Who Wrote That?
Answer to "Who Wrote That?
(B): George F. Cram
This writing, possibly an allegorical account of one dimension of the U.S. Civil War, is credited to George F. Cram. Minette, A Story of the First Crusade was published by John W. Iliff & Co., 1901. The 397 page historical romance of the Crusades set in June of the year 1096 seems a far stretch from the Civil War of 1861-1865. However, Cram's own journey as a "crusader" in the Civil War was marked with the experiences of being part of an occupying army in a hostile land that seemed foreign and far from home.
Perhaps Cram's use of this form of historical romance in the eleventh century communicated much of the passion, intrigue, and confusion that he felt himself as a member of a conquering force. For as a foot soldier in General Sherman's Twentieth Army Corps, Cram was both witness and participant to the "bumming," foraging, and maraudering of the South and its people during 1864-1865.
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As Cram wrote in the introduction to Minette, ". . . let us not forget that there was much that was noble, much that was sincere, in the courage and devotion of the tumultuous bodies of enthusiasts who formed those armies of the Crusades and found graves in the Holy Land during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A thousand years later our own story may need the covering of as broad a mantle of charity." Antioch or Atlanta? Perhaps both were unforgettable "Gate Cities" in his mind.
As Editor of Soldiering with Sherman: The Civil War Letters of George F. Cram, I was inspired to remember Cram's own words as he wrestled with communicating this story of the first crusade because it captured many of my own concerns and emotions in tackling the charge I held: ". . . my attention was arrested by a line here and a page there, from which I was able to trace a story full of strange pathos, and all the more interesting, as it seemed to me, that its characters, many of them at least, were real; and, gathering and connecting these fragmentary traces, I have tried to present them in such words as would make them no less interesting to you than they were to me."
May you find the characters of Cram, Ellis, Tirtlot, Whitlock, Kingsley, Wheeler, Congleton and the other comrades described in Soldiering with Sherman of particular interest because they were real people in a strange time performing with the courage and devotion so similar to the Crusaders of long ago.
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