When the Civil War breaks out in April of 1861, Jethro Creighton is just nine years old, still a child who deeply respects and admires the adult men in his life. Over the course of the war, Jethro grows up both in chronological years and in maturity. Because Across Five Aprils focuses almost exclusively on the concerns and affairs of men, it explores its vision of maturity in terms of what it means to be a man. Among the adults around Jethro, four provide particularly important examples for him to model his own behavior on. Shad demonstrates courage and conviction when he sets his own life plans aside to fight for the Union. And as the war drags on through many brutal and costly battles, his courage shines ever more brightly. Jethro’s father Matthew and President Abraham Lincoln share a judicious nature, and their attempts to prevent or limit bloodshed impress upon Jethro the importance of tempering justice with mercy.
But perhaps most importantly, Jethro’s favorite brother, Bill, models how a man should follow his convictions—and accept the consequences—no matter what other people think. Bill follows his conscience to the Confederate Army, turning himself against the United States government, his own home state of Illinois, his local community, and even his family. When Jethro becomes responsible for the fate of his cousin Eb, who has deserted the Union Army, he follows Bill’s example of conscience, considers his values and independently choosing how he wants to act. Like the men he admires, Jethro ultimately forges a path that acknowledge the demands of justice while also seeking mercy for deserters in light of the trauma they have suffered in the war. And like Shad, he shows courage in the face of danger, for his actions expose himself and his family to legal trouble for harboring fugitive Eb. He accepts the potential consequences, no matter how grave, in order to do the right thing. His actions show how growing up means looking at this messiness and confusion, embracing the adult responsibility of developing a moral consciousness, and living according to it. The novel thus argues that true masculinity (or maturity in a broader sense) involves courage, a careful balance between justice and mercy, and the conviction to follow through on one’s own beliefs.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Coming of Age ThemeTracker
Coming of Age Quotes in Across Five Aprils
“Fer one thing I was wonderin’ why Abe Lincoln can’t make up his mind about war. I wonder—is he like Pa? Is he so against heven’ blood on people’s hands that he’s afeared to start a war?”
Ellen stopped her work and stood a moment without speaking, her rough brown hands resting on the handle of the hoe.
“He’s like a man standin’ where two roads meet, Jeth,” she said finally, “and one road is as dark and fearsome as the other; there ain’t a choice between the two, and yet a choice has to be made.” She shook her head. “May the Lord help him,” she whispered. “May the Lord guide his hand.”
Bill, his favorite, was a big, silent man who was considered “peculiar” in the neighborhood. In an environment where reading was nor regarded highly, there was something suspect about a young man who not only cared very little for hunting or wrestling and not at all for drinking and rampaging about the county, but who read every book he could lay his hands upon as if he prized a printed page more than the people around him. He wasn’t quite held in contempt, for he had great physical strength and was a hard worker, two attributes admired by the people around him; but he was odd, and there was no doubt of that […] He had even attended school the previous winter when work was slack, which surely was a fool thing to do unless one as interested in “breakin’ up school.”
“Seems like I can’t face up to yore goin’.”
“I’m not eager for it either, Jeth, not by a long way. I’ve got a lot of plans for the next forty of fifty years of my life and being a soldier is not a part of any single one of them.”
“Do you hev to do it then?”
“I guess I do. There’s been a long chain of events leading up to this time; the dreams of men in my generation are as insignificant as that—” he snapped his fingers sharply. “We were foolish enough to reach manhood just when the long fizzling turned into an explosion.”
“If the editor of the county paper ain’t against freedom of speech, could I jest put one more question to this young ’un?” Without waiting for a reply, the man called Wortman turned again to Jethro. “What I want to ask you is this: is yore pa good and down on Bill? Does he teach you your brother is a skunk that deserves shootin’ for goin’ against his country?”
Jethro felt a great weakness. He had to steady himself against the counter for a second, and when he spoke the words were the first ones that occurred to him.
“My pa don’t teach me one way or the other. He knows that I think more of my brother than anybody else in the world—no matter where he is. And that’s all I’ve got to say to you.” He looked directly at the man with an anger that dissipated his weakness.
“There be things that’s evil in these woods tonight. I seed evil apassin’ my place a while ago, comin’ in from the shortcut road to town and reelin’ in the saddle. I heered evil braggin’ in the saloon today about layin’ fer a young ’un on his way home.” He reached over and took the reigns from Jethro’s hands. “I’d best drive till we’re out of the brush,” he added. We’re gittin’ close to the place where some piz’nous snake might strike quick.”
The world was turning upside down for Jethro. He felt as if he were someone else […]. When he tried to speak, he found that […] his lips worked as they had often seemed to work in a bad dream to form the words that he wanted to say, but no sound passed them, and there was nothing to do but sit quietly while his mind floundered in the uncertainties that beset it.
If someone had asked Jethro to name a time when he left childhood behind him, he might have named that last week of March in 1862. He had learned a great deal about men and their unpredictable behavior the day he drove alone to Newton; now he was to learn what it meant to be the man of a family at ten. He had worked since he could remember, but his work had been done at the side of some older members of the family; when he had grown tired, he was encouraged to rest or sometimes he was dismissed from the task altogether. Now he was to know labor from dawn till sunset; he was to learn what it meant to scan the skies for rain while corn burned in the fields, or to see a heavy rainstorm lash grain from full, strong wheat stalks, or to know that hay, desperately needed for winter feeding, lay rotting in a wet quagmire of a field.
Jethro heard someone shout his father’s name and Bill’s and the word Copperheads.
Matt fumbled his way to the front door. “Show yore faces,” he called. “Come up and give me a chance to talk.”
There was only raucous, drunken laughter at his words. A bundle of something was thrown at the gate, and then the riders galloped on.
Jethro scrambled down the ladder and ran out into the yard. At the gate there was a bundle of switches tied together with a cord, the symbol adopted by local ruffians as a warning of punishment to follow. He tore off the paper that was attached to the cord and carried it inside to the table, where Ellen had lighted a lamp. On the paper in large printed letters was the message: “Theres trubel fer fokes that stands up fer there reb lovin sons.”
Has justice been done, gentlemen? Has an ailing man who commands the respect of those in this county who recognize integrity—has this man suffered enough to satisfy your patriotic zeal?
May I remind you that Tom Creighton died for the Union cause, that he died in battle, where a man fights his opponent face to face rather than striking and scuttling off into the darkness?
And just in passing, Gentlemen, what have you done lately for the Union cause? Of course you have burned a man’s property—barn, farm implements, hay, and grain; you have polluted his well with coal oil and terrified his family. Furthermore, you have done it quietly, under cover of darkness, never once asking to be recognized in order to receive the plaudits of the county at large. But, has any one of you faced a Confederate bullet? Well, Matt Creighton’s boy has.
His eyes were wide and troubled with his thoughts. He had a high respect for education, for authority of men in high places, and yet the stories in the newspapers made him wonder. McClellan, the most promising young officer in his class at West Point, was now the general who either didn’t move at all or moved ineffectually; Halleck, the author of a book on military science, was now the author of boasts that somehow branded him as a little man, even to a country boy who was hungry for a hero. There were stories of generals jealously eyeing one another, caring more for personal prestige than for defeating the Confederates; there were Pope and Sheridan, who blustered; there was Grant and the persistent stories of his heavy drinking. Nowhere in the North was there a general who looked and acted the part as did the Confederates’ Lee and Jackson.
The authority of the law loomed big in his mind; he remembered, “You and your family will be in serious trouble.” Loyalty to his brother Tom and the many thousands who had fought to the last ditch at Pittsburgh Landing, at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and all the other places that were adding length to the long list—how could loyalty to these men be true if one were going to harbor and give comfort to a man who simply said, “I quit.”
But on the other hand, how did one feel at night if he awoke and remembered, “I’m the one that sent my cousin to his death.” Eb was not a hero, certainly—not now, anyway. People scorned the likes of Eb; sure, so did Jethro, and yet—
“How do I know what I’d be like if I was sick and scared and hopeless; how does […] any man know that ain’t been there?”
“Looks like purty important mail you’re gettin’, Jethro,” Ed said quietly. His eyes were full of puzzled concern.
Jethro’s head sawm. This was the showdown; now, all the family, Ed Turner, and soon the whole neighborhood would know everything. In the few seconds that passed before he opened the envelope, he wished with all his heart that he had not meddled in the affairs of a country at war, that he had let Eb work out his own problems, that he, Jethro, were still a sheltered young boy who did the tasks his father set for him and shunned the idea that he dare think for himself. He looked at the faces around him, and they spun in a strange mist of color—black eyes and blue eyes, gray hair and gold and black, pink cheeks and pale ones and weather-beaten brown ones.
That winter many people were talking of peace […]. A people pushed to the extremities that existed in the South could not possibly hold on […]. But they did hold on, and as the war trailed drearily on, vindictiveness toward the stubborn stand of the seceding states grew steadily more bitter in the North. This vindictiveness was urged on by men in high places who resented the President’s spirit of clemency as violently as they resented the tenacity of the South.
In December Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation of amnesty, in which he promised pardon and full rights to any individual Confederate who would swear to protect the Constitution and the Union of the states, to abide by the government’s pronouncements against slavery. He promised, too, that a Confederate state could return to the Union whenever ten percent of its voters should reestablish a loyal Union government within that state.
Ed brought the boy’s letter down for Matt to read. In it the boy told of the burning of Columbia, of how the soldiers laughed as a great wind fanned the flames, of the loot carried off, of mirrors and pianos smashed, and of intimate family treasures scattered to the winds by men who seemed to have gone mad. […]
“What is this goin’ to do to an eighteen-year-old boy, Matt? Kin a lad come through weeks of this kind of actions without becomin’ a hardened man? Is human life goin’ to be forever cheap to him and decency somethin’ to mock at? […] these boys air goin’ to believe that they be heroes for lootin’ and burnin’, fer laughin’ at distress, fer smashin’ the helpless without pity. In some ways Sammy is more of a child than yore Jeth here; he goes with the crowd without thinkin.’ Mary and me has had to guard against that way of his.
