Page:John Brown's body by Stephen Vincent Benét.djvu/10



As this is a poem, not a history, it has seemed unnecessary to me to encumber it with notes, bibliography, and other historical apparatus. Nevertheless—besides such original sources as the Official Records, the series of articles in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, and the letters, memoirs, and autobiographies of the various leaders involved—I should like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Channing's The War for Southern Independence and McMaster's The United States Under Lincoln's Administration, to Oswald Garrison Villard's John Brown: A Biography Fifty Years After, to the various Lives of Lincoln by Lord Charnwood, Carl Sandburg, and Ida Tarbell and the monumental work of Nicolay and Hay, to Natalie Wright Stephenson's Abraham Lincoln: An Autobiography, and, finally, my very particular debt to that remarkable first-hand account of life in the Army of the Potomac, Four Brothers in Blue, by Captain Robert Goldthwaite Carter, from which the stories of Fletcher the sharpshooter and the two brothers at Fredericksburg are taken.

In dealing with known events I have tried to cleave to historical fact where such fact was ascertainable. On the other hand, for certain thoughts and feelings attributed to historical characters, and for the interpretation of those characters in the poem, I alone must be held responsible.

The account of the defeated Union army pouring into Washington after the first Bull Run is founded on a passage in Whitman's Specimen Days and Collect.

The Black Horse Troop is an entirely imaginary organization and not to be confused with the so-called Black Horse Cavalry. In general, no fictional character in the poem is founded upon a real person, living or dead.

STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT.

Neuilly-sur-Seine, April, 1928.