cover image CHARLES DAHLGREN OF NATCHEZ: The Civil War and Dynastic Decline

CHARLES DAHLGREN OF NATCHEZ: The Civil War and Dynastic Decline

Herschel Gower, . . Brassey's, $26.95 (240pp) ISBN 978-1-57488-394-7

Gower, an emeritus professor of English and American literature at Vanderbilt, adds to the marginalia of Civil War literature with this straightforward and workmanlike biography. By focusing on Dalgren, whose life was neither so insignificant as to leave no traceable record or so consequential as to interest most historians, Gower illuminates a rarely charted area, specifically the postbellum fate of once prosperous Southerners. Dahlgren was born in Philadelphia in 1811 and at 24 moved to Natchez, Miss., to monitor famed financier's Nicolas Biddle's interests. Over the next two and a half decades, Dahlgren married, was widowed, remarried, fathered 12 children and became a wealthy plantation owner, a slaveholder and a pillar of the Southern society he wholeheartedly embraced. When the Civil War erupted, Dahlgren was made a brigadier general and commander of the 3rd Mississippi Brigade, while his brother served as an admiral with the Union navy. With the South's surrender, Dahlgren lost everything; he transplanted his family to New York City, where he became an entrepreneur and a lawyer—though never a financial success. Because of his connections to famous Civil War figures and his talent for self-promotion, however, he did gain some notoriety offering revisionist versions of his life to the New York press. "Perhaps no man in New York is more rich in reminiscence," mused one of his contemporaries. When Gower writes that Dahlgren's postwar difficulties "might have driven a man of less steel" to despair, readers should forgive the author his tendency toward drama; the chronicle of those later years is the book's most compelling narrative. 20 b&w photos not seen by PW. (Jan. 7)