Unto This Hour by Tom Wicker (1984, Hardcover)

Unto This Hour
by Tom Wicker
Publisher: The Viking Press
Copyright 1984
Second Printing

Using as a burning glass one great two-day Civil War battle, Tom Wicker has written an American epic, one which draws us simultaneously into the dread lottery of war -- death or survival, victory or defeat -- and into the destinies of characters, both created and real, who experience in their own vivid ways a great crucible in our republic's history.

The battle of August 28-30, 1862, known to the South as Second Manassas and to the North as Second Bull Run, provides the factual background of Unto This Hour.  It brought together a remarkable group of the Civil War's leading figures:  the pious and inscrutable Stonewall Jackson, the doughty and cocksure Pope, other famous soldiers -- Lee, Longstreet, Stuart, Porter, McDowell -- and offstage, Lincoln, and McClellan.  The battle itself, where through brilliant deception and maneuver the trapper becomes the trapped, is unforgettably recounted here.

But the special triumph of this extraordinary book is the number of people we come to know in full and deep dimension.  Dashing Fargo Hart and brutish Corporal Amos Gilmore both find love with partners of whom they had never dreamed.  General Hoke Arnall is a warrior to whom his troops are by necessity expendable, but his wife, Amy, back in South Carolina, learns in a horrifying way that the slaves in the yard are people.  Private Hugh Williams of Wisconsin yearns to be tested and is sustained by faith.  Captain Micah Duryea of Vermont -- cold, brilliant, detached -- knows his commanders.

Civilian eyes, too, lend perspective to the surging battle:  Andrew Peterson, photographer from Atlanta, who strives to record the truth from which others avert their eyes; Teddy Redmund, supercilious British correspondent late of the Crimea, who has come to see how these American rustics fight; Larkin Folsom, a gentle, poetry-writing orderly; the deserter Foxy Bradshaw; the loutish farmer Durward Brace and his uncommonly spirited daughter Missy.

These characters and many others are drawn with total clarity.  And it is the agony, testing, and fate of these individuals, the awesome willingness of men (so often boys) to charge again and agai into maiming and killing fire, that moves us and makes us know that these people are -- through a superb act of re-creation -- our very selves.

Condition:  Used.  Hardcover.  Dust cover.  Pages may be tanning and discolored from age.  Dust cover shows discoloration, edge wear and tearing.  Dust cover spine has an inch-long rip in the edge.  Dust cover flaps have small edge tears and creases.

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