Confederates by Thomas Keneally

First published: 1979

Type of work: Historical chronicle

Time of work: 1862

Locale: Virginia, Maryland, and North and South Carolina

Principal Characters:

• Usaph Bumpass, the protagonist, a Confederate soldier serving in the regiment of the Shenandoah Volunteers
• Ephephtha Bumpass, his wife
• Decatur Cate, a soldier conscripted into Bumpass’ regiment and Ephephtha’s lover
• Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, a Confederate general
• Horace Searcy, an English war correspondent and spy for the North
• Dora Whipple, a widow who becomes Searcy’s lover and accomplice
• Gus Ramseur, Bumpass’ fellow soldier and best friend
• Danny Blalock, a soldier in Bumpass’ regiment
• Ash Judd, also a soldier in Bumpass’ regiment
• Lafcadio Wheat, the colonel commanding the Shenandoah Volunteers

The Novel

The broad historical canvas upon which Confederates takes place is filled out with sharp portraits of individual actors as well as wide-angled panoramas of clashing armies. The protagonist, Usaph Bumpass, is a foot soldier whose vivid responses to battle are the dramatic high points of the novel. More general perspectives are provided by two important subplots, one focusing on the military strategies devised by General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (a real historical figure) and the other depicting the journalistic and espionage activities of Horace Searcy. Both subplots offer a bird’s-eye view of the warfare that Bumpass experiences at first hand, and, through Keneally’s deft alternation of close-up and long-shot, his complicated narrative moves forward at a brisk pace.

With the exception of a few flashbacks, Confederates is set in 1862, at a time when the superior fighting qualities of the Southern troops enabled them to meet larger and better equipped Northern forces on terms of approximate equality. Bumpass and his fellow Shenandoah Volunteers, although already bloodied in battle, have not yet lost their initial enthusiasm for the justice of their cause and the defense of their homeland. These hopes are bolstered by the confident leadership of Stonewall Jackson, whose ability to act quickly and decisively has so far befuddled the Union generals sent to fight against him. This is a source of immense frustration to Horace Searcy, who knows that the Confederacy would be defeated if the North made vigorous use of its advantages in numbers and supplies; it is also the cause of much anxiety among Southern leaders, who know that time is against them and an impressive military success is an absolute necessity. The race between Searcy’s efforts to get his information to the North and the South’s attempts to win a resounding victory is a major element of suspense in Confederates, given that most readers will be unfamiliar with the outcome of the particular battles fought in 1862, although they will know that the South is destined to lose the war.

Bumpass himself is also a battlefield within whom a serious conflict rages, in this case involving his wife, Ephephtha, and the itinerant artist Decatur Cate, who painted her portrait just before being drafted into the Confederate army. Cate brings Bumpass a letter from Ephephtha, and thus to the volunteer’s natural contempt for the conscript is added the raging jealousy of an absent husband. Something about the way Cate treats him, alternately overfamiliar and patronizing, convinces Bumpass that Cate has been his wife’s lover; since his suspicions are, in fact, correct, he begins to persecute and bully Cate with the help of his cronies Gus Ramseur, Danny Blalock, and Ash Judd. The artist responds to this harassment by refusing to defend himself, infuriating Bumpass all the more—to the point that he considers murdering him at the first opportunity.

These dramatic conflicts are played out against a background of escalating military tension, as Jackson prepares for a northward advance that will give him a chance to overwhelm the opposing troops piecemeal before they are able to concentrate into a superior force. A series of brilliantly executed maneuvers allows the Confederates to get around the Union flank and threaten its supply and communication lines, and, for a moment, it appears as if the South has won the crushing victory it so desperately needs. The superior resources of the North, however, even when mishandled, enable it to stalemate the Confederates at the bloody Battle of Antietam. Here, the Shenandoah Volunteers are decimated, Cate is killed, and Bumpass is so badly wounded that he returns home to be reconciled with, and ultimately to forgive, Ephephtha.

These major plot developments rest upon a rich variety of subsidiary incidents, many of which deal with the strong sexual passions aroused by the enforced separations and chance encounters that often occur in wartime. Searcy has a brief and tragic relationship with Dora Whipple, who is executed (Searcy, a British subject with the equivalent of diplomatic status, is only deported) when her links with his spy network are discovered. Two of Bumpass’ comrades-in-arms, Danny Blalock and Ash Judd, have a bizarre menage e trois with a farm woman that comes to a premature end when they are shot at by her crippled son; and Colonel Lafcadio Wheat, having spent a passionate night with a wife whose husband is away at war, manages to give Bumpass an inkling of those differences between lust and love which will eventually enable him to come to terms with Ephephtha’s adultery. Sexual desire is never far beneath the surface of Confederates, since its characters’ increasing familiarity with death is accompanied by powerful urges toward anything that affirms life.

As this last point suggests, it is the novel’s graphic depiction of the violence and horror of war that provides the fundamental motivations of its characters as well as the framework of its plot. This is accomplished, as in most good descriptive writing, by selecting the telling detail rather than piling on the adjectives and adverbs: It is the eyeball dangling from a socket and the intestines spilling out of a stomach that bring home to the reader what happens when flesh meets bullet or artillery shell. Where historical novels in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott display masses of men colliding on an epic scale, Confederates takes readers into the center of the struggle and offers overwhelming evidence of the traumatic transformations which occur in the ordeals of combat.

The Characters

Usaph Bumpass is the hub around whom the many spokes of the novel revolve. Although he never actually encounters the leading actors in the two major subplots, Stonewall Jackson and Horace Searcy, their actions affect him so directly that they nevertheless constitute a part of his personal universe. In keeping with his centrality to the novel’s narrative, Bumpass is in most respects an average sort of fellow: He follows orders, does not stick his neck out, and envies those who, like the artist Decatur Cate and the musically talented Gus Ramseur, have special gifts that lift them above the run-of-the-mill. Even Bumpass’ basic equanimity, however, is broken down by the wear and tear of fighting and his apprehensions regarding his wife’s faithfulness, the latter being brought to the boiling point by the appearance of Cate.

Cate’s feelings for Bumpass, a combination of almost brotherly affection and simple pity, make him one of the most interesting characters in the book. Cate believes that he has been truly and deeply loved by Ephephtha and that this makes him and Bumpass confederates in love as well as in war; for Bumpass, however, Cate is simply an intrusion, a painful reminder that Ephephtha is now beyond his influence. The dynamics of this interaction, in which Cate is compelled to pursue Bumpass and he, in turn, is driven to despise Cate, tend to overshadow the relationship that each has had with Ephephtha, who is described as a very attractive but otherwise passive and vacuous woman. In this, she is joined by the rest of the novel’s female characters, who, even when sexually desired, do not seem able to offer their lovers anything more than a temporary respite from the stronger bonds forged between men in battle.

Stonewall Jackson and Horace Searcy are somewhat underdeveloped as individuals but still function as important sources of more expansive points of view. In accordance with the historical record, Jackson is portrayed as a reserved but resolute leader capable of inspiring great efforts from his men, with Thomas Keneally compensating for the absence of psychological data by providing a wealth of tactical military detail that makes it easy to follow the geographical course of the war. Searcy, who bears some resemblance to the famous English war correspondent W. H. Russell, serves to put the South’s need for a quick victory on the battlefield into an international context in which such a victory would help it achieve diplomatic recognition from Great Britain. Other period figures, among them Abraham Lincoln, make brief appearances in Confederates but are generally treated in a conventional, at times stereotypical, manner that does not stray far from the historical record.

Bumpass’ friends in the Shenandoah Volunteers are given far more complex and interesting treatment. Ramseur’s painstaking composition of a “War Symphony,” Blalock’s penchant for grandiose turns of phrase, and Judd’s irrepressibly profane humor are sketched in bold, dramatic strokes that firmly establish their personal idiosyncrasies. The numerous minor characters who make up Bumpass’ regiment and its allies and enemies are similarly presented as a colorful kaleidoscope of men at war, and one comes away from Confederates remembering its quirky privates rather than its famous generals and politicians. To play with the word for a moment, there are a host of “characters” among the novel’s characters, and they add a rich human dimension to its accounts of large-scale maneuvering on the military and diplomatic fronts.

Critical Context

Prior to the publication of Confederates, Keneally had achieved substantial critical and commercial success in his native Australia and in Great Britain, but he was not well-known in the United States. The novel’s subject matter and intrinsic excellence earned for Confederates a hearing among American reviewers and readers, and subsequent novels, such as Schindler’s List (first published in Australia as Schindler’s Ark, 1982) and A Family Madness (1985), have also been very well received. The cult popularity of the 1978 film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (based on Keneally’s 1972 novel), in which the author has a feature role, has undoubtedly contributed to the wider public recognition of his work.

In the context of Keneally’s previous books, Confederates continues an interest in historical fiction that began with the evocation of a South Pacific penal colony of the 1790’s in his third novel, Bring Larks and Heroes (1967), and continued in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, based on a turn-of-the-century Australian murder, and Gossip from the Forest (1975), which depicts the negotiations that ended World War I. Confederates’ thematic preoccupation with the nature of human loyalties is foreshadowed in The Fear (1965), which examines the faiths of Catholics and Communists, and in Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968), which describes an urbane priest’s conflicts with his less gifted colleagues. Confederates succeeds in uniting these historical interests and thematic concerns into an extraordinarily fine novel and represents the most significant development in Keneally’s literary career.

Bibliography

Beston, John B. “An Interview with Thomas Keneally,” in World Literature Written in English. XII, no. 1(1973), pp. 48-56.

Burke, Jeffrey. “Novel of War,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXII (October 5, 1980), p. 3.

Hospital, Janette T. “Keneally’s Reluctant Prophets: Analysis and an Interview with the Novelist,” in Commonweal. VII (May, 1976), pp. 295-300.

Kroll, Jack. Review in Newsweek. XCVI (September 15, 1980), p. 89.

Michaud, Charles. Review in Library Journal. CV (September 1, 1980), p. 1752.

Motion, Andrew. Review in The Times Literary Supplement. November 23, 1979, p. 11.