A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

by John Matteson

Overview

Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Matteson illuminates three harrowing months of the Civil War and their enduring legacy for America.

December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln’s government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country’s law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American.

Guided by patriotism, driven by desire, all five moved toward singular destinies. A young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. confronted grave challenges to his concept of duty. The one-eyed army chaplain Arthur Fuller pitted his frail body against the evils of slavery. Walt Whitman, a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by the guardians of propriety, and Louisa May Alcott, a struggling writer seeking an authentic voice and her father’s admiration, tended soldiers’ wracked bodies as nurses. On the other side of the national schism, John Pelham, a West Point cadet from Alabama, achieved a unique excellence in artillery tactics as he served a doomed and misbegotten cause.

A Worse Place Than Hell brings together the prodigious forces of war with the intimacy of individual lives. Matteson interweaves the historic and the personal in a work as beautiful as it is powerful.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393882421
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/19/2022
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	1,036,685
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 5.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

John Matteson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Eden’s Outcasts and the Ann M. Sperber Prize for The Lives of Margaret Fuller. A Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, he lives in the Bronx.

Table of Contents

Prologue A Brahmin's Baptism xiii

Book 1 Antietam

Chapter 1 The Poet's Son 3

Chapter 2 The Blond Artillerist 32

Chapter 3 Burnside's Bridge and a Broadway Bar 60

Chapter 4 An Army in Crisis 83

Book 2 To the Rappahannock

Chapter 5 A Man of God 107

Chapter 6 "The Most Beautiful Girl Runner" 136

Chapter 7 "Beauty" and "Sallie" 154

Chapter 8 "Believe Me, We Shall Never Lick 'Em" 168

Book 3 "A Worse Place than Hell"

Chapter 9 Caroline Street 191

Chapter 10 Pelham Does First Rate 216

Chapter 11 The Stone Wall 229

Chapter 12 Southbound Trains 246

Chapter 13 "A Worse Place Than Hell" 261

Book 4 Two Nurses

Chapter 14 The Prince of Patients 281

Chapter 15 "Death Itself Has Lost All Its Terrors" 296

Chapter 16 "Our Fearful Journey Home" 317

Chapter 17 The Song of the Hermit Thrush 335

Book 5 Two Soldiers

Chapter 18 St. Patrick's Day, 1863 361

Chapter 19 "The Duty of Fighting Has Ceased for Me" 376

Chapter 20 "To Act with Enthusiasm and Faith" 394

Epilogue "Real, Terrible, Beautiful Days" 410

Acknowledgments 435

Notes 437

Bibliography 486

Index 499

Editorial Reviews

"John Matteson has once again delivered a beautifully written, exhaustively researched, and brilliantly interpreted work of history. This is a riveting and eerily relevant account of America at its most divided, yet also seeking redemption."

Debby Applegate

"If you already know who won the Battle of Fredericksburg, you will soon forget, as John Matteson follows the intimate and intricate lives of five people who lived through it. Courage and valor vie with fear and anxiety—on a wintertime battlefield, on the home front, and in field hospitals. This story of choices, mistakes, and shifting luck is also a portrait of war on a human scale."

Martha Hodes

"If the truest history is biography, as Emerson says, then seldom has history been better told than in this epic biography of five lives upended and transformed by the Civil War. John Matteson helps us see through the surface to the deeper currents beneath, revealing how one key battle became the inflection point transforming not only these men and women but the nation they composed, right down to the stories we tell, the poems we read, the monuments we build, the laws we live by, the prayers we utter—even the buildings we live in. Not to be missed."

Laura Dassow Walls

"[A] moving group portrait…[Matteson’s] firm grasp of detail, visible as well in his fine biographies of the Alcott family and Margaret Fuller, makes each of his characters vivid and distinctive."

David S. Reynolds

"Fredericksburg in 1862 became a true touchstone of history…John Matteson’s genius flows effortlessly through the entire narrative, taking us through the blast furnace of war and its battles and hospitals, and its suffering. This is the best book I’ve ever read on the impact and meaning of Fredericksburg, where ordinary lives were made extraordinary."

Francis A. O’Reilly

01/01/2021

Matteson's (Eden's Outcasts) sweeping collective biography is not a conventional study of the bloody Civil War battle at Fredericksburg, VA. While skillfully conveying the historical importance of the events of December 1862, he focuses on the significance of the battle in the lives of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., John Pelham, Walt Whitman, Arthur B. Fuller, and Louisa May Alcott. Pelham, daring fighter and sole Southerner of this group, died later in the war, while Fuller, a chaplain, perished at Fredericksburg early and with little notoriety. Holmes, Whitman, and Alcott achieved wide recognition in the years following the war. With keen biographical skill, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matteson deftly interweaves the wartime actions of these five with what occurred in their lives and minds before, during, and, for all but one, after the battle. The author shows how, in different ways, Fredericksburg offered Whitman and Alcott distinctive memories of military hospitals. Holmes, Pelham, and Fuller faced the intense fighting differently, each according to past experiences and commitment to their causes. Matteson also effectively demonstrates how the lives of these individuals connected with more familiar characters of the battle and war. VERDICT Highly recommended for fans of historical biography, especially as it intersects with the Civil War.—Charles K. Piehl, Minnesota State Univ., Mankato

Library Journal

★ 2020-11-03
The chaos of war transformed into a riveting tale of sacrifice and redemption.

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Matteson turns to the Civil War in his third book, an insightful, exhilarating interweaving of grim military history and uplifting biographies. Focusing on the Union Army’s devastating loss in 1862 during the Battle of Fredericksburg, this is an affecting, courageous story about fathers and four sons and a daughter, “heroes” who “confronted war and struggled to redeem themselves within it.” Growing up, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the future Supreme Court justice and son of the famous poet and doctor, had a difficult time escaping from his father’s shadow. Wendell Sr. believed slavery a “tragic, ghastly business” but was against war; Wendell Jr. disagreed, fought for the cause, was wounded three times, and nearly died of dysentery. His father left home to find his hospitalized boy. John Pelham, another doctor’s son, fought for the Confederates and distinguished himself as a battery officer. “Few young men,” writes Matteson, “had ever fit their historical moment more exquisitely.” While the “ambitiously named” George Washington Whitman was also fighting, his brother, Walt, was in Brooklyn, “seeking the literary means to move a nation.” After he learned his brother was wounded, he sought him out and volunteered as a nurse to help wounded soldiers. Union chaplain Rev. Arthur B. Fuller, whose sister Margaret had tended to the wounded during the Roman Revolution of 1848, took care of Union soldiers until he was killed by Confederate bullets. Fledgling author Louisa May Alcott left home to become a nurse for the Army of the Potomac, treating hundreds of soldiers from the bloody battleground. When she caught typhoid, her abolitionist father, Bronson, brought her home. Intimate portraits of these main characters smoothly merge with many others, including Abraham Lincoln, George McClellan, and Jeb Stuart, who fought with Pelham. In an impressive narrative juggling act, Matteson deftly unfurls many stories within stories with a confident, novelistic flair.

Ambitious, nuanced, and thoroughly rewarding Civil War history.

Kirkus Reviews