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I first heard about this book when it briefly came up on a Civil War Facebook group. Reading the synopsis, I grew intrigued. A sweeping epic about a large Virginia family caught up in the events of the Civil War and having to deal with the fact that Lincoln is their nephew! This sounded interesting.By far the best part of the book is the first third, that covers the runup to the war. The characters’ views on slavery gradually change and harden as chances for compromise begin to disappear from the national scene. This provides some of the best dialogue of the entire work. In a sharp rebuke to the Lost Cause mythology, Williams repeatedly, and rightly asserts, the war was always about the right of southern planters to keep slaves. But while he does note the vast majority of southern army volunteers came from the middle and lower classes who don’t own slaves, he seems to think that they were pulled along by events beyond their control. As one character says, “We’re all just-grains of wheat in the hopper.” While this is true to a degree, historians like Bruce Catton and William W. Freehling have noted, poorer southern whites still believed in a racial superiority. while these sections are not perfect, Williams’ time on them should be appreciated.I completely understood why Williams had so many family gathering scenes, as it served as a good way to introduce and add dimension to characters. Margaret Mitchell famously did this in Gone with the Wind when Scarlett attends a ball at a neighboring planation and all the major characters for the book are introduced. Yet, as House Divided kept going, I began to have two problems with Williams’ writing style. First, whereas Mitchell seemed to know when to end an extended scene, Williams does not. A long Christmas dinner scene would end, only for another dinner scene to begin in the next chapter. During these, the family dynamics are established, but nothing really is added. At one point, Williams appears to be building a subplot or two, but then simply abandons them later. The second thing that bothered me was that as Williams focused more and more on the women in the family, he seemed to struggle with how to write them. While the matriarch, Cinda, is fairly flushed out as a person, three other female characters, Enid, Tilda and Dolly come off as weak and annoying with no redeeming qualities.Williams does a really good job of writing a backstory for Abraham Lincoln’s grandmother, a person still shrouded in mystery today, and connects her to the main characters and putting everything into a believable context. But how does this event and its discovery affect the story? Not a lot. The characters do have to reckon with this early on, but it does not seem to seriously change much about where each of them is headed. Something even Williams admits late in the book.I should note here that throughout reading this, I kept comparing House Divided to two other books: John Jakes’ Love and War (part of his North and South Trilogy), and Donald McCaig’s Jacob’s Ladder, in addition to Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Both Jakes and McCaig do an amazing job of creating large casts of characters, giving them different roles and perspectives on the war and keeping the story dramatic. Despite Love and War being 1,092 pages, I never felt like I got bogged down since things kept happening. Not only did the two families in the book have to deal with the war itself, but internal family struggles and a psychopath and corrupt officer bent on killing both.With his own large cast of characters, I thought that Williams would take an ensemble approach to the story and jump from one perspective to another. The war section started promisingly enough with a long description of the now largely forgotten Battle of Big Bethel in June of 1861, that is memorable, and the evacuation of the family from their mansion as George McClellan’s army closes in, reminded me of the Mitchell’s evacuation of Atlanta. But none of the battles or military scenes come close to matching it afterward. It was almost as if Williams wanted to prove that he could do it, but after putting in the work, did not want to do it again.Instead, the vast majority of the 1,515 pages of the book are taken up with the female characters in their houses in Richmond experiencing food shortages, waiting for word from their husbands and sons and seeing how the war is changing southern society around them. In essence, I think what Williams was trying to do was write a deconstruction of a traditional Civil War novel. The little the reader sees of battle is not romantic nor do the characters really get any opportunities to be heroic. In fact, two, after very long introductions, are similarly killed off in their first battles, both being left to bleed to death around a pile of corpses. Two others survive but are left crippled from battle. Because of this, major battles pass by with just a few sentences from the women at home.While Williams may have meant to show the costs of the war and the families left behind in its wake, at some point his editor should have turned to him and said, “For God’s sake Ben, liven this up!” Too much of the time the characters are simply going through normal day to day activities. Historical fiction should have allowed Williams to have his his characters go on minor adventures. To be fair, he does have one meet Lincoln and then they see him from a distance later. Another meets John Wilkes Booth. But the rest of the time, they are relegated to supporting roles. One spends the entire novel as a member of an artillery battery and apparently sees no action. Another serves on Longstreet’s staff coordinating and collecting supplies. Another rides with Jeb Stuart, but we never see the war from his perspective. One rides with John Mosby, the few action sequences there are involve him, but he is always off by himself. In essence, characters are introduced and then largely recede into the background. Compare this to Jakes’ brilliant use of characters in Love and War, by the time one finishes that work, they have stood beside a young Union engineer as the Army of the Potomac marches into Virginia, ridden alongside a Confederate currier during the hell of Antietam, watched conversations with Jefferson Davis, walked with nurses through hospitals, seen the war profiteering in the North and the sat with a character doing tedious paperwork in Washington DC as his friends and family go off to fight. McCaig pulls off much the same thing, through skillfully structured vignettes that also gives a panoramic view of the war. In the novel Rifles for Watie, Harold Keith uses an extended spy mission to allow the main character to move back and forth between the armies, adding excitement, entertainment and romance along the way. I never got that sense with House Divided.Instead, characters simply come and go from a house in Richmond, meet with officers at Confederate headquarters, then go back to the house in Richmond. One quits the war entirely and returns to a plantation in North Carolina, effectively ending his arc. Another is wounded and returns home with no further role. The book could have been much better had Williams utilized what he had to provide a larger view of the war, instead of seemingly dismissing them. If there are any real villains in the book, they would be the two family members, a father and son, who do everything possible to avoid military service, profit from speculation and blockade running and even the consequences they face, do not feel entirely satisfying. The burning of Richmond, which should have been the climax of the book, instead, more or less just happens, and once again, the main characters watch it from their windows instead of having to race through the streets.Williams does do a good job of describing the political problems the Confederacy faced during the war. He notes issues with forming political unity, getting supplies and talks at length about how various states refused to help the central government, declaring it was about “States rights.” In this, he is on very firm ground, but he was not the first to make this claim. As early as the 1920s, southern historian Frank Lawrence Owsley, argued that the failure of states to support the government led to the Confederate defeat. Williams also blames poor political leadership from Davis and the other figures for the loss. Yet the army, for all its faults, is the only noble thing to come out of the war.I think what Williams was trying to do was nothing else than write an American War and Peace that would serve as his opus to the Civil War generation. Throughout it, he was on an intellectual tightrope, not buying into claims that the war was never about slavery, having a realistic view of the Confederacy and yet, also seeking to honor the men who fought for it and, most of all, the women who lived it. He may have also been seeking to outdo Mitchell, whose own master work had come out in 1936 and gone into history as one of the best films ever produced just two years later. But I am sorry to say, he failed on both counts. House Divided lacks the epic sweep of Tolstoy, and his female characters, in comparison to Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Wilkes, never come close to being fully realized in the same way. The real historical figures of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee also come off as distant and removed. Only James Longstreet seems fully realized and this is not surprising given that Williams was his grandnephew.The tragedy of House Divided is that it is probably one of the better researched Civil War novels and one does get the sense that Williams really threw himself into the writing of it. Yet, in his efforts to show the characters’ reactions to events, the events themselves, not the characters, become the driving force of the story. This leaves the reader with the impression that there was no free will and thus the story is hamstrung by Williams’ refusal to allow for this separation.A powerful planter family like the Currains would have also most certainly had members who would have gone into politics and would have been members of the Confederate congress, others would have likely become colonels or major generals in the army. Not relegated simply to members of the general staff or cannoneers or people who sat at home as events passed them by. Most of all, family dynamics, like affairs, would have been handled much, much differently than Williams describes. Most of the family never seems to grow or change, Trav and Brett, thoughtful doting husbands, stay that way to the end. Enid, spoiled and childlike, remains the same.The biggest historical oversight of House Divided is Williams’ handling of the sensitive issue of slaves. He is correct is his assumption of there being an emotional disconnect between the Currains and their human property. The characters don’t really think deeply about their own relationship with slaves. Williams simply has them state that the family makes sure to treat them well, whipping and other forms of coercion are avoided. This is highly inaccurate. As historian Dickson Bruce Jr. wrote in Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South “Southerners were aware, and they were reminded of it often enough, that the system of slavery rested, ultimately, on violence.” Adding, “All the various ex-slave sources are agreed, moreover, that arbitrary violence was inseparable from the system itself.” Had Williams explored this master-slave relationship in greater detail, especially from the point of view of the slaves themselves, it would have added much more to the story. Instead, Williams falls into same “happy slaves,” trap as earlier works by Margaret Mitchell and Mary Johnston, having all of the slaves chose to stay with the family rather than leave to figure out their own lives. Fellow southern writer Robert Penn Warren did a much better job of showing the southern view of slaves, in fewer pages, in his own landmark work All the King’s Men, which came out one year before House Divided. Readers seeking to get a better understanding of life of plantation slaves should read Erskine Clarke’s Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic, based on hundreds of letters by Charles Jones, a Georgia planter during the war, and perhaps the best book written on the topic.In the final page of the long story, the main character almost speaking directly reader, calls on the South to forget the war and move on from it. This may have been meant to be a poignant call to modern times for forgiveness, but it seems to betray the character and shows Williams’ own ignorance on how a mother who lost a son and a brother to the war would have felt about it. As Edward L. Ayers writes in Southern Crossing: A History of the American South, 1877-1906, evidence of the war lay everywhere, even after a decade of rebuilding in the 1870s. Men with missing legs and arms could commonly be found sitting around the general store telling stories and everyone seemed to know someone who had served or died. Because of this, The Lost Cause was not simply built out of a refusal to admit defeat as Williams seems to suggest, but on a fundamental search meaning for all of the death and destruction across the region. To say it had all been about slavery was not edifying for southern families, instead they shifted to saying it had been about personal freedom and protecting an idyllic way of life. So no, a family like the Currains, would not have been able to simply move on from the war. Undercutting his own balancing act at the end, Williams states that war was brought on by fire-eaters in the North and South and that Virginia was simply put in impossible position of having to chose sides and that it had gone with the Confederacy, but not because of slavery. Unfortunately embracing the Lost Cause mythology.House Divided has a wide canvas and large cast and I think could have been a great American epic but seems unwieldy in Williams’ hands. Despite him having a put in a lot of research, there are still large historic flaws that can’t be overlooked. In the end the book is just not that interesting. Characters never quite come off as real people and recede into the background. Nor does the reader feel like they have experienced the war, but rather simply sat with the family in the parlor.
