fought for a slave-owning people. In these pages you will meet Laurel MacKenzie, betrothed to Wyeth, and Morna (Dabney) Alexander, who wants the young sailor just to prove to herself that marriage has not dulled her charms. Tap Roots' readers will remember her and her melancholiac husband, Keith Alexander, a Southerner who fights for the Union. Keith is here, too, contemptuous as ever of his own life and the lives of others. Then there is Sharon Weatherford, a rooming-house keeper in Natchez-Under-the-Hill. Her love for Simeon St. Leger Granville apparently is a hopeless thing, and yet she, a social and racial outcast, meets every challenge, and triumphs. The story begins with the building of the Arkansas and ends with the fall of Vicksburg, which was to the South what Hastings was to England during the Norman conquest. The Union was saved in the West, but that theater has been neglected. Few Americans realize that the Battle of Franklin was bloodier than Gettysburg, that the Arkansas created more havoc than the Merrimac, and that Vicksburg held out for more than a year. As in Tap Roots, Mr. Street warns his readers again that they will not find the Civil War of Lee and Jackson in this book. This is history as it happened, not the dry meager words of textbooks or the dulcet tones of the julep school. Scoundrels and mountebanks work and cheat in the red glare of Vicksburg's guns. But man is at his best while making war and even when human life is not as dear as rotten mule meat, there are those who prove again that there always will be honor, decency, and dignity for those willing to fight for them.