FROM A TREE AT GETTYSBURG

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 28008, 30 June 1956, Page 5

FROM A TREE AT GETTYSBURG

A FRAGMENT OF HISTORY The Fremantle Diary. By LieutenantColcnel J. A. L. Fremantle. Editing and commentary by Walter Lord and introduction by Maurice Ashley. Andre Deutsch. 304 pp. Fremantle, an officer of the Coldstream Guards on furlough, is credited with the best eye-witness account of the Battle of Gettysburg, which he saw from a tree top just above the Confederate commander-in-chief. General Robert E. Lee. This alone would make Fremantle’s account of the three months he spent with the Confederate forces of unusual interest. There is much more to the diary than the decisive action at Gettysburg, however. Fremantle chose an unusual way to spend a holiday, but he enjoyed the rigours of the blockaded South as much as the military experience. He had a keen eye for detail, and set down a vivid description of life in the Confederacy during the third year of the American Civil War. Although Fremantle’s observations were acute and accurate, he drew the wrong conclusions from them. Reading his journal now, it is clear that at least from the time of Gettysburg, and probably before, the South was doomed. Yet he concluded: “I never can believe that in the nineteenth century the civilised world will be condemned to witness the destruction of such a gallant race.” “Why?” asks the editor, “did Fremantle discount these weaknesses and smoke his pipe dreams. . . . He had succumbed to the threadbare graciousness of Charleston, the thunder of Gettysburg, the soft breeze of a starlit, night at Shelbyville. Fremantle, in short, was in love with the South, and his heart now rules his mind.”

This was undoubtedly true and it says much for the magic of the Southern States, because this was not the romantic war of neatly dressed cavaliers that often appears in novels. Fremantle describes accurately enough the rough clothing of the Confederates, their lack of boots, and the raging inflation. He noted also, unsympathetically, their attachment to the “peculiar institution” of slavery and their devotion to the rights of individual States, the latter one of the greatest weaknesses of the Confederacy. Some of his observations sound unhappily familiar today, except that slavery has given way to segregation. Then, as now, the right of the Southern States to make their own laws was attacked at the point where they were morally in the wrong. This did not, and will not, make Southerners any happier to accept dictation from Yankees, who lack the affection for coloured people often found paradoxically in the South, as Fremantle saw.

The value of the diary is much increased by Mr Ashley’s introduction, a brilliant, brief essay on the Civil War, and by Mr Lord’s witty commentary. Mr Lord modestly draws attention to the anecdotes of Lee, Longstreet, and, above all, Stonewall Jackson collected by Fremantle. He himself provides even better. Fremantle gives only one chapter of a story that has yet to be finished. This edition of his diary should make the concluding chapters, a century later, more intelligible to readers inside America as well as outside.