Transformed Lives

A Worse Place Than Hell is a cogent, elegantly written examination of the far-reaching impact of a single battle. “More concerned with the personal than the political,” author John Matteson eschews history on the grand scale for a view shaped by the experiences of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., John Pelham, Walt Whitman, Arthur Fuller, and Louisa May Alcott.

Matteson follows the five from Antietam through the Union debacle at Fredericksburg three months later, arguing that we “would now inhabit a different nation” had each of these individuals not been transformed by their witness to the war’s slaughter. Today Holmes, Alcott, and Whitman are familiar names; Pelham and Fuller, neither of whom survived the war, less so.

John Pelham commanded J.E.B. Stuart’s “horse” artillery and played a key role in the Confederate repulse of the Union assaults on Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg. Christened the “perfect lion” by a biographer, Pelham met an early death, at 25, at Kelly’s Ford in March 1863 and in Matteson’s telling became “a unique icon” reminding Southerners then (and now) that “the war had not been horrible, but courtly and glorious.”