The Perilous Road

Set in Eastern Tennessee during the American Civil War, William O. Steele’s historical fiction, The Perilous Road (1958), follows a boy named Chris Brabson who lives with his family in a rural area in the mountains. When the Union Army’s frontier advances over Tennessee, appropriating his family’s critical supplies, they struggle to survive the winter. Compelled to help the Confederate Army to avenge his family’s exploitation, Brabson becomes conscious of a war bigger and more complex than the one he first imagined. The novel was awarded the Newbery Honor, one of the highest prizes in literature, for its vivid characterization of the intersections of adolescence, rural domestic life, and civil war.

The novel begins near the beginning of the Civil War. It describes Brabson’s life in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee, an area relatively untouched by civilization except for small farm developments. Brabson’s routine family and work life are suddenly upended when the Union Army advances over the area. Its cavalry soldiers, desperate for resources, claim the majority of the Brabson family’s food supplies, which are being stockpiled for the coming winter. They also claim the Brabsons’ only horse, which is essential for driving the plow over their crops. As a result, the family is underprepared for winter.

Meanwhile, Brabson’s brother, Jethro, is in his first months of enrollment in Tennessee’s branch of the Union Army. Knowing that his neighbors deeply support the Confederate Army, Brabson is forced to question the morality of the partisan logic driving the Civil War, as well as the beliefs of both the Yankees and Confederates. He realizes that war cannot be understood in moral absolutes; instead, it is a complex system of motivations and affinities that are often at odds with the aims of the war itself. Jethro’s enlistment in the Union incites the rage of the Brabsons’ neighbors. In an act of hatred, they set fire to the Brabsons’ shed and threaten to burn their house down.



Even though Jethro is fighting for the Union, Brabson cannot help but hate the Union for the toll it took on his family. One day, he discovers that an army convoy is passing through the area. He tells his friend, Silas Agee; Silas thanks him for the information, and tells him that he is a Confederate spy. As soon as Silas passes the information on, Brabson finds that his brother is a wagon driver, and is possibly in the nearby convoy. He rushes to alert his brother that the Confederates know about the wagon train’s presence and will probably stage an attack. When he arrives at the convoy, the Union officers warmly welcome him, give him food, and get to know him. Brabson changes his mind about the Yankees, alerting them to the Confederate Army’s spying. At the end of the novel, Brabson’s change of heart coincides with the Union Army’s victory in Tennessee. The Perilous Road suggests that the atrocity of war can follow from the most basic misunderstandings and unresolved emotional conflicts. Brabson’s moral development is ultimately contingent on his willingness to meet with the people he trusts and distrusts, and he comes to oppose all violent war as an instrument of revolution.