CVU Teacher Gets Good Crowd to His Talk
Tyler Alexander appeared at Carpenter-Carse Library on a snowy night Dec. 2 and spoke about his new book centered on the letters written by a Glover, Vermont, soldier to his fiancée.
The Record Staff
NOTE: Tyler spoke to a packed Community Room at Carpenter-Carse Library on Dec. 2 – despite the snow – and told The Record later that he sold all of his books, “a nice problem to have,” he said. His book is available at The Flying Pig in Shelburne, Phoenix in Burlington and Essex, and the Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury.
If I Can Get Home This Fall” by CVU teacher Tyler Alexander chronicles the epic story of Dan Mason, a white resident of Glover, Vermont, who served in the Civil War as a soldier in the Sixth Vermont Infantry and as an officer in the Nineteenth U.S. Colored Troops.
Framing the book with letters Mason wrote to his fiancée, Harriet Clark, Alexander connects them with other historical records to create a vivid picture of the brutal war and Mason’s motivation for fighting.
Alexander provides a compelling account of the human cost of war and offers insight about the experiences and attitudes of those who witnessed war firsthand, including enlisted troops and officers, men and women, Democrats and Republicans, and white and Black Americans.
Alexander examines how the most controversial issues of the war – emancipation, the draft, military strategy, the arming of Black troops, and Reconstruction policy – were viewed by the participants who found themselves engulfed in the maelstrom of war, particularly those from a strongly anti-slavery farming community in the hills of northeast Vermont.
The voices from this distant time show what patriotism, courage and moral conviction look like in times of extreme national divisions over race, identity, and the meaning of democracy.
In assessing Alexander’s book, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian James McPherson said, “These are some of the best and most moving of the thousands of Civil War letters I have encountered.”
The letters provide harrowing accounts of combat at places like Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Petersburg and also tell a heart-wrenching love story of a young man and woman who dreamed of a post-war life together.
Alexander taught for 17 years at North Country Union High School in Newport and now teaches U.S. history and AP U.S. government and politics at CVU. His book was published in September by University of Nebraska Press.