To: kaylar
I have seen Grissom's
Southern By The Grace Of God, but have not yet read it.
Sorry.
What do you think of him?
To: All
Oops - my apologies for the double post.
To: Constitution Day
When he's being nostalgic for the Old South of , say, his parent's days, he's not too bad. Folkways, folklore, food, that sort of thing. But when he trots out the ol', "the slaves were happy and loyal" crapola, when contemporay sources (eg, Mary Chestnut's diary) say otherwise, he's pretty dismal. And when he made the claim that Union soldiers only joined up for the bounty, he loses all credibility, at least as a civil war historian : Bell I. Wiley was as staunch a Southerner as you can imagine, and he concluded quite otherwise, as he details in his book, The Life of Billy Yank, and he came to his conclusions after reading the letters and diaries of thousands of Union soldiers . It's one thing to praise Johnny Reb ; it's another to tell lies about Billy Yank, and I think Grissom knew he was lying. The Union soldiers' performance at too many battlefields (eg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, not to mention at Andersonville) was not that of conscripts just in it for the bounty ( and simple logic dictates that if they were, wouldn't they all have deserted?). But when he sticks with "Foxfire" territory, and discusses the folklore and folkways of the rural south in the early and middle decades of the 20th century, he's quite readable. On a scale of 1-10, I give him overall a 4...worth buying used or paperback.
32 posted on
10/07/2001 5:45:05 PM PDT by
kaylar
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