The Guns of Bull Run

The Guns of Bull Run is the first book in Joseph Alexander Altsheler’s Civil War Series, published in 1914. The series is one of his most ambitious projects, an eight book sequence that follows young protagonists on both the Union and Confederate sides through nearly every major engagement of the American Civil War. The Guns of Bull Run sets up the whole sequence by following two cousins, Dick Mason on the Union side and Harry Kenton on the Confederate side, through the months leading up to and including the first major battle of the war.

The novel opens in Kentucky just before the war, with Dick and Harry as friends and cousins about to be pulled into opposing armies. Most of the book follows Harry, who joins a Confederate regiment under Colonel George Kenton, his uncle, and travels east to join the gathering army under Beauregard at Manassas. There are training scenes, marches, the slow assembly of the two armies, and then the battle itself, which Altsheler narrates in considerable detail over a long section.

What is interesting about the series is how seriously Altsheler tried to be fair to both sides. He was a Kentucky man writing for a national audience in the years around the fiftieth anniversary of the war. The Union and Confederate protagonists are both treated as honourable men doing their duty as they understand it. The series has been criticised for going easy on the Confederate cause and on the slavery question, and that criticism is partly fair. But within the limits of the boys adventure form, Altsheler is more even handed than most of his contemporaries.

The Guns of Bull Run runs about three hundred and fifty pages. It works as a single novel and also as the start of the eight book series. For readers continuing on, The Guns of Shiloh follows immediately, switching to Dick Mason’s Union perspective in the western theater. The full series continues through Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, the Wilderness, and the final campaigns.