Gettysburg Requiem: The Life and Lost Causes of Confederate Colonel William C. Oates.

Gettysburg Requiem: The Life and Lost Causes of Confederate Colonel William C. Oates. By Glenn W. LaFantasie. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xxxiv, 414. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-19-517458-8.)

Since the fight on Little Round Top at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, history and Hollywood have celebrated its Union defenders, the Twentieth Maine Infantry, commanded by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. With this volume, Glenn W. LaFantasie rescues from obscurity the commander of the Confederate attackers, William C. Oates of the Fifteenth Alabama. Significantly more than a military biography of Oates--and fuller than Mark Perry's Conceived in Liberty: Joshua Chamberlain, William Oates, and the American Civil War (New York, 1997)--LaFantasie's volume presents Oates's life as a "portrait of Southern manhood and the dynamics of violence, heroism, and memory in the nineteenth century" (p. xviii).

LaFantasie's greatest strength is his ability to unravel the complexities of Oates's life and character. Raised by a violent father and a passive mother, Oates determined at an early age to rise above the humble circumstances of his rural Alabama upbringing. After a trouble-filled period of teenage wanderlust, he established himself as a prominent newspaper editor and lawyer yet remained frustrated by his failure to win the respect of Alabama's social and political elite.

Although Oates had been wary of secession plans, he changed his mind after Fort Sumter. He then wrangled a captain's commission, raised the Henry Pioneers, and accompanied them to Virginia as part of the Fifteenth Alabama Infantry. LaFantasie depicts Oates as a brave but obstinate officer, occasionally prone to acting rashly. His two most memorable moments came at Gettysburg, where his brother John fell mortally wounded, and at Fussell's Mill east of Richmond, where he lost his arm in combat in August 1864. Through it all, his frustration grew. Despite commanding the Fifteenth Alabama--a colonel's billet--for much of the war, Oates officially remained a captain. For the rest of his life, Oates blamed state politicians and even Jefferson Davis for denying him the promotion he believed he deserved. Thus he always viewed the war as his most unappreciated yet most heroic years.

Oates's wartime glory evaporated in the postwar South. His law practice thrived, despite accusations of ethical lapses. He became wealthy, amid rumors of corrupt business practices. A lifelong Democrat, he won election to the Alabama General Assembly in 1870, beginning a colorful political career of nearly forty years, including seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and a two-year term as governor. Controversy invariably haunted him; allegations of vote-buying dogged him, and the candidate he defeated for the Alabama governorship threatened to create a dual government. Despite his loyalty to the Democratic Party, Oates believed, as LaFantasie explains, that "the color line between the races could not be starkly drawn," and Oates's opposition to grandfather clauses and other restrictions designed to disenfranchise educated African Americans ultimately relegated him to the party's ineffectual fringe (p. 273). Still, in other respects, his views on race reflected entirely those of his region. In 1898 he accepted a brigadier generalship in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War but balked at assignments that might have required him to command African American troops.

Oates's changing political views may have reflected elements of his postwar private life. In perhaps the most intriguing aspect of his work, LaFantasie offers a disquieting psychological portrait of "the one-armed hero of Henry County" (p. 193). Oates sired two illegitimate children soon after the war's end, including a biracial son. The second child, LaFantasie suggests, may have resulted from a nonconsensual sexual relationship with a teenage girl, describing the situation as having a "pedophilic dynamic" that Oates shared with "other notable Southern white men of his time" (p. 189). Some readers may well find such psychological evaluations to be unconvincing or distracting, but they command consideration nonetheless. In 1882 Oates married Sarah Toney, a young woman he first met when she was an infant, sired another son, and then often ignored them. As LaFantasie asserts, Oates's personal relationships most clearly represented his effort to satisfy his psychological need for absolute control.

One specific matter remained beyond Oates's control, however, and LaFantasie draws upon Oates's struggle to find peace with his brother's death at Gettysburg to explore the workings of both personal and collective memory in the postwar South. A committed Lost Cause advocate, Oates frequently defended the South's right to secede, praised the gallantry of southern soldiers, and acted in concert with Robert E. Lee's Virginia partisans to bash Lieutenant General James Longstreet. He produced one of the lengthiest individual memoirs written by any Confederate veteran. In The War Between the Union and the Confederacy and Its Lost Opportunities ... (New York, 1905), published five years before his death in 1910, Oates listed every man who fought in his Fifteenth Alabama, praising those who fell in battle but treating with equanimity even those who had deserted the colors. More personally, however, Oates's inability to banish Gettysburg's haunting ghosts clearly demonstrated the capacity of personal memory to shape one's views of past, present, and future. His unsuccessful effort to win approval for a monument at Gettysburg to honor his late brother offers a fascinating microstudy of northern and southern efforts to control the collective memory of that battle.

In short, LaFantasie combines comprehensive research, flowing narration, and astute analysis to produce a candid study of this complex Alabamian.

CAROL REARDON

Pennsylvania State University