| Finalist
for the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, sponsored
by the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of Civil War
at Shepherd College, Shepherdstown, West Virginia
A History Book
Club Selection
With Blood Image, his compellingly original biography
of Confederate cavalry leader Turner Ashby, Paul Anderson
demonstrates that the symbol of a man can be just as important
as the man himself. Renowned as a born leader, graceful horseman,
and violent partisan warrior, Turner Ashby was one of the
most famous fighting men of the Civil War. Rising to colonel
of the 7th Virginia Cavalry, Ashby fought brilliantly under
Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson during the 1862
Shenandoah Valley campaign until he died in battle near Harrisonburg,
Virginia.
These bare facts
of Ashby’s wartime exploits scarcely convey the majesty
and shaping force of the legend that grew around him while
he lived and fought. Anderson explores how and why Ashby’s
admirers in the Shenandoah Valley made him into their essential
icon of “home.” Anderson also demonstrates that
Ashby’s image — a catalytic, mesmerizing, and
often contradictory combination of southern antebellum cultural
ideals and wartime hopes and fears — emerged during
his own lifetime and was not a later creation of the Lost
Cause.
Recognizing the
power of Ashby’s fame as knightly horseman, family defender,
natural man and savage, and Confederate warrior, Anderson
boldly organizes his study in four radial chapters that capture
and reflect the circular energy of those images, each facet
reinforcing and refreshing the others. With superb scholarship
he shows that the force of Ashby’s image was double-edged:
it inspired admirers in the Shenandoah Valley, but it also
shielded them from the savagery of a war that challenged the
very ideals at the heart of their defense of home.
“A broad and refreshingly original portrait of Ashby
and his times.”
— Civil War Book Review
“The most
detailed study of Ashby to date. . . . This may be the coming
of a new way to write Civil War biographical history.”
— Civil War News
“A major
addition to Confederate biography and Civil War iconography.
It merges first-rate biography with an elegant, graceful,
and highly nuanced analysis of Civil War cultural history,
mythology, and memory.”
— Civil War History
“[Blood
Image] reaches back into the era preceding the war by
offering a fascinating interpretation of the solidification
of the chivalric ideal, and extends well beyond the Civil
War with its analysis of the longevity of Ashby’s image.”
— North Carolina Historical Review
“A very sober
and intelligent look at some of the darker aspects of human
nature . . . it is also an analysis that is as colorful and
engaging as the complex individual upon whose life and career
it is based.”
— Virginia Quarterly Review
“Anderson
not only captures the man and his age, but gives us cause
to reflect upon the circular energy of those images.”
— Washington Times
Paul Christopher Anderson is an associate
professor of history and Alumni Master Teacher at Clemson
University.
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