You.

Hello, and welcome to the bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is Conrad Bevins, author of The Best General in the Civil War, a novel.

Conrad, thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

I'm so excited to talk about this book because it's a little bit different.

We've had a few novels, but we've never had one like this on before, and I like that the format is a little bit unusual.

Could you start by just introducing the book to us?

Well, it's, as I say, a novel, but it's all based on fact.

This general George Thomas was a real person.

He was, he was born in Virginia, but he sided with the North during the Civil War, even though his parents were slaveholders.

And he was, you know, good friends with Robert E Lee.

But he decided that his, oath to, the army to defend the Constitution from all enemies, domestic and foreign or paramount was paramount.

So he, he signed with the North, and he became quite hated across the South because of that.

But he, stuck to his guns, literally.

And, most Civil War, experts would rate him, you know, probably the third best general in the North had.

And he was, pretty vital to their effort.

And, you know, some people think the South might have won the Civil War had he gone with them.

That's, you know, debatable, but kind of like the title is debatable.

But, so, that was just something I was very interested in.

And, I, you know, a friend.

I'll almost 40 years ago urged me to read, The Civil War Histories by, Shelby Foote.

This is before he became a, superstar on PBS.

And, I, I enjoyed the books.

I thought the most interesting person to me was, George Thomas.

Just because of the the sacrifices he had to make, to do what he thought was right.

So, Yeah, I was going to ask how you came to be so interested in the Civil War.

Was it was it those those books that got you into it?

Yes.

And, so I'm originally from the Kansas City area.

For about three years I lived in Memphis, which is where the, you know, the Civil War still sort of, a lot of monuments around and so forth.

I was, I was interested in, like I say, my friends said, well, Shelby Foote, who is also from Memphis, he wrote, you know, this great, study of it and, and it was it was a great, you know, series of books and, I just thought, well, what was Thomas thinking?

What?

You know, he never wrote his own memoir, a fact he hated the idea of doing that.

So I thought, well, I can, I can do one better than him.

If he didn't write it, I'll write it.

And, I wrote it.

Really?

Not as a a regular memoir.

I, I guess the concept was that he was just, you know, toward the end of his life, he was sort of, you know, a little bit angry about some of the slides that were paid to him, both from the north and the South.

So he was just sort of, narrating this to his wife and, he was giving his, you know, kind of unvarnished opinions of about certain people because he, he didn't necessarily like Lincoln or Grant and, and, you know, his roommate at West Point was the William Sherman.

He was, famous for his, you know, marched through Georgia.

But, in a way, he, even though they became his enemies, he still had a great deal of friendship for Robert E Lee and, oh, James Longstreet and people like that.

So, anyway, now this is your first novel.

Correct.

But you've you've been a journalist.

You've written for many years.

Was that a difficult jump to make from from writing?

I guess it's still you kind of toe the line because it's fiction.

But you you do tend to do a lot of research and write as accurate as possible.

Yeah.

I mean, though I did write a lot in, in journalism as mostly an editor, a copy editor and wire editor for most of my career.

I, you know, but it wasn't it was something I wanted to do because you, you know, you edit, you're you're also writing to a degree and, I just it was it was a fun transition to make.

It was just, it was a book I started working on in a way, almost 30 years ago.

And I wrote some early drafts, you know, at the turn of the century.

And then when I retired, in 2018, I could, you know, give my full attention to it.

So.

So we, we've talked about it that this was, this is historical fiction.

But it is, it is pretty historical as you say.

So I imagine a lot of research was done.

Can you talk about your research process.

Well I read about more than 40 books on, the subject, you know, the in the war in general and about five biographies of, of Thomas Tudor written in the century.

And they were, you know, quite good.

Kind of gave a pretty balanced view of him.

And I just for pleasure and also research, I visited a lot of Civil War battlefields, including most of the ones that where he fought and, I also went by the house where he was born, which is still a working farm in southern Virginia.

You know, just you can't go in.

It's like I say, it's private ownership.

But it was, you know, quite nice to see the house.

And they did have a historic marker in front of them in front of the house.

And also there's a historic marker for, Nat Turner's rebellion, which was happened just a couple of miles from where, Thomas grew up.

And Nat Turner was, a slave several miles away, and he, you know, led, our fight against, slavery.

And it was, very bloody, and George Thomas and his family barely escaped from that.

And it was their very lucky.

Part of it was that, his family owned about a dozen slaves, and he was had been friendly to the slaves.

He was when he was, you know, 14 or 15 years old and he treated them well.

And they did not join the rebellion.

In fact, they, you know, escaped from Turner as fast as I could as well.

And I think it had some effect on, Thomas's outlook on slavery.

I don't think he, you know, became an abolitionist right away, but I think he saw the some of the problems of slavery and the the inhumanity of it.

I think that, mentioned would have some, effect on his decision to side with the North when the war broke out.

I would imagine being able to travel to those places to, to physically be there, which would maybe help enrich the writing a little bit because, the, the, the war part of the, of the novel is well documented.

So I'm sure that's pretty accurate on on where he's moving and what he's doing.

But having been to see the battlefields probably helps you kind of enrich what you're what he's able to describe in the novel and what he's seen.

It does what he's feeling.

It did.

And like, like I say of the conversations I write or of course, from my imagination, I would think a 19th century gentleman would, would, think and express himself.

I the book isn't just about the battles.

I there was, you know, he, Whenever I eventually end up marrying a woman from the north, of course, that had some effect on his decision as well.

And just his growing up, some of his non war experiences and, you know, I spent some time in Texas as a cavalry officer and, so and he, during his, pre-war travels, he went, you know, all over the United States and even down to Central America.

And after the war, he went up to Alaska for a while.

So, I hope the people think, he's just going to be nothing about battles.

I know there's more to it than that.

I hope.

No, it's absolutely a full rich picture of of of his life.

I mean, it's as if he was writing his full kind of, autobiography or his memoir from birth through what he didn't know would about to be his death.

And I think that's a that's wonderful.

I also want to highlight, too, that since we've talked about how much research was done, it has a bibliography at the end, which is rare for a novel, but I think for one like this, this is the kind of thing that I would hope would kind of be a gateway for people if they read this and they want to learn more about the history you've given them a pretty robust reading list at the back.

Yeah, they were there.

A lot of them are books, you know, fairly recently from this century, in the 1990s, though, I went back and looked at, you know, Ulysses Grant, his autobiography, William Sherman's.

But, most of them are fairly recent, but, you know, Shelby Foote, of course, from the, the he wrote them from the 50s through the 70s.

And Bruce Catton was great as well.

So, but, you know, like I say, the two more recent biographies of, of Thomas were, by miss and Bob.

Rick, I called Master of War and, something by Brian Wills called, Truth Steel also like about Thomas.

And they were, quite instructive.

So, so what I do want to highlight too, there's a, there's an interesting framing device around the book where, it's it's almost like, like a found footage movie, like the conceit of the book is they're remodeling a church somewhere, and they come across, these papers.

I love that it's a framing device, because as a reader, it gets me right in, and I'm like, oh, what did they find?

I want to know more.

Well, why did you choose or how did you choose to include that?

Well, I thought it'd be fun.

And I mean, I, I'm, I'm trying to be entertaining more than anything.

I'm not trying to be educational, but, Yeah, I just I thought that it would maybe, you know, you know, get you into the book and just.

I hope people will notice that.

Yeah, it is a novel that I am making this up, that, he did not write his stuff.

And it's not hidden in some church in upstate New York, but, I was in a lot of it also was that this is an autobiography, a novel that he did not want people to read.

He was being very frank about his opinions on people.

And, I think that was where he's just very that was, you know, he's the only person who really would hear this was be his wife.

And you can you can vent to your spouse, you know, in ways that you would never speak to in public.

So I just thought that would be more fun.

And, maybe, you know, maybe a little more honest in what I imagine he really thought of people.

Sure.

So.

Sure.

Oh, I can compliment you.

I think it worked because I think you.

It gets you in it.

And then I also feel like it just sets you up to even though, you know, in your head it's a novel, it just sets you up as the reader to be ready to believe this.

And, I do.

I always find myself when I get to read historical fiction, I have to say what a what a time we live in, because I can read something I go to that really happen, and then I can go Google it and go, oh, well, that actually did happen.

It's such a fun, way to read something like, I know you don't want to be educational, but you sneak it in there and and you're learning about something that maybe you wouldn't have necessarily read to begin with.

So I think it's great for that.

Yeah.

I've, you know, some, friends of mine just they're very well educated that they hadn't really heard of George Thomas.

So I think that's good.

I mean, like, he's a good example for the 21st century and, just, just a very good man and, somebody I would respect quite a bit.

I, I want to expand on that, too, because I'm not the biggest Civil War buff, so I had never really heard of him.

And now I know a lot more.

You mentioned that his contemporaries, a lot of them did write their own, autobiographies and their memoirs.

And, of course, you know, Lincoln had a million things written about him.

Right.

Do you think the fact that he didn't in his own time, actually write this story, work against his legacy?

Very much so.

Of course, he died fairly young and only about five years after the war was over.

He was, some of his rivals in the north and the northern Army were still kind of sniping, and I'm a little bit and I think that upset him.

And maybe, you know, quickened his death.

But, you know, he, you know, he died when reconstruction was only halfway through.

And, and I think, you know, after reconstruction ended, the South, you know, was really going in with their, their lost cause and mythology and I think they they just basically wanted to ignore that the fact that, you know, this great general was from the South, but he side with the North and of course, he wasn't alone.

There were, you know, several, notable, soldiers from the South who sided with the North.

But he seemed to, you know, make them the most angry somehow they they hated him more than anybody else.

And, you know, I think the the North was also after reconstruction ended, they were.

Oh, they respected Thomas, but the, they didn't want to, you know, put him up on two high pedestal because they wanted the north of the south to, you know, be united again.

I just thought that now pushing Thomas too much just wouldn't make the South angry.

So it it, so he became, you know, a little more obscure, like, I mean, Civil War scholars know him very well.

And, so he wasn't forgotten by them, but by the general public, you know?

Yeah, I would say for the layperson, we know, Lee, we know Jackson, right?

We know Grant, and we know, Sherman.

But this was just not a name that that I had heard as a as a layperson, which is a shame, because as, as you've said and I think as a character for a novel, he's such an interesting figure.

This is somebody, as you said, was from the South, grew up owning slaves in his family, but has experiences or things that changed him.

And and as time came, he chose loyalty to country over state.

And it cost him a lot, both in from his fellow Southerners.

And then also maybe some distrust among the other northerners, like, can we really trust this southern person?

So he kind of was he wasn't alone, but maybe at his rank, he was kind of a man alone, you know, I mean, Lincoln, it took Lake in a long time to, fully trust him.

And, I think that bothered Thomas.

Quite a bit.

And, Thomas was for a general.

He wasn't that vain.

I mean, of course he was vain.

You have to be to be a general.

But he was somewhat self-effacing and, so, you know, he wasn't as colorful as some of the other generals who, you know, were, like, you know, Grant, of course, was fairly self-effacing, too.

But Grant, for some reason, just did not ever like Thomas.

It was sort of a mutual distrust, just a I guess they were just allergic to each other.

And I think that that sort of held, Thomas quite back a little bit.

And he was good friends with William, Thomas.

But, I think even he and Thomas became somewhat antagonistic toward the end of the war.

I think they had different philosophies because, you know, Thomas, you know, he was careful and deliberate, and he was, you know, a lot of people thought he was too slow.

But, you know, he he would he'd be fast when it was called for.

But he wasn't as reckless as, Grant and Sherman could be.

And I like he, he didn't want his men to die unnecessarily.

And, I think that one respect maybe of, the soldiers, the in the field.

But, maybe some of the general said, okay, come on, speed it up here.

Let's go, let's go.

But the the interpersonal relationships was it was one of the themes of the book that I really enjoyed with.

I guess I never thought about how the fact that maybe these generals all knew each other because as we learned in the book, they were a a lot of them went to West Point.

They were contemporaries, if not same class men, upper and lower classmen.

So the northern generals and the southern generals, they came up together in some ways, and they had prior relationships before this split happened.

So the the complications of all that and people are people.

So that's going to come into how they react to each other, anticipate what the other is doing.

It's it's a fascinating kind of study.

There are a lot of friends across the, the line and, and some of them became friends afterwards.

So, you know, Thomas became really had a, a nice meeting after a war with John Bell Hood, who, was his big rival in the the, you know, the last big battle of the Civil War allies in the West.

And, John Bell Hood was an interesting person.

He was, a he wasn't that great.

General was incredibly brave, and he would not stop for anything.

He lost use of an arm in one battle, and they lost a leg in another battle.

But he kept going.

Is a little bit like the, Black Knight in the Monty Python movie, the Holy Grail.

You know, I just, you know, just come on, man, you've lost.

But no, he won't give up.

So.

And, Oh, and he also became friends after the war with, Longstreet, who was, probably Lee's best general.

So he was, you know, his friendships were some held on, but some men splintered as he, as you would expect during the war.

Sure.

So, you mentioned in your author's note the how it's hard to parse his exact feelings on the institution of slavery and when and how they evolved because, I think you say, like his northern friends would say one thing, and his southern former friends may say another thing.

And since he didn't write it down, we don't know exactly when and where his feelings evolved.

And as we've discussed, his family did own slaves.

But then he witnessed that that uprising.

And and as a general, he fully supported, black soldiers on the Union Army.

So, how do you how do you go about parsing out and and trying to prevent I mean, obviously we can't know, but trying to present an accurate picture of what a man of his time must have thought.

Well, he did write something.

Or he thought, okay, these former black slaves who are escaping from the South, you know, they want to fight.

They want to, you know, fight for their freedom.

And I thought, okay, well, maybe we should use them.

I mean, at first he has doubts, but other people are saying telling him that, yes, they will fight.

They're just as brave as anybody else.

And we they proved it to him.

And, in fact, his his great victory at the Battle of Nashville.

Black soldiers were very instrumental in helping him, gain that victory.

So he like I in the book, I say that his views evolved and, and I think after the war, he was very good about helping, the former slaves, be successful in their life.

And he was trying to protect their civil rights because, you know, during reconstruction, it was, you know, the the war officially ended, but it was there's still quite a bit of violence afterwards.

And he he tried to do his best to, to help the former slaves.

I think this is always such a fascinating thing to me, as we can never know what they really thought.

And there's always sometimes opposing viewpoints, it would seem in, in these, in the, in this generation of people.

But I feel like it makes sense the way you kind of wrote him, because obviously his thoughts must have changed for him to to fight for the union and to turn his what his family felt was like turning his back on them.

So certainly something, something changed within him.

And I think I think it's reasonable the way it's written.

Thank you.

Of course we've discussed I it's not all battles, as we said, but, the battles tend to be kind of very accurate.

But also you kind of you kind of throw in maybe what he's thinking or why he's making these decisions, and being too slow or, or strategizing in the way that he did.

He the deal is he was, not that often the main general in a certain army.

He was usually commanding.

The bulk of the army is sort of like the, the guy that the commanding general commanded or counted on.

But, he the, you know, like, he would really set up and try to set up a good defense.

And then when he saw the chance to take the offensive, he would go for it.

But, the deal is he kept several what would have been union defeats from the coming complete catastrophes and, like Chickamauga and whatever that, became is, one of his, nicknames was a rocket ship, Chickamauga, because he kept that from being a complete disaster.

It was just a minor disaster.

But it it was awful for the North.

But whenever he got a chance to command an army by himself, he never lost, you know, and, And Grant and Sherman sometimes would lose battles.

Thomas never lost one when he was fully in command.

And, you know, he would, I think he he would expect the unexpected, you know, I mean, you you can't expect the plan to to go exactly as you hope.

And, you know, I don't know that he ever had anything to do with the boxer.

Mike Tyson versus Mike Tyson once said, everybody has a plan to get hit in the face.

I think Thomas was the same way as, like he expected to get hit in the face and then, okay, I'll, I'll readjust and do whatever is necessary to to save the situation.

So I, I also liked how I, it seems like we, we like to kind of assign stereotypes to, to people in just in general.

So he got that moniker of being too slow.

You know, Sherman kind of had that slash and burn, right?

Oh, and then Grant was known as a drunk.

And and you explore the idea of what's what's true and what's not.

How do we get these nicknames for, for kind of all of them, a little bit in the, in the book.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, I Thomas, I don't think I ever saw Grant drunk.

I think Grant, you know, he had a drinking problem before the war.

I think he had it mostly under control during the war.

I think, that it it hurt Grant's reputation, obviously, but, you know, as, as Lincoln supposedly once said, hey, if if Grant is doing really well, if he's a drinking man, I want to send the same, booze to the other generals, and maybe they'll do as well.

So.

But, you know, as I said, Thomas was really self-effacing, and he, he.

So sometimes the turn now promotions because they just didn't fit what he thought was right.

He didn't want to undermine, other officers, you know, in, in intriguing against them.

He wanted to be fair and sometimes fear that I read about him.

It's like, you know, come on, George, just take it.

You know, I mean, you're the better guy, you know, do what you need to do.

But he was very much, you know, trying to do what he thought was the right thing all the time.

Even if it hurt him.

Hurt him?

So very methodical.

Both in personnel and and in matters of battle.

Well, unfortunately, we're running a little short on time here.

And our final two minutes.

Can you tell us what you hope people take away from your book?

Well, I hope they're entertained.

And I hope, it's informative.

You know, I it's written from the viewpoint of a 19th century man.

And, a very good American, a very, someone that I think we all can be proud of.

Whether you came from North or South, the Mason-Dixon line even now.

And I he's a, I think, a great example for the 21st century of how we should be.

And, you know, I like I say he was he's someone I just had a lot of respect for when I was reading all these books.

And, and my respect for him grew even more, and I, I hope that, you know, sometimes I think, a lot of Americans are somewhat ignorant of their history and, I hope that, you know, we can find good examples in the past.

And, they may not always be people that are that we've heard of.

And that may be, you know, Lincoln, of course, was a great man.

Thomas was not at that level, but he was a great man his own way.

And I hope, people will read histories and find other people to respect in the past.

And so we'll, I hope, have, people in the future to respect us as much.

Well, thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me here and for writing this book.

I mean, it's a fascinating look at a person that I now want to know more about.

So I appreciate that.

Thank you for joining us.

The book again is the best general in the Civil War.

We're out of time, so I will see you again soon.