Research Notes for Flame & Steel, Chapter 11
With the notable exceptions of Erasmus and Annabel, all of the major characters and most of the numerous supporting players throughout this story are based upon actual people who lived and died, and much of their dialogue comes from personal letters, memoirs, and interviews. The principal sources for Chapter 11 are as follows.
My portrayal of Stephen Mallory largely comes from Stephen R. Mallory: Confederate Naval Chief, a rigorously researched biography by Joseph Durkin, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1954. I also relied on Stephen Russell Mallory: United States Senator from Florida and Confederate Secretary of the Navy, by Occie Clubbs, appearing in the Florida Historical Quarterly of January 1947.
The litany of sunk and captured Confederate blockade-runners presented in this chapter — as well as so many other details throughout this entire tale — comes from The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, often simply referred to as the OR. Originally authorized by Congress in 1866, this is a massive collection of primary sources drawn from military and government records and other first-hand accounts. It ultimately came to consist of an astounding 138,579 pages of text with 1,006 maps arranged in 128 books and published over a twenty-year period between 1881 and 1901. It is considered THEindispensible resource when researching military activities of the American Civil War. Recently the OR has been digitized by the Cornell University Library and is available online for free. Kudos to them, indeed.
Portions of Gideon Welles’ dialogue come from Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and Johnson, published posthumously in 1911 by Houghton and Mifflin. Gustavus Fox’s dialogue is derived from Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1861-1865, published in 1918 by the Naval Historical Society. In addition, sections of their dialogue are directly quoted from the OR.
Sadly, as it is so often the case when it comes to shit-poor illiterate people — the great unwashed such as Annabel and Erasmus — there is only a paltry record. To recreate their world I leaned on John Jay Janney’s Virginia, published independently by one of his descendants. This is an uncommon first-hand account of the basics of life for common folk in Virginia — their food and clothing, their bedding and shelter, their tools and daily tasks — while delving into social ills such as drunkenness and thievery, as well as superstitions and attitudes toward graves and spirits. I also turned to compilations such as The Expansion of Everyday Life: 1860-1876, published by the University of Arkansas Press (2000), which contains chapters covering such topics as “Daily Woes,” and “Enjoying Life.” I have also poked around in Everyday Life during the Civil Warpublished by The Writer’s Digest (1999) as a guide for authors poking around in this era.
Additionally, I have drawn upon witnesses from across the pond. Charles Dickens, an astute observer of the human condition, particularly among the underclass, visited Virginia in 1842 and expounded in American Notes for General Circulation. Two other equally astute observers — the famous geologist Sir Charles Lyell and his wife and lifelong scientific partner, Mary Horner — sharply characterized circumstances in Virginia in Travels in North America(1845) and A Second Visit to the United States (1849). During their journeys to America they often slipped off the beaten path and made countless observations concerning almost everything from the cost of living, teachers’ salaries, gender roles, swearing, local and regional customs, transportation systems, rocking chairs, counterfeit money, malaria, boarding houses, literary tastes, and anything else that fell under their gaze.
One thing in particular grabbed the Lyells— slavery. They decried how families were ripped apart on the auction block. They also noted that the “peculiar institution” was collapsing in Virginia due to the influx of Irish workers. They remarked that some slave-owners who had become financially strapped refused to sell off their chattel to the Deep South because they feared that those “whom they had known since childhood… could scarcely hope to be treated with the same indulgence by strangers.” Other slave owners, like Erasmus’s fictional master, couldn’t care less.
The origin of Miz Auntie Do-Funny lies in an odd gift from a friend many years ago — a child’s book, a thin, hardbound (and threadbare) and peculiarly illustrated volume entitled Daddy Do-Funny’s Wisdom Jingles, published by the aforementioned Century Company in 1916.
There is one last thing to discuss, and that is the avian motif that flits throughout this novel. For this, I have no explanation. In this chapter, I describe passenger pigeons blackening the sky during their annual migration. It has been estimated there were 3 billion of these chubby fowl, maybe more, easily the most abundant bird in North America and in all probability the most abundant vertebrate animal of any sort that ever inhabited the continent. Yet within a handful of decades these immense flocks were hunted to extinction to supply cheap commercial fodder for swine factories such as those in Cincinnati, the “Hog Capitol of the World.” Plump passenger pigeons were easy to bag by the thousands as they flocked together in vast compact masses in the trees and on the ground. The last passenger pigeon died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. In this chapter I also mention the ivory-billed woodpecker. Its final sighting is vigorously disputed to this day.
​