IN A BOOK I used for research for another novel I found a Post-it on which I had scribbled a note to myself, somewhere back over the last five years.
“Vicksburg,” it said, “great story for a novel.”
What brought me around to doing the siege of Vicksburg this time I cannot recall, but I suppose it was always in that file cabinet in the back of my mind where I go when looking for ideas that have been put on the back burner.
“The town where the people were trapped and lived in caves,” I reminded myself, “my readers ought to love that premise.”
But research and reading told me the story was so much more than that. This was the town where they named one of their 18-pound cannons “Whistling Dick,” where the editor of the Daily Citizen kept printing all through the forty-seven-day siege, in spite of being shelled and attacked and running out of newsprint. He printed the paper on the back of old wallpaper.
This is the town where the people could venture out on the streets three times a day: eight in the morning, twelve noon, and eight at night, when the Yankee artillerymen ate their meals.
This is the town where “Old Abe,” an American bald eagle and mascot for the 8th Regiment, Wisconsin Volunteers, was wounded. It was Old Abe’s job to fly, screeching, over the enemy when his regiment fired at them. I have him being attended here by Landon Corbet, our heroine’s doctor brother.
In short, I found so many delicious things happening in Vicksburg that I couldn’t not write the book. I have followed history scrupulously and did not have to go far afield to fictionalize, but there are things I made up for the sake of story.
The Corbet family, for instance, is fictional, although there were many families in Vicksburg as gallant and well esteemed and confused as were they. I tried to make Claire Louise as true to her age as was possible. Little James I patterned after my grandson James who is near the same age. The trepidation Claire Louise has around her father is the same as I had around my father all my life. Claire Louise finally, in a way, “connects” with her father. I never did.
She calls him “sir” and her mother “ma’am” because that is the way children in the South addressed their parents in those days.
I had some difficulty, at first, with giving Pa malaria. At first I thought it only came to soldiers who fought in World War II, like my late brother-in-law, but I consulted Doctors in Blue, a wonderful book by George Worthington Adams, and discovered that malarial fevers were constant and many during the Civil War—522 cases per 1,000.
Which brings me to the many and wonderful books I used for research that are listed in my bibliography. I wish to thank the many authors who wrote them so people like me could enjoy and use them. I particularly thank the women who penned the hospital books, for my information has been diluted from these.
In particular I am grateful to the personnel at the bookstore of the Eastern National Military Park Service at Vicksburg, Mississippi, especially Nikki Anderson, assistant unit manager, who helped me select research books and got them to me so promptly. The National Park Service has not failed me yet.
It is important to note here that at the same time the siege at Vicksburg was winding down—July 2, 3, and 4—the battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was raging. The South was defeated at Gettysburg the same day, July 4, that Vicksburg surrendered to General U. S. Grant. No one ever seems to mention this when they speak of Gettysburg. It seems that the siege of Vicksburg is a stepchild in the annals of Civil War history.
I realize, fully, that once my faithful readers finish this novel I am going to receive many many e-mails and letters asking what happened to Claire Louise Corbet. Did she meet Robert again? Did he come back to the stream where the blackberries were? Did she run off with him? My readers always want closure, with everything tied up with a bright red ribbon.
Life is not that way. I don’t know what happened to Claire Louise any more than you do. But there are possibilities. In life there are always possibilities. So sit back and make up your own ending. Use your imagination. And if you don’t like it, then do it over again tomorrow. That’s what writing is all about. And that’s why I like it so much.