(November 2010 Civil War News)

Faith, Valor, and Devotion: The Civil War Letters of William Porcher DuBose. Edited by W. Eric Emerson and Karen Stokes. Illustrated, notes, bibliography, index, 392 pp., 2010, University of South Carolina Press, www.sc.edu/uscpress, $49.95.

A Palmetto Boy: Civil War-Era Diaries and Letters of James Adams Tillman. Edited by Bobbie Swearingen Smith. Illustrated, photographs, notes, appendices, bibliography, index, 200 pp., 2010, University of South Carolina Press, www.sc.edu/uscpress, $29.95.

These two new publications of the USC Press are worthy additions to a relatively thin library of wartime writings of Palmetto State Confederates.

The lengthier book brings together roughly 150 letters between William Porcher DuBose and his fiancée (and later his wife) Anne “Nannie” Peronneau. All written between October 1861 and early April 1865, these letters are superbly edited by Civil War scholar Eric Emerson and archivist Karen Stokes.

The shorter volume consists of Civil War-era family correspondence written principally by James Adams Tillman, interspersed with Tillman’s diary entries, each inexpertly edited by his grandniece. 

Will DuBose was to the manor born. The son of a Yale-educated planter, DuBose grew up in the midlands of South Carolina. A brilliant student, DuBose graduated first in his class at the Citadel before going on to the University of Virginia, where he earned several more degrees.

The outbreak of war caught DuBose studying for the Episcopal ministry. Seven months passed before DuBose decided that his duty to his country trumped his duty to God. Once he had made the decision to take up arms, however, DuBose never looked back.

As adjutant of the Holcombe Legion in Evans’ South Carolina Brigade, DuBose saw hard service, mostly in the Eastern Theater of the war. Wounded three times, he was also taken prisoner and briefly incarcerated in 1862.

In the fall of 1863, without DuBose’s knowledge, his kinsman Gen. Joseph Kershaw, prompted by the Episcopal bishop of South Carolina, arranged for DuBose’s transfer as chaplain to Kershaw’s hard-fighting brigade, a position DuBose retained for the balance of the war.

After the war, DuBose distinguished himself as a minister, theologian and educator. DuBose lived into his 80s and died some 45 years after his beloved Nannie.

A native of the South Carolina upcountry, James Tillman also hailed from a privileged background. As with DuBose, a loyal family slave attended to Tillman throughout his Civil War service.

Just out of school in April 1861, the teenaged Tillman waited a year to enlist. His regiment, the 24th South Carolina Infantry, served initially in coastal defense of South Carolina before moving west and becoming part of the South’s main western army.

A good soldier, Tillman rose from private to captain and, like DuBose, also shed blood for the Confederacy. Tillman shared the hardships of Hood’s disastrous Tennessee Campaign in late 1864, and he was still with the Army of Tennessee at its North Carolina surrender in late April 1865.

Returning home at war’s end, Tillman assumed responsibility for his widowed mother’s farm and supervised freedmen who were once family slaves. Complications from war wounds took Tillman’s life in mid-1866.

DuBose’s letters reflect a cultivated mind as well as a profound spirituality. Written first as courtship letters and later as missives to a new bride, DuBose’s letters are understandably light on military subjects; however, they do provide insightful commentary on several prominent Confederates.

Tillman was quite literate, but his letters lack the literary and biblical allusions and overall polish of DuBose’s correspondence. However, Tillman’s letters contain more commentary on campaigns and battles than do DuBose’s. Tillman’s diary entries are abbreviated and deal mostly with the weather and his precarious health.

Support for the Confederacy was axiomatic with both DuBose and Tillman, and neither devoted much ink to the causes or justification for secession or the war.

The DuBose book contains only a few maps, but they are at least readable, unlike those in the Tillman book. But the glaring difference between the two books is the quality of the editing. Bobbie Swearingen Smith deserves credit for bringing her ancestor’s writings to print, but a lack of familiarity with the Civil War shows through repeatedly.

This reviewer recommends both books to readers interested in wartime private correspondence of young but educated and observant South Carolina Confederate officers, even though he wishes that the USC Press had engaged a co-editor for the Tillman papers.

Reviewer: C. Michael Harrington  

C. Michael Harrington is a member of the Houston Civil War Round Table and Civil War Aficionados. He has written several articles on South Carolina Confederates. A practicing lawyer, he has degrees in economics from Yale and Cambridge and a law degree from Harvard.