The Shades of the Wilderness A Story of Lee’s Great Stand

The Shades of the Wilderness is one of Joseph Alexander Altsheler’s books in his Civil War series, the long running historical adventure sequence that took young protagonists through the major events of the war for a generation of American boys reading in the early twentieth century. Altsheler had built his reputation writing historical adventure novels for boys, particularly the Young Trailers series about the Kentucky frontier, and the Civil War books extended that approach to the more recent national conflict that still shaped American memory in the years he was writing.

The shades of the wilderness of the title and the Lee’s great stand subtitle point to the Battle of the Wilderness and the wider Overland Campaign of May 1864, when Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Potomac began the brutal series of engagements that would carry the Union forces from northern Virginia toward Richmond and would set the stage for the eventual Confederate surrender at Appomattox the following spring. The Battle of the Wilderness itself was fought in the dense second growth forest west of Fredericksburg, where the visibility was so poor and the terrain so confusing that the fighting often took place at extremely close quarters with neither side fully aware of where their own units actually were. Altsheler uses the historical material as the structural anchor for his fictional narrative about young protagonists caught up in the events.

Lee’s great stand of the subtitle refers to the Confederate defense that managed to bring the initial Wilderness fighting to a tactical draw, even though the strategic situation that followed forced the Confederate forces into the long defensive campaign that would eventually end at Appomattox. Altsheler put a lot of effort into rendering the actual military history with reasonable accuracy for a young readers’ adventure novel, and his battle scenes capture something of the chaos and the moral weight of what nineteenth century combat in such conditions was actually like for the young men who fought in it.

Altsheler’s prose is brisk and his action sequences move at the pace his young readers expected. The moral lessons about courage, loyalty, and the costs of war are delivered through the narrative rather than imposed in lectures. Modern readers should be aware that the period assumptions about race and the moral character of the various participants in the war are very much present in Altsheler’s Civil War fiction.