By Boyd Cathey
November 10, 2026
Like most boys growing up in the South in the 1960s, I experienced the excitement of the "Civil War Centennial," with its numerous commemorations and re-enactments, the publication of literally hundreds of books and essays, and including considerable time in the classroom recalling events of a century past, but which in many ways in my mind's eye seemed only like yesterday. We read Bruce Catton, Clifford Dowdey, and various others, and, as I recall, a fabulously illustrated commemorative series published in Look Magazine, and we dreamed of riding with the "that devil Forrest" and the dashing Jeb Stuart.
As I look back I recall the phrase penned by the late Southern writer, my late friend and mentor Mel Bradford, that the Southerner possessed as no other denizen of America the capacity-that special grace historically-to "remember who we are," that is, to fathom and understand both the legacy and living reality of his past...a past in so many ways which defined him.
Despite the seemingly unstoppable and terrifying corruption that has devastated my homeland and its citizenry in recent decades, I have believed that history...that memory...was still available to those who earnestly searched it out. Yet, it seemed that the onrushing flood of political correctness, which tends to drown us all in a Procrustean bed of ironclad ideology worse than any totalitarian "Newspeak" that George Orwell could have imagined, was extinguishing or at least exiling to St. Helena any writer, any work which dared to violate the new template.
And that is why, just recently, I rejoiced when I came upon a newly published volume by Virginia author, H. V. "Bo" Traywick Jr., Written on the Whirlwind: The Epic of the Confederate Republic (Scuppernong Press, 2026; both in hardback and paperback editions). It is, with no exaggeration, one of the most engaging and probing volumes about the short life and tragic death of the Confederate States of America I have read in many a year.
Since the times of my youth and too many years of university, grad school, and teaching to count, there have been few books, few histories, which have so stirred my imagination and my connection to a living past as has done this well-edited and handsomely printed volume.
Not a dry-as-dust history recounting of battles and campaigns, nor an effort to simply catalogue the conditions of civilians in what became an increasingly desperate struggle to survive, Traywick artfully, at times poetically, weaves together firsthand accounts of military events with the contemporary lives, vividly told, of individuals and families. He does this by carefully selecting illustrative texts from diaries, journals, reminiscences, post-war histories, as well as correspondence and newspaper reports of what was actually occurring and how it was affecting life, arranging them in narrative form chronologically. Thus, we have the engrossing memoirs of Lieutenant John S. Wise, The End of an Era (1899, and subsequent editions), one of the finest works of its kind, forming a kind of spine of the text, with additional textual excerpts focusing on the war selected from post-war memoirs of General John B. Gordon, Major Jedediah Hotchkiss, Colonel Charles Marshall, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Taylor, Major Heros von Borcke, and others. And interspersed are poignant descriptions of contemporaneous home life, the attempts to maintain some semblance of family and community, the increasingly negative ravages of the war, and finally a deeply painful Calvary as radical dislocation and destruction overtake the population. But even so, the excerpts Traywick selects and seamlessly integrates into his text are not only wistful memories but also offer faint glimmers of hope, Christian Hope and a resilience of citizens in the face of near total military and societal collapse.
As I read with interest episodes highlighted in Whirlwind, certain selections caught my attention. All through graduate school at the University of Virginia I had accepted more or less at face value that it was the impetuous Southern batteries in Charleston harbor that initiated the horrors of civil war. Every history professor I had stressed that point. Yet, I also recalled Edward Pollard's Southern History of the War (1866), quoted extensively by Traywick, which had raised serious doubts about that established narrative, and more recently there was historian William Marvel's comprehensive history of how the conflict actually began, Mr. Lincoln Goes to War (2006): "Lincoln chose to handle it [the Fort Sumter crisis] aggressively rather than diplomatically: he gambled on provoking a war to assure the dominance of federal authority when he could not have misunderstood that his policy weighted the odds overwhelmingly against a peaceful outcome." (p. 22)
Traywick discloses the final proof of Lincoln's warlike intent, quoting his message to Captain Gustavus V. Fox, commander of the Fort Sumter relief expedition.
The communication deserves to be printed in full:
"Washington, D. C., May 1, 1861
"Captain G. V. Fox
"My Dear Sir: I sincerely regret that the failure of the late attempt to provision Fort Sumpter should be the source of annoyance to you.... You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumpter, even if it should fail, and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result. Very truly, your friend, A. Lincoln" (fr0m Samuel W. Crawford, The Genesis of the Civil War: The Story of Fort Sumter 1860-1861; New York, 1887, p. 420).
And this all the while the US Secretary of State, William Seward, was assuring Confederate peace commissioners in Washington city that there would be no forced attempt by federal forces in Charleston harbor. (Marvel, pp. 23-24)
Whirlwind centers on events which occurred in central Virginia. That focus allows Traywick to examine and concentrate with more detailed attention on a developing unity in his narrative and the events his characters experience.
Between chapters are brief and appropriate quotations from English Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson (Idylls of the King, etc.), Sir Walter Scott, Matthew Arnold, and others which tend to mirror the vision of a true "epic" in the classical sense, the epic of the short-lived Confederate Republic which Traywick explores and gives expression to. Indeed, he titles his last chapter, "The Passing of Arthur," referring directly to the last section of Tennyson's heroic poem.
"For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole Round Table is dissolved
Which was an image of the mighty world,
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds."
Fittingly, Traywick finishes his volume appropriately with General Lee's famous "Farewell to the Army" (General Order No. 9, April 10, 1865).
Yet, it is not-nor does it have to be-the end. For buried deep in the consciousness of every Southerner is an ember, the memory of time and place, and of ancestors and heroic gestes which have not been completely blotted out.
It was the 2oth century Spanish writer, Miguel de Unamuno, who, in his volume, The Tragic Sense of Life, most accurately gave voice to this sentiment, and it should serve as our watchword as we slide into an uncertain and dangerous future: "Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope. Give us leave to live ! The eternity that is like an eternal present, without memory and without hope, is death...."