George D. Prentice and Sue Mundy

I’ve been reading Richard Taylor’s new novel, Sue Mundy. It’s given me a greater appreciation of George Prentice and his importance in Civil-War-era Kentucky.

Marcellus Jerome Clarke, familiarly known as Jarom in Taylor’s novel, was a notorious guerilla operating in Kentucky in 1864-65. He joined forces with William Quantrill for a while when Quantill crossed over into Kentucky to avoid capture. Clarke liked to wear his curly dark hair long, and he affected somewhat gaudy costumes, red velvet with fringe & tinsel and a plumed hat.

Sue Mundy (also spelled Munday), the brazen woman guerilla, was completely the invention of George D. Prentice, editor of the Louisville Journal. Clarke was captured and hanged as Sue Mundy in March 1865.

Prentice was a strong Union loyalist and has been given some credit for keeping Kentucky in the Union. But he strongly disapproved of the actions of Major General Stephen Burbridge. It has been said that Kentucky seceded from the Union after the Civil War and much of the fault or credit for that lies with “Butcher” Burbridge, who put Kentucky under martial law, interfered with elections on Lincoln’s behalf, and executed two Confederate “guerillas” for every Union sympathizer killed in Kentucky. If he didn’t have a guerilla prisoner, an ordinary POW would do. Sometimes he selected his victims by lots drawn. He would take them to the location of the latest guerilla raid and have them shot down as publicly as possible.

Prentice invented Mundy as a tool to taunt Burbridge. A great punster, he would write in the Journal thus:

Many think it makes no difference on what day of the week a man dies, but we confess that we shouldn’t like to die of a Mundy.

You have been an awful girl, Sue, we must say. You have killed so many persons, of all colors, that no doubt white, yellow, and black ghosts haunt you continually, the black ones coming by day because black doesn’t show at night.

Our journal may bring you and your fellows to justice and thus be to you and them not only a newspaper but a noosepaper.

The novel is a fascinating look at the horrors of life in a border state with more relevance than you might think to contemporary times, dealing as it does with an insurgency.

Both of Prentice’s sons fought for the South. One died campaigning with John Hunt Morgan, the other, if I remember correctly, was never reconciled with his father. [Addendum: In Sue Mundy, Taylor has portrayed Jarom Clarke as an orphaned boy constantly looking for father figures who fail him: John Hunt Morgan and William Quantrill among others. Prentice also is presented as one of his failed fathers, one who created him in his avatar Sue Mundy. Here is a small passage from the end, when Jarom is waiting to be hanged:

Jarom would never meet or even see George D. Prentice, his failed father, the author in part of his son's destruction. Would he come to visit? No. Had he been at the wharf or somewhere along the route to the prison? Would he be among the throng that gathered for his execution, armed with sharpened quill to get the last word?

Fascinating to think of the Civil War as a failure of fathers, perhaps even a failure of men of letters who "father" our public figures. I am not smart enough to follow that thought up to any kind of conclusion. Takes a novel for that.]

Prentice the polemicist was also Prentice the poet and patron of poets. I have written about him here. The poem below, appropriate to the day, is his most famous.

The Closing Year

‘Tis midnight’s holy hour-and silence now
Is brooding, like a gentle spirit, o’er
The still and pulseless world. Hark! on the winds
The bell’s deep notes are swelling. ‘Tis the knell
Of the departed year.
No funeral train
Is sweeping past; yet on the stream and wood,
With melancholy light, the moonbeams rest,
Like a pale, spotless shroud; the air is stirred,
As by a mourner’s sigh; and on yon cloud,
That floats so still and placidly through heaven,
The spirits of the seasons seem to stand-
Young Spring, bright Summer, Autumn’s solemn form,
And Winter, with his aged locks-and breathe
In mournful cadences, that come abroad
Like the far wind-harp’s wild and touching wail,
A melancholy dirge o’er the dead year,
Gone from the earth forever.
‘Tis a time
For memory and for tears. Within the deep,
Still chambers of the heart, a specter dim,
Whose tones are like the wizard voice of Time,
Heard from the tomb of ages, points its cold

And solemn finger to the beautiful
And holy visions that have passed away
And left no shadow of their loveliness
On the dead waste of life. That specter lifts
The coffin-lid of hope, and joy and love,
And, bending mournfully above the pale,
Sweet forms that slumber there, scatters dead flowers
O’er what has passed to nothingness.
The year
Has gone, and, with it, many a glorious throng
Of happy dreams. Its mark is on each brow,
Its shadow in each heart. In its swift course,
It waved its scepter o’er the beautiful,
And they are not. It laid its pallid hand
Upon the strong man, and the haughty form
Is fallen, and the flashing eye is dim.
It trod the hall of revelry, where thronged
The bright and joyous, and the tearful wail
Of stricken ones is heard, where erst the song
And reckless shout resounded. It passed o’er
The battle-plain, where sword and spear and shield
Flashed in the light of mid-day-and the strength
Of serried hosts is shivered, and the grass,
Green from the soil of carnage, waves above
The crushed and mouldering skeleton. It came
And faded like a wreath of mist at eve;
Yet, ere it melted in the viewless air,
It heralded its millions to their home
In the dim land of dreams.
Remorseless Time!-
Fierce spirit of the glass and scythe!-what power
Can stay him in his silent course, or melt
His iron heart to pity? On, still on,
He presses, and forever. The proud bird,
The condor. of the Andes, that can soar
Through heaven’s unfathomable depths, or brave
The fury of the northern hurricane
And bathe his plumage in the thunder’s home,
Furls his broad wings at nightfall, and sinks down
To rest upon his mountain-crag-but Time
Knows not the weight of sleep or weariness,
And night’s deep darkness has no chain to bind
His rushing pinion. Revolutions sweep
O’er earth, like troubled visions o’er the breast
Of dreaming sorrow; cities rise and sink,
Like bubbles on the water; fiery isles
Spring, blazing, from the ocean, and go back
To their mysterious caverns; mountains rear
To heaven their bald and blackened cliffs, and bow
Their tall heads to the plain; new empires rise,
Gathering the strength of hoary centuries,
And rush down the Alpine avalanche,

Startling the nations; and the very stars,
Yon bright and burning blazonry of God,
Glitter awhile in their eternal depths,
And, like the Pleiad, loveliest of their train,
Shoot from their glorious spheres, and pass away
To darkle in the trackless void; yet Time,
Time, the tomb-builder, holds his fierce career,
Dark, stern, all-pitiless, and pauses not
Amid the mighty wrecks that strew his path,
To sit and muse, like other conquerors,
Upon the fearful ruin he hath wrought.

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