Summer Land

Summer Land

In January 1864 John Graves is sent by his Boston newspaper to report on the progress of the Civil War in its western theatre. With Vicksburg recently fallen and control of the Mississippi River entirely in Northern hands, Union forces look poised to strike deep into the Southern heartland. The situation is complicated, however, by the generalship of William T. Sherman, whose military judgment, erratic behavior and irascibility have opened him to numerous attacks in the press and, consequently, a failure in public confidence, a situation of which he is acutely aware. Almost immediately Graves incurs the general's wrath when Sherman intercepts the young reporter’s very first dispatch reporting troop movements, a report which Sherman feels might benefit the enemy. Thus, Graves is incredulous when he learns that Sherman has decided to allow him to accompany the Army of Tennessee—some 30,000 men—as they embark upon a campaign striking across the state from Vicksburg to Meridian. In the three weeks that follow, Graves gets a first-hand lesson in the realities of war, a war that he has previously reported on only from the safe remove of his New England office. In particular, he is exposed to the sort of “total war” tacitly endorsed by Sherman, a form of warfare in which the Union forces will “live off the land,” foraging and pillaging for the supplies they require, and from which civilians are not excluded. It is the blueprint—a trial run—for the savage campaign Sherman will unleash later that year in his notorious “march to the sea.”In effect, Graves’ first exposure to the world of war shakes him loose from the world he has always known, triggering a sequence of unforeseen consequences: he is caught up among Newt Knight’s band of irregulars, the “Southern Yankees” who have seceded from the South, creating their own Free State of Jones; he finds himself fighting a duel in Mobile under the tutelage of the cousins Dabney and Harry Maury, two former Confederate generals; fleeing the consequences of this encounter, he is in Mexico City in time to witness the chaotic final days of the crumbling, ill-fated Maximilian monarchy. Ultimately, he washes up on a beach in Nicaragua, itself a country torn by virtually unrelenting revolutionary strife and North American interventionism for decades. During the six years that have passed, Graves has seen a great deal, and learned...something—about war, about friendship, about love, about the newly emergent modern world within which he finds himself somewhat shakily upright. Read more