Kittrell J. Warren's The Life and Public Services of an Army Straggler

Warren's 1865 Life and Public Services of an Army Straggler is one of the very few examples of realistic Civil War fiction incorporating humor. Most fiction of the Civil War was, understandably, quite serious and often celebratory. Not so Warren's work. Billy Fishback, the hero of the Life is, as we say, a low-down, rotten, dirty little sneak with no redeeming whisper of conscience, who roams about the South taking advantage of the poverty-stricken inhabitants. Billy is a "straggler," by which of course is meant a deserter, of the Confederate Army and is about as cowardly as it is humanly possible to be. So it is with great wit that Warren names Billy "his own and his country's hero."

Warren himself was a Confederate soldier, and "straggling" was by no means an unpopular choice for soldiers in the long-suffering Confederate forces. Jefferson Davis reported in September 1864 that over one third of the Confederate Army was absent without leave. Billy's demented picaresque--which includes but is not limited to horse-stealing, widow-conning, and impersonating an officer--definitely fits the bill of a con man, but Billy, unlike so many other characters of this type, does not delight. He is too vicious and without charm. The audience rejoices, not in Billy's successes, but in his defeats. He is the "biter bit," to borrow Richard Boyd Hauck's term for the con-man out-conned. Perhaps the best illustration of this comes at the close of the work. Having conned a seat for himself on a crowded train by telling the riders that he is tending to a wretched-looking fellow sick with small pox--and thus clearing the car entirely--Billy is aghast to find the man really does have the deadly disease. Billy contracts it and dies.

It is in some ways a satisfying close to a dark vision of Civil War culture. A somewhat lighter take on a very similar character would appear years later in Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Billy and his more clever, and perhaps even less principled, frenemy Captain Slaughter, prefigure the Duke and the Dauphin, whose ability to deceive is matched by their ability to delight their reading audience. Though we rejoice thoroughly in the fall of the Duke and the Dauphin in much the same way that we are pleased to see Billy defeated, we are significantly less appalled by their manners. Which raises a question: to what extent do modern, and for that matter contemporary, notions of class dictate the reading of these texts?