Tales from a Long Commute

By Stephen P. White There is a cluster of hills, just East of where I live, which in the aftermath of the First Battle of Bull Run (1861), were occupied by Confederate troops as the defeated Union army retreated back toward Washington. From the top of one of these hills - Munson's Hill, it was called - the Confederate troops could look down toward the Union lines near Bailey's Crossroads and beyond, some eight miles East, to the dome of the U.S. Capitol, still under construction. The rebels, to give their federal opponents something to look at in return, hoisted an enormous Confederate flag atop Munson's Hill which, on a clear day, could be seen clearly from Washington. Through much of the summer of 1861, Munson's Hill bristled with Confederate artillery, which could be spied by telescopes from the federal city. Later in the year, it was discovered, much to the embarrassment of Union commanders who were quickly earning a reputation for timidity if not fecklessness, that the imposing guns that had kept them at bay were "Quaker Guns" - painted logs set between old wagon wheels to look like cannons - which had been left by Confederate soldiers who had long since abandoned the position and fallen back to more defensible lines farther West. It was a view of the troops and fortifications (since re-occupied by soldiers in blue) atop Munson's Hill, and nearby Upton's Hill, which inspired Julia Ward Howe, that November, to compose the words of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." One of the most famous patriotic songs in American history was inspired by the view of the Union Army from what is now, give or take a few hundred yards, the parking lot of my local Target. I drive past these hills pretty much every day on my commute home from the office. It's not a terribly long commute, at least not measured in distance. But traffic in the Capital being what it is, and given the lack of a direct route between work and home, and accounting for various carpool duties, it is a commute that makes up in duration what it lacks in distance. I try to make the most of all this time in the car by listening to audiobooks. Long books. Books-I've-been-meaning-to-read-for-years-but-never-would-have-gotten-around-to-reading-if-it-weren't-for-my-obscene-commute sort of books. To give you some sense of the length of my commute, and at the risk of appearing a most insufferable try-hard, in the past twelve months (excluding "reruns," such as a smattering of Wodehouse and Tolkien's entire The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion) I have worked my way through a series of classics that I had never yet read: Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter, Eliot's Middlemarch, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Scott's Ivanhoe, Manzoni's The Betrothed, Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis, and Tolstoy's War and Peace. I generally find fiction works better than non-fiction for listening in the car, especially while driving. No one needs to be focused on following an extended line of argument while merging in traffic. But I am currently about halfway through the third volume of Shelby Foote's three-brick masterpiece, The Civil War: A Narrative, which, in print, comes in at just under 3,000 pages. Atlanta has just fallen to Sherman, and Grant is laboring around Petersburg. Foote's narrative style makes for easier listening than most non-fiction. (I searched for a version narrated by the author - anyone who remembers Ken Burns' Civil War documentary will remember Foote's sonorous Southern voice - but to no avail.) In addition to the aforementioned details of local historical interest, such as Munson's and Upton's Hills, Foote's telling of our nation's bloodiest chapter has provoked some reflection on our current situation, as dramatically different as our time is from the 1860s. Abraham Lincoln, to choose a poignant example, is remembered as one of the greatest presidents, if not the greatest, in our history. But even just a few short months before the election of 1864, neither he nor his friends had much...