(Excerpt from The Plain People of the Confederacy The com...)
Excerpt from The Plain People of the Confederacy The common folk, white and black, constituted the bone and sinew of the Southern Confederacy. White yeomen comprised the bulk of the armies that followed Lee in Virginia, Joe Johnston in the central South, and Kirby Smith beyond the Missis sippi. These rustics were not all exemplary soldiers by any means. Some of them were overly fond of liquor; others were impervious to discipline; thou sands absented themselves without leave; many preferred filth to cleanliness; hundreds played the coward when the bullets whistled close. But on the whole they were good fighters. It is not too much to say that the record of the Confederacy on the field of battle must stand or fall on the basis of their performance. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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(Concentrating on the lives of Mary Boykin Chesnut, Virgin...)
Concentrating on the lives of Mary Boykin Chesnut, Virginia Tunstall Clay, and Varina Howell Davis, the author sheds light upon the strength, endurance, and pride of Confederate women.
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Bell Irvin Wiley was born January 5, 1906 in Halls, Tenn. , the sixth of thirteen children of Ewing Baxter Wiley, a minister, teacher, and farmer, and Anna Bass, a teacher. His grandmother, Fredonia Abernathy Bass, was a Confederate widow whose stories intrigued him. Two Civil War veterans, Union soldier George Washington Bunker and Confederate Will Martin, were often in his home and helped implant a deep interest in the Civil War into the young child's mind.
Wiley graduated from Halls High School and then Asbury College in Wilmore, Ky. , with a B. A. in 1928. Wiley would always be indebted to his debate teacher, Zachary T. Johnson, for his career. While teaching at Asbury and coaching the debating team, Wiley did graduate work at the University of Kentucky, receiving an M. A. in English in 1929. At Yale, Wiley received a Ph. D. in history in 1933; his dissertation, done under Ulrich B. Phillips, was published in 1938 as Southern Negroes, 1861-1865.
Wiley was among the first to write about blacks, women, and common soldiers. In 1934, Wiley became professor and head of the history department at Mississippi State College for Women at Hattiesburg. During the summers, he taught at Peabody College in Nashville. In 1938, Wiley went to the University of Mississippi as professor of history and head of the department. Wiley's most influential book, The Life of Johnny Reb, the Common Soldier of the Confederacy (1943), dealt with a largely neglected subject of the Civil War. "They had such very, very rich humor, " observed Wiley of the Confederates, and he quoted letters and diaries to let Johnny Reb speak for himself. Throughout his career, he was ready to challenge accepted views, as he did by questioning the need for the war itself in this book: "This inescapable urge of blue and gray to intermingle and to exchange niceties suggests that - grim war though it was - the internecine struggle of the sixties was not only in some aspect a chivalric war but that it was in many respects a crazy and a needless war as well. " Joining the army in 1943, Wiley became lieutenant colonel in three years, serving as a staff historian with the Second Army and as assistant historical officer at headquarters, Army Ground Forces, during World War II.
In 1946 he became head of the history department at Louisiana State University, and in 1949 he settled in Atlanta as professor of history at Emory University. In 1952 he completed The Life of Billy Yank, the Common Soldier of the Union, which David Donald called "a major contribution to American social history. " David M. Potter said, "Out of an immense depth of knowledge Professor Wiley pictures the Union soldier with a fullness that leaves no aspect of his life and few areas of his thought unrevealed. " Wiley became president of the Southern Historical Association in 1955 and fought to end its policy of racial segregation. At the SHA annual meeting on November 10, 1955, papers in support of integration were read by William Faulkner, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse College, and Cecil Sims, which were published as The Segregation Decisions (1956), with a foreword by Wiley. He examined the reasons for Confederate defeat, in The Road to Appomattox (1956), saying, "The South had reason to believe that it could achieve independence. That it did not was due as much, if not more, to its own failings as to the superior strength of the foe. " One of his students, Henry T. Malone, recalled, "Wiley's greatest enjoyment when lecturing comes in quoting from the letters and diaries of semiliterate Civil War soldiers. "
Wiley contributed to the increasing popularity of his field by supporting Civil War Round Tables, and from 1959 to 1960 he was president of the Atlanta Round Table. In the 1940's and 1950's, Civil War Round Tables were formed, with members from a wide variety of occupations, to encourage public interest in the war through meetings, where leading historians lectured, and battlefield trips. In 1981 the New York Round Table established the Bell I. Wiley Award, often presented to a hero of battlefield preservation. In the 1965-1966 academic year, Wiley was Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University, and he published Lincoln and Lee in 1966. He was chairman of the executive committee of the National Civil War Centennial Commission; with two of its officials, Allan Nevins and James I. Robertson, Jr. (his former student), Wiley compiled the two-volume Civil War Books: A Critical Bibliography (1967 - 1969). A debate raged in 1970 at Emory University over whether black students should be admitted under separate admissions standards. Wiley believed in a single standard and said so in the newspaper debate. Earlier, he had lost friends because he supported integration. Now he was being criticized again because of his conviction that equality could not be compromised. After giving the summer commencement address in 1974, Wiley retired from Emory. He continued to teach as visiting professor at the University of South Carolina (1974), Tulane University (1975), Agnes Scott College, where he was historian in residence (1975 - 1977), and the University of Kentucky (1977). Saying "women have always held more fascination for me than men, " in 1975 Wiley published Confederate Women, a study of Mary Chesnut, Varina Davis, and Virginia Clay. Mary Boykin Chesnut was the most famous Confederate diarist: A Dairy from Dixie (1905) was revised as Mary Chesnut's Civil War; Varina Howell Davis was the wife of the Confederate president and the author of Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America. A Memoir by His Wife (1890); Virginia Clay was the author of A Belle of the Fifties (1904). His last project was Slaves No More: Letters from Liberia, 1833-1869 (1980), which he edited. Wiley died in Atlanta.
(Concentrating on the lives of Mary Boykin Chesnut, Virgin...)
(Excerpt from The Plain People of the Confederacy The com...)
Quotations: In 1978, Wiley wrote a new introduction to The Life of Johnny Reb in which he reflected on the history of the South and the Civil War: "The 'lowly' people gave a better account of themselves than did the more privileged members of Southern society. They quarreled less than those who were rated their superiors. They bore their hardship with less complaint than the bigwigs. Generally speaking they were not the drab, improvident, depraved, ignoramuses depicted in Tobacco Road and other fictional works. Many of them were deeply religious. "
Quotes from others about the person
C. Vann Woodward said in 1964, "His book still stands as the best general treatment of this important subject in existence. "
Bruce Catton has given an appraisal of Wiley's contribution to the study of the Civil War: "Of all the books that have been written the ones that will truly live are Bell Wiley's. "
On December 19, 1937, Wiley married Mary Frances Harrison; they had two children.
