The twin seven-shooters

Description

Notre costume by Eugène Marsan is a military memoir written in the early 20th century. The book centers on a Union officer’s Civil War service, using a pair of presentation revolvers as a unifying thread to recount major battles and to reflect on courage, loss, and reconciliation. The narrator opens with the symbolic “twin seven-shooters,” then relives the Army of the Cumberland’s harsh winter march and the ferocious fighting at Stone’s River: the collapse of the right, the stabilizing countercharge through the cedars, Mendenhall’s massed guns blasting back Breckinridge, and the battered Union line holding firm. In the aftermath, the regiment presents the matched pistols to their young commander. Later, during the siege of Chattanooga, a Confederate cavalry raid under Wheeler captures the narrator’s baggage and the prized revolvers. He fights through Orchard Knob and the spontaneous, irresistible ascent of Missionary Ridge, which breaks the Confederate line and opens the road toward Atlanta, yet he believes the pistols lost forever. Decades on, one pistol resurfaces in Reconstruction-era Alabama via an Iowa major; years later the second is returned by an ex-Confederate colonel who had carried it in the war, introduced by Senator Pugh with General Wheeler present. The reunited pistols close the story, capped by an epilogue celebrating the mutual respect of former foes and the durable fraternity of a reunited nation. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Subjects

• United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Personal narratives
• E456