Bringing Civil War History to Life: Stan Haynes on And Slavery No More

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to Civics and Coffee, a history podcast. The show all about United States history, delivered to you and the time it takes to enjoy your morning cup of coffee. I'm your host, Alicia, a historian trained in United States history with a passion for telling both the known and unknown parts of America's past. So grab your coffee and get ready for some bite-sized history. Welcome back, everyone. The Civil War is one of the most written-about pieces of American history. And yet there are still so many stories left untold. My guest today decided to take a little known piece of that history and weave it into a fast-paced historical novel that will leave you wanting more. I hope you all enjoy the conversation. Welcome everyone. Joining me today is Stan Haynes. He is an attorney whose lifelong interest in American history led him to write several books covering both fiction and nonfiction. He has given talks about his research to several presidential homes and libraries, and his most recent effort, And Slavery No More, is a work of historical fiction set during the Civil War and will be the focus of our conversation today. Welcome, Stan.

SPEAKER_02 1:16

Thank you, Alicia. It's a pleasure to be with you.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

So glad to have you. So uh let's dive right in. I I want to kind of ask you about how did you come to write historical fiction?

SPEAKER_02 1:28

Well, as you stated, I've always, since I was a kid, been interested in American history, political uh history, and presidential history, particularly. And I had written uh three nonfiction books. Um my first books were about presidential nominating conventions from the mid-19th century all the way to the mid-20th century. And then I began to think about historical fiction as a way to kind of expand my experiences as a writer, uh, to do something different, to look at history a different way, uh, to explore the historical events that I love to write about from a different perspective. So as you indicated, my new book is called And Slavery No More. It's set during the Civil War in 1862. And in preparing to write it, I came to realize, which I did not fully understand before, how much historical fiction has been a part of a Civil War uh over time, even before the war began, um, and our interpretations of the war since then. And the most important historical fiction book of all time was Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by Harriet Beatrice Stowe uh in the mid-1850s, in the year before the war. And that was a fictional account of the evils and brutality of slavery in the South. And that book is credited by historians as galvanizing public opinion in the North against slavery and eventually uh leading to the war. There's a famous story about uh President Abraham Lincoln uh during the war, meeting with Harriet Beecher Stowe. And he says to her, and the quote is probably apocryphal, but it's very interesting, he says, Oh, so you're you're the woman that wrote the book that started this whole thing. So that shows that historical fiction even before the Civil War was important. And if you look at some of the historical fiction books that have been uh very popular since the war, um just think of Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell in the 1930s, uh, a book that became a famous movie. Uh it really perpetuated and reinforced the lost cause myth of the South for decades. And then more recently we have The Killer Angels, written by Michael Sherer in the 1970s, a fictional account of the Battle of Gettysburg, um, which was the inspiration for the filmmaker Ken Burns to do his documentary series in the 1980s on the Civil War on the public broadcasting systems that really reignited an interest in the Civil War that continues to this day. So the Civil War and historical fiction has been intertwined for a century and a half of war. So I thought I'd try my own hand at it.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Well, and and speaking of, uh can you talk a bit like how do you decide what historical events to write about?

SPEAKER_02 4:28

So this is my third historical fiction book. I have three, uh, one set in the 1840s, one in the 1850s, and then one in the 1860s during the Civil War. And what I've tried to do with each of them is to focus on a real event that I find interesting and that is not very well known in history, uh, something that the readers will probably learn about for the first time by reading the book, and will hopefully find it um uh intriguing. Um, and then I try to build a fictional plot around that real event to try to make it come alive for the readers. My first novel was called Um Tyler No More. It's set in the 1840s, and it focused on an explosion on a U.S. naval warship, the USS Princeton. Um this explosion occurred on a cruise on the Potomac River, and on board that ship was the elite and cream of Washington Society, uh, President John Tyler and most of the cabinet. Dolly Madison, former First Lady, was on that cruise. And what happened is a cannon exploded. It was a horrible, tragic accident. Killed uh several people, uh, including two cabinet members. Um almost killed uh President John Tyler, but for uh being way late on his way to the deck, he would have been killed also. So that's a very important historical event, but it's kind of been lost to history, so I could try to um build a plot around that uh for the first book. Second book is set in the 1850s in the Kansas territory. At that time, there was a guerrilla war going on over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free state or an enslaved state. During the course of that fighting, uh the famous abolitionist John Brown went to Kansas and he basically committed a massacre. He pulled um pro-slavery people out of their cabins and uh had his men hack them to death. Uh I think there were five people uh murdered in one night, uh, two of whom were teenage boys. Uh again, a very significant event, but one that's kind of been lost of history. So that was my 1850s book, and then in the current book, um, and slavery no more, just that during the Civil War, uh the event I try to focus on is the lost orders of General Robert E. Lee. Now, Civil War buffs are probably familiar with this, um, but the average reader is probably not. Uh, what happened is the the Confederate Army invaded the Union state of Maryland, and uh the Union Army is chasing them. Uh one morning a Union uh soldier is walking through a field and he looks down and he sees in the grass some papers wrapped around two or three cigars. And he picks it up and reads the orders that the papers, and they turn out to be an original copy of orders from General Robert E. Lee outlining the movements of his troops over the next several days. So this quickly makes its way uh up the chain of command and falls into the hands of the Union general, a top Union general, George McClellan, within hours. And much of the historical debate over the 1862 Maryland campaign and the Battle of Antietam is whether McClellan acted quickly enough or appropriately enough when this intelligence coup fell into his hands. So that's uh again another key historical event that I don't think the average reader is uh interested in. And hopefully by reading my book, um, they will become interested in it and perhaps explore it further on their own. So that's what I try to do is to pick a little-known event and build a plot around it.

unknown 8:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

Well, can you talk a little bit about your research and your writing process?

SPEAKER_02 8:21

Uh of course, I do a lot of reading about the historical events uh that the book is set in, um, particularly biographies of the key historical figures that are involved or books about the era. Uh I use uh uh newspapers, I research historical newspapers from the era. I'm writing about an event, I'll look at some of the key newspapers, uh, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, to see how they recorded the event uh in the days after it occurred, just to see what the sentiment was at that time. Um I try to be as historically accurate as possible. Uh, in my new book, uh President Lincoln is a prominent figure. And whenever I have Lincoln speak in the book, I try to use uh quotes uh from him for the dialogue. Uh, for example, um, the book deals with the Emancipation Proclamation, uh, which uh Lincoln signed on New Year's Day of 1863. In that era, New Year's Day was a big, big deal at the White House. The presidents always had a big reception uh in the White House on New Year's Day. They would first greet dignitaries for about an hour or so, and then the public would be invited in, and the president would be there shaking hands for three hours or so uh with dignitaries and members of the public. So, what happened on New Year's Day, 1863, is that Lincoln uh went to this reception for three hours, and then he went upstairs to his office in the White House to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. And he noticed when he picked up his pen that his hand was shaking. Well, his hand was sore from having shaken hundreds, if not thousands, of hands over the past few hours. And he and he looked at the people around him and he says, you know, I'm not gonna do this right now. You know, if if my hand is unsteady when I sign this document, history will say that I hesitated, that my heart wasn't in it. So he put the pen down, he flexed his fingers a few times, picked it back up, and then he boldly signed the Emancipation Proclamation. So I include all of those dialogues and um and the words of Lincoln in that particular scene in other other chapters as I can to make it as realistic as possible. Um as to my writing process, uh I do not use an outline. When I start a book, I know where I want it to begin and where I want it to end. And the middle card is kind of uh a haphazard process. I found that many of the best chapters that I've written have been by my chasing down rabbit holes, uh going after tangents, uh something that I probably would not have thought of if I was religiously following an outline. So that's what works for me. I know every author has a different method, but that's what I found that works best for me.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:13

Well, and you know, this this book is uh about the the Lee's Lost Orders, as you mentioned, but you also talk a lot about Lincoln's kind of inner debate about emancipation. And so I'm I'm kind of curious as to, you know, kind of how what drew you to that kind of as your as your entry point into the book.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

Well, a big part of my interest in the Emancipation Proclamation story is that the true story is really different from our modern perception of President Lincoln. Uh we view him today as, you know, the great emancipator, as someone who was um fighting for slavery and was hell-bent on freeing the slaves all of his life and who uh promoted equal rights for blacks. Uh, the truth is much more complicated. Uh Lincoln's views on slavery evolved over time. Uh we do know that as a young man he detested the institution of slavery, but he was not an abolitionist. Uh, when he was a politician in the years before the war, uh his focus was on uh limiting the scope of slavery, not doing away with it. He was against the spread of slavery into the territories. But when he ran for president in 1860, he ran on a platform that pledged not to interfere with slavery where it existed uh uh already in the southern states. And then the war goes badly uh for the Union in the first couple years, and uh they're kind of desperate for uh ways to change the tide of the war. And Lincoln comes upon the Emancipation Proclamation, which is an executive order by the president, an emergency wartime act to free the enslaved people in the southern states. And he wants uh uh uh Southern blacks to uh leave their plantations and to join the Union Army to help fight uh in the war. And a couple of hundred thousand of them do, and they make a big difference in the second half of the war. So when you think of Lincoln as the emancipator, he really kind of came at it from a different perspective than we uh normally think of it. Even while pursuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln uh was exploring other ways to deal with slavery. I write in my book about uh a plan that he was pursuing for um uh gradual emancipation. He proposed a bill to Congress uh where this would be a plan whereby over a period of years, maybe even a generation, slaves would gradually be freed, and their slaveholders uh would be compensated financially by the government for the loss of their property. So something very different uh than the emancipation that we generally associate with Lincoln. Uh, he was also at this time uh exploring colonization plans. Uh, this is a system whereby freed blacks would be encouraged to leave the United States and to go live somewhere else. In my book, I write about uh plans that he was exploring uh during the same months he was finalizing the Emancipation Proclamation about moving uh freed slaves to Haiti or to Colombia in Central America and have them live there. I write about a famous uh meeting that Lincoln had in the White House in August of 1862. Again, this is one month before the Emancipation Proclamation is first made known publicly. He calls these black leaders into the White House from the District of Columbia, and he tells them, you know, very bluntly, uh, I think you ought to look into these uh colonization plans, and you ought to encourage your people uh to pursue them uh once they're freed. Uh he tells them that, you know, I really don't think that black people and white people can live together uh as free people in a society in the United States. And uh, you know, for for right or for wrong, uh it would be in the best interest of everyone for you all to leave. So this is not an abolitionist uh who is um hell bent on ending slavery uh from the get-go. So he he comes around to it eventually. Um by the time of his assassination in 1865, uh the Emancipation Proclamation has been in effect for two years. Uh black soldiers have for have served with distinction uh in the Union Army. And he by that time, 1865, comes around to the idea of black voting rights uh for black men who have served in the war or for other educated blacks. So so what drew me to the Lincoln Emancipation Proclamation story is the evolution of his thoughts over time, which is somewhat in contrast with the normal historical thought of it today.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

Yeah. Yeah. I yeah, I thought the the evolution that you drew of the character was was quite quite well and and quite nuanced, as you mentioned. So um Right, thank you. Yeah. And and as you mentioned, this is uh your third historical book, but uh it's kind of the third in a series. So it's uh represents a continuation of a developed character, Montgomery Tolliver. So can you give listeners a little backstory of Monty and and how he came to be inside the White House during the Civil War?

SPEAKER_02 16:35

Sure. So I have uh these three historical fiction books. Um they're set, as I said, in different decades. They can all be read independently, uh, but the same main character is featured in all three, and his name is Montgomery Tolliver Monty to his friends. Um Monty is from Ohio. Uh he goes to Washington, D.C. as a young man to study to become a lawyer, and when that doesn't work out, he becomes an aide to Sen Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, who was one of the most famous uh political figures of that era. Uh he was Clay was a man who had ran for president multiple times and had lost uh all of the elections, won very closely. Uh one election he ran, if a few thousand votes in New York had shifted, he would have been elected president. And if he had been elected president, uh history would have been changed because he was um against the annexation of Texas, against the expansion of slavery. And um, so very important person that Monty became associated with and influenced by. Uh Monty then he abhors slavery. I write in the first book about an incident where he um goes to a slave auction near Washington and he's abhorred by it. He um sees this older black woman who's about to be uh auctioned off. And on the spur of the moment, he decides to purchase her. He doesn't have much money. He uses a small inheritance he had from his grand grandfather to purchase this woman. And once he purchases her, he immediately frees her. Um so that's kind of the type of person he is in his attitudes towards slavery. Uh uh he then goes to the Kansas Territory in the 1850s, where this war over slavery is going on. He becomes a leader of the anti-slavery cause. And it's there in 1859 when Lincoln is running for president, he makes a campaign trip to the Kansas Territory. And he and Monty meet, they hit it off, become friends, and when Lincoln's elected, he brings Monty to Washington to work as kind of a mid-level bureaucrat in the War Department. But more importantly, the their friendship increases, and Lincoln uh uses Monty as kind of an informal advisor, having him come to the White House and to talk about the war and what's going well, what's going badly, uh, what should I do different? What are your opinions? So that's that's kind of the arc of the Monty Tolliver storyline in my books.

SPEAKER_01 19:06

Well, and I thought one of the the gems of the book uh was that readers who are familiar with the era and the war will definitely recognize a few names uh throughout the book. So how did you kind of determine who to include? You know, this is a a book that is heavily about the campaigns and civil war. Um, and so how did you how did you figure out who you wanted to add in as little Easter eggs for the reader?

SPEAKER_02 19:33

Well, I have uh I have Monty and Lincoln meeting often in the White House, so I need to use White House staff as uh as real white White House staff as characters. I have John Nicolay, who is um Lincoln's chief uh secretary as a character in several of the chapters. Um I have the real doorkeeper of the White House uh at that time uh as a character. He was an older gentleman who had served in several prior administrations uh before Lincoln. I have a fictional character who was a Confederate officer, uh, and um he becomes uh affiliated with the staff of General Robert E. Lee. So I have one of um Lee's key staff members, uh fellow by the name uh George Marshall, who befriends my fictional character. So I kind of get the inside of the lead aspect of this invasion of Maryland. So the the historical figures I use are largely driven by the plot. Who would my fictional characters interact with? And then I put them into the manuscript.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

And so you spend, you know, lots of time with the men on the battlefield. So, you know, how how did you craft this and and yeah, how did you how did you build this world?

SPEAKER_02 20:56

So the book is set during the Confederate Army's invasion of Maryland in 1862. This is the first time in the war that the that the war has been fought in the Union. Up until then, which was a year and a half in the war, all the fighting had been in the South. So Maryland was a Union state. So we um after a prominent victory at Second Manassas in late August of 1862, um feels he has the Union Army on the ropes and he's looking for a knockout punch. So he crosses the Potomac River, invades Maryland, hoping to uh finish off the Union Army. So that all resulted uh in the Battle of Antietam. Um I'm not a military historian, so I don't write about General So-and-so ordered this and opposing General So-and-so did that in response. But if he had done this instead of that, it would have been different. That's that's not my cup of tea. What I wanted to do was to give the reader just kind of a feel for the battle from the soldier's point of view. Yeah. Uh I have one character. Who is a young Union soldier who joins as a teenager, volunteers, very idealistic. You know, rah-rah saved the Union. He happens to be Montgomery Tolliver's stepson. His name is Josh. And he sees action at the Battle of Antietam. So that's kind of what I do in terms of developing the characters. My goal was to tell the story of an Antietam from a different perspective than most Civil War books by kind of focusing on these individuals rather than the kind of a top-down view of the battle. I hope that the reader will come away from the book with a desire to learn more about the Battle of Antietam. You know, today Antietam is somewhat secondary and sidelined by Gettysburg, which is much more written about and talked about these days. Gettysburg occurred about nine months later. Both battles were kind of the same strategically. They were a narrow Union victory. Neither resulted in the end of the war. Gettysburg um may be so famous today because Lincoln went there and gave a speech, the Gettysburg Address. But Antietam is certainly worth exploring. There are a lot of interesting uh facts and twists and turns uh in that campaign that I think the readers will be interested in. So I hope that um if they're reading a book and like it, maybe they would explore uh the military aspect of Antietam more carefully.

unknown 23:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

Well, and you've talked about, you know, the historical research is very important to you in and building the story around uh historical accuracy and and people and the events. But obviously, you know, building historical fiction, where do you where do you draw the line between kind of the fact and the fiction in in your books?

SPEAKER_02 23:56

Well, I I cannot change history. So that's that's that's the red line, I guess you'd say. Um my books have to be consistent uh with the historical record. I can't have the Union Army chase down the Confederate army after Antietam and destroy them and end the war because that didn't happen. So, but I can use my fictional plots and characters to give the reader an insight or a different perspective into what really happened. Um I I strive to use the known facts, and and if I don't do that, then my book's gonna have no credibility. You know, I remember reading somewhere years ago that someone said that if um you can have Abraham Lincoln as a character in a historical novel, but Lincoln has to be tall. He can't change certain facts. So um I try to be as true to the facts uh as I can. But then there are unknown things in history. We talked about the lost orders of General Lee. Uh to this day, no one knows how those orders got in that field and found by that soldier or who put them there. So that's an unknown, something I can play with as a historical fiction writer, uh, come up with my own um plot twist concerning that. And I can do that because I'm not interfering with the historical record by doing so. So that's one of the things I try to do is follow the history, but if there's an opening to uh explore, do that.

SPEAKER_01 25:25

And so you've written both fiction and nonfiction. I imagine the process for researching and and and writing and approaching those projects are very different. So can you talk a little bit about the difference in the process and how you approach each project?

SPEAKER_02 25:40

Well, I didn't realize until I did both how it works different parts of your brain, writing fiction versus nonfiction. Um, my career was as a trial attorney. So in presenting my clients' cases, you always had to have the evidence to back it up. You, you know, you can't stray from the truth or or you'll lose the case. And I found that being a nonfiction writer is a lot like being a lawyer because you have to do the research and have the facts to back up everything you say. You have to have footnotes to justify everything or you'd be called out on it. So it's a very um methodical process, um, and you have to follow the facts, being a lawyer or a nonfiction writer. But then again, being a fiction writer, you can make up things. And again, you have to be true to the historical record, but you have to be more creative. And when I started uh writing the nonfiction or the fiction books, I found it much more difficult because my mindset as a lawyer was always, you know, follow the facts. But then I found things will come to you, you know, and I found that once your historical fiction book is done, you tend to be more proud of it and because it's something you created. You've created this world of characters and you place them in an historical context. And, you know, no one else has done that, and no one else will do it again, just because that's what came out of your mind. So I I found it rewarding, and um, I'm I still like both, but um the fiction, uh, I will probably continue with that a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 27:21

Yeah, speaking of your your fictional characters uh and and Monty specifically, so he's he's appeared in three books. Will we see him in uh a future installment?

SPEAKER_02 27:33

I'm not sure exactly um what the next book is gonna be. My thinking is probably not to have him as a main character. Uh I mentioned earlier that I I have his stepson, who's a young Union soldier, uh uh still a teenager by the time the book ends, uh, who has fought at Antietam. So my thought now is to maybe uh pursue him, his name is Josh, over the next uh post-war and reconstruction years and have him be the main character, perhaps involved in politics in some way. But of course, having a stepfather, Monty, in the background to consult from time to time.

SPEAKER_01 28:16

That'll be fun. And so you've touched on it uh a little bit already, but I I want to give you uh some some time to expand. What do you hope readers take away from the book?

SPEAKER_02 28:30

Well, it seems to me that there are really two different types of history readers. There's the nonfiction history readers and the fiction history readers. Um I think uh most people who read nonfiction history probably don't read fiction books, and saying for vice versa for the fiction readers. I hope that my book will appeal to both groups. Uh it is fiction, yes, but it's very fact-based. Uh you will learn some interesting history by le by reading my book that you didn't know before. And I hope that readers will be um interested enough to, as I said, go and and research further after reading the book what really happened uh in the lead up to the Emancipation Proclamation? What did happen uh at the Battle of Antietam? Could the war have ended ended then if um McClellan had done something differently? Uh how much did the fact that these orders fell into McClellan's hand play into the campaign and how it played out? So that's what I hope that that that people will do is to um read the book, get interested in the the historical events in it, and explore those further.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

And then where should people go when they've finished the book and they want to learn more about you and the work that you do?

SPEAKER_02 29:53

I have a website, which is my name, uh www.stanhaynes, s-d-a-n-h-a-y-n-es.com. There's information there about all my books, about me, about events uh where I'll be speaking about the books, things like that. I'm also on Facebook at Stan Haynes Books, and I'm on Instagram at Stan Haynes, the number three.

SPEAKER_01 30:16

And trying to kind of keep some of the plot points, you know, under wraps, but is there anything that we haven't covered that you want future readers to know?

SPEAKER_02 30:26

Uh I don't want to, you know, give away the plot. Um, I'd like the readers to to um read the book and and find that out. But it does have some interesting uh twists and turns, I think. I guess I would go back to the thought of I would like to see history readers kind of get out of their lane. Uh, if you're a nonfiction history reader, pick up an historical fiction book. You might find uh that you'll like it. It's a different way to look at history. Uh it's not um doesn't interfere with the history, it kind of adds to it. Uh, same way for uh fiction uh historical fiction readers, maybe pick up a nonfiction book and uh you'll learn from that. So don't be bound by what you usually read and um uh try to venture out and explore, would be my advice.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Nice. Well, to the listeners out there, if you do have any interest in Civil War, presidential, political history, or historical fiction, uh definitely consider getting a copy of And Slavery No More. Thank you again, Stan.

SPEAKER_02 31:33

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

My thanks again to Stan for spending his time with me. And Slavery No More is available now. So to learn more about Stan and his other books, be sure to check out his website, which is linked in the show notes for the episode. Thanks, peeps. I'll see you next time. Thanks for sitting down with me as I explore this chapter of American history. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and share with your friends. I look forward to our next cup of coffee together.