The Review I Didn’t Write

A couple of weeks back, various New England newspapers ran my review of a new book that needs and very much deserves to be known: Mike Pride’s No Place for A Woman: Harriet Dame’s Civil War.

The review I wanted to write began, “I’ll never forget the first time I saw a Confederate flag decal on a New Hampshire pickup truck.”

But that’s not the review I published.

A long-serving editor of The Concord Monitor, Pride has in rigorous retirement been writing history, often concerning the sufferings and contributions of veterans. No Place for a Woman is about the Civil War, but Harriet Dame of Concord was no soldier.

Dame could not stay at home while her New Hampshire neighbors marched off to fight Southern slave power. In an era when nursing was work reserved for men, Harriet Dame defied politicians, generals, and an all-male medical establishment, following New Hampshire regiments to camps and battlefields, tending illness and wounds, saving lives and easing deaths.

Still, the review I couldn’t send to the papers said too little about Harriet Dame and too much about a nation so in need of her idealism and courage. Then and now.

I blame Pride, for being too good a historian. In the opening pages of No Place for a Woman, he writes 1860s Concord back to life: neighborhoods, businesses, politics, personalities. And me, I couldn’t help noticing that no one in town seemed to want war, but war had been coming for decades. From the three-fifths clause in the Constitution to guerilla war in the territories, Southern slave power insisted on minority rule, threatening to destroy the republic if it couldn’t hold sway.

Northerners – including Concord’s most famous citizen, former President Franklin Pierce –offered abject appeasements: the “compromises” of 1820 and 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act. No use. Southern politicians frightened their constituents with alternative facts and conspiracy theories, flattered them with paradoxical claims of Southern greatness and victimization. Claiming to be guardians of democracy, Southern radicals went to war because they wouldn’t accept the result of a presidential election.

Nope. I just couldn’t help noticing certain similarities to our own time. Reading about Concord’s reaction to Fort Sumter, I thought about what happens to a two-party republic when one party abandons democracy. Reading about Harriet Dame and her neighbors, I wondered what peaceable, brave citizens can do to confront treasonous power.

I wanted to write about all that. It didn’t seem such a stretch to connect one time to another —  not in a month that included headlines about police brutality to black men, election denial conspiracies, and a former president’s dinner with a white supremacist.

But editors in the responsible press are reluctant to offend readers. Too many mainstream journalists hope that not saying the obvious will somehow keep us civil. I feared they wouldn’t publish a review suggesting the Civil War is still too much with us.

I tried again, beginning with that story about the first time I saw a country music station’s “rebel” flag decal on a New Hampshire pickup truck.

We were both on our way to work, I suppose, that frosty morning in the early 1990s. The grown man in the pickup had stopped at a four-way facing the green in one of the little towns strung along Route 4 north of Concord. As I pulled up behind him, the sticker on the truck’s rear window came into focus: a Confederate battle flag over the call sign of a country music station.

I was shocked.

Just ahead of us, on the green, stood a granite marker bearing the names of men and boys who fought traitors waving that white-supremacy flag. New Hampshire sent a score of regiments, fully 11 percent of its population, to fight for the Union and against slavery. The Fifth New Hampshire suffered the highest casualty rate of any Union infantry. Many names on the memorial ahead of us were starred. Some of those last names were still represented at Town Meeting, at softball games and PTA bake sales. The guy in the pickup might well have been a Yankee soldier’s great-great-grandson.

How did a northern New Englander come to identify with the Confederate flag?

And sure, thirty years later, we’re no longer shocked to see the Stars and Bars this far north. But how did that happen?

The review I wanted to write would note that the “rebel” country station was owned by a national media conglomerate heavily invested in right-wing hate radio. It would state the obvious: that the shock jocks’ shouts were echoed, more or less subtly, by the company’s news and music programming. (Here’s a good book about that.) I’d write that the Confederate flag crossed the Mason-Dixon line as mass-marketed “country” conservatism and “rebel” cool. Because it takes decades and billions to create a political culture as polarized as…

But I didn’t think they’d print that, either. And it wouldn’t have been fair to No Place for a Woman. It’s not Mike Pride’s fault that I can’t keep history in the past.