In contrast to AGAINST THE WAR, which always follows the views of its characters and never tells anything other than through their experience and consciousness, PUSH TO APPOMATTOX follows the story of Grant’s “national push” and only brings in characters when they pertain to this central story.
This cross-societal focus is explicitly and recurrently sounded in PUSH TO APPOMATTOX, often at the start or end of chapters. For example, in Chapter 54. the lead paragraph states: “As for his own part in the national push, the western prong, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman understood, in early August of 1864, that he was on the verge of achieving two of his most important strategic goals: defeat of the Army of Tennessee and capture of the city of Atlanta with its foundries, arsenals, machine shops, and symbolic value.”
The idea for this story-of-the-whole-society approach came from reading AUGUST 1914, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which tells the story of the defeat of the Imperial Russian Army in the Battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia in 1914. When built on this model, PUSH TO APPOMATTOX could address the historical phenomenon of this era deeper even than the war itself. This core phenomenon in American history, at that time, was the transition from the ante-bellum North versus South divided nation to the post-bellum unified nation that, by the resolution of the war, was freed to proceed to the “realization westward” of America’s “great experiment” in democracy.
As an example of the role of characters within this Solzhenitsyn model, the ante-bellum versus post-bellum American reality is made known primarily through the ongoing interaction of Lincoln and Grant, who exchange views on the “three pillars” of the Whig “American system,” prominent in the political doctrines of their youth, and the “Manifest Destiny” of John L. O’Sullivan, which inspirited the American migration westward.
In a like manner, — operating within another thematic thread of the novel, — the burden of “total war” is revealed mostly through the expressions and thoughts of Grant, Sherman, and Lincoln as they steel themselves against the work of destruction that they eventually feel obliged to unleash on the South. The characters who come into the purview of the novel in this particular thread are continued throughout, forming the sub-plots centering on Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, in the North, and Davis, Lee, and Early in the South.
The novel has seven thematic threads in total: (1) conception and execution of Grant’s “national push;” (2) acceptance of “total war;” (3) changing status of women; (4) changing status of blacks; (5) confederal versus federal concepts of government; (6) division versus reconciliation; and (7) pacifist rejection of war, leading (in the thought progression of Josiah Derr) to a proto-existentialist mentality. The significance of these threads is that nothing in the novel does not pertain to them. Everything else was cast aside.
The fictional characters of the novel come into the action in the thread of total war, also, and they are prominent as well in other threads such as those examining the changing status of women and blacks, as the story of the push turns toward them, creating the sub-plots of the “romantic four” (Josiah Derr & Louisa Stone, Hiram Stone & Emily Derr). There is also a sub-plot around the Stone family’s educated slave, Terner Ross, and his struggle to achieve intellectual independence and dispatch the mantle of leadership placed upon him by his fellow slaves.
As a final element of the structure of the novel, the slow pacing and close level of realistic detail, consistent throughout, provide the canvas for the intentionally mural-like view of armies and battlefields, cities and towns, shops and farms, rivers, roads, and railroads, and social, military, and political venues, in a panoramic depiction told, as appropriate for a cross-societal epic, in an elevated style.