Five Forks: Waterloo of the Confederacy: A Civil War Narrative

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The Battle of Five Forks was one of the last battles of the American Civil War. A week later, Lee surrendered. Two weeks later, Lincoln was dead. In this meditation on that battle, Alexander juxtaposes the story of the battle, which he tells through narrative, letters, and journal entries, with his own impressions, viewing the South through Northern eyes. In addition, he views contemporary American society through the story of the Civil War and specifically through the story of Five Forks. If it is true that we meet our future coming to us out of the past, then, Alexander posits, America is still grappling with issues unresolved by the Civil War. Those issues are not just the obvious ones of race and class, or of North vs. South, but also the more ephemeral issues surrounding the mythos Americans live by.Alexander is not a historian, and this is much more a literary work than a battle story. However, the immediacy with which Alexander tells his tale leadsthe reader to experience Five Forks -- the land, thesmells, the cries -- as if present there in 1865. Thus, he does not just describe a battle, he captures thespirit of all battles, all wars."Robert Alexander's Five Forks is a splendid andintriguing study of the South's Waterloo. I can't recommend too highly this book that so clearly belongsin anyone's permanent Civil War collection. The proseis improbably lucid and lovely." -- Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall"Alexander's purpose is not to furnish us with another tactical account of the Battle of Five Forks, fought April 1, 1865, but rather to entwine a narrative of those events which led up to this climactic battle of the Civil Warknown as 'the Waterloo of the Confederacy.' With the generous use of primary sources, from commanding generals to the common soldier, he interweaves their stories in telling how the two contending armies got to Petersburg along with providing a lively discussion on how the wa