Before the Dawn

Before the Dawn, A Story of the Fall of Richmond is a Civil War novel by Joseph Alexander Altsheler, published in 1903. It came earlier in his career than the major Civil War series of 1914 and 1915, and is one of his standalone treatments of the war from the Confederate side.

The novel is set in Richmond during the last months of the war, from the autumn of 1864 through to the fall of the Confederate capital in April 1865. The protagonist is Robert Prescott, a young Confederate captain wounded earlier in the war and now assigned to staff duties in the capital. Most of the action takes place in Richmond itself rather than on the battlefield. There are the closing months of the siege at Petersburg, the increasing pressure on the city, the social life of the Confederate government and military as the situation deteriorates, the desperate political maneuvering of the final months, and the eventual evacuation and burning of Richmond on the night of April 2 and 3, 1865.

Altsheler is at his best in the city scenes. The portraits of Confederate Richmond in its decline are atmospheric and well researched. He captures the strange mood of a society that knows it is losing and that continues to maintain its forms even as the substance is going. The military and political figures who pass through the book include several of the historical figures of the period, handled with reasonable accuracy. The romantic subplot involves a young woman named Helen Harley and works in the conventional manner of the period without being especially original.

The novel runs about three hundred and fifty pages. It is one of Altsheler’s stronger standalone Civil War novels and has the kind of focused setting that the longer eight book series sometimes lacked. For readers interested in fictional treatments of the Confederate experience from the southern side, this is one of the better novels of the early twentieth century. It pairs naturally with his later Civil War series, particularly the volumes set in Virginia, and with Mary Johnston’s Civil War novels from around the same period.