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Carrying the Flag: The Story of Charles Whilden, the Confederacy's Most Unlikely Hero. By Gordon C. Rhea. (New York: Basic Books, 2004. Pp. 279. Cloth $26.00.)
In Carrying the Flag, Gordon Rhea traces the life of Pvt. Charles Whilden, a soldier in Gen. A. P. Hill's corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, to his singular act of heroism in May 1864. Rhea's book is based on the premise that often the actions and the "capacity of insignificant players ... alter[s] the course of history," a realization long acknowledged by social historians, but still in need of emphasis in the historiography of the American Civil War (3). Charles Whilden's act of heroism in the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania Court House in May 1864, Rhea argues, prolonged the war for another ten months. What made Whilden's exploit so "unlikely" was the fact that it was accomplished by a forty-year-old private who was racked by frequent epileptic seizures and who had failed in virtually every professional and private endeavor he undertook before the war.
Despite the promise to tell the story of Charles Whilden, as the title suggests, this book is as much, if not more, about the sectional crisis and the subsequent Civil War. Therein...