The American Civil War

A Literary and Historical Anthology

Ian Frederick Finseth, Ian Frederick Finseth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000082821
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The American Civil War: A Literary and Historical Anthology brings together a wide variety of important writings from the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, including short fiction, poetry, public addresses, memoirs, and essays, accompanied by detailed annotations and concise introductions.

Now in a thoroughly revised second edition, this slimmer volume has been revamped to:

• Emphasize a diversity of perspectives on the war
• Showcase more women writers
• Expand the number of Southern voices
• Feature more soldiers' testimony
• Provide greater historical context.

With selections from Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Sidney Lanier, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Kate Chopin, and many more, Ian Finseth's careful arrangement of texts remains an indispensable resource for readers who seek to understand the impact of the Civil War on the culture of the United States. The American Civil War reaffirms the complex role that literature, poetry, and non-fiction played in shaping how the conflict is remembered.

To provide students with additional resources, the anthology is now accompanied by a companion website which you can find at [insert URL]. There you will find additional primary sources, a detailed timeline, and an extensive bibliography, among other materials.

V
Reconstructing

Charleston, S.C. The Mills House, with adjacent ruins. April 1865. Photographer: George Barnard. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-cwpb-02353

Introduction

In 1862, only a year into the conflict, the fire-breathing Richmond journalist Edward Pollard published a work titled Southern History of the War: The First Year of the War— which he later followed up with histories of the second, third, and fourth years. Pollard’s choice of titles is intriguing, because it reveals an instinctive awareness that this war would have different histories written about it, and that he should get his into print, quickly. Pollard stands, in this sense, at the very head of a decades-long cultural effort, involving many actors and many agendas, to fix the place of the Civil War in American public memory. Indeed, that effort continues to this very day. New popular books and scholarly studies, though ranging widely in topic, disciplinary background, and ideological orientation, all enter into the struggle to influence how Americans understand the war, and therefore how our collective past will shape our modern cultural politics.

The theme of this section is reconstruction, in the fullest sense of the word. It refers both to the challenges of rebuilding the nation, particularly the South, in the aftermath of the war, and to the ways in which the war is reconstructed in memory, imagination, and representation. The former process, involving everything from the political reorganization of former Confederate states to the management of veterans’ pensions to the belated interment of the remains of thousands of soldiers, was halting, violently controversial, frequently mismanaged, and often deemed a “failure,” at least in the sense that the nation’s racial wounds and pathologies were far from healed. Yet the United States did rebuild, and by the turn of the century its economic, political, and military consolidation enabled the country to assert itself forcefully in world affairs, most notably in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and soon after in the First World War. To get there, however, the United States also had to confront the psychosocial legacy of the Civil War, and while that often meant coming to terms with the war’s causes and complexities, it also produced all manner of evasions and suppressions. Reconstructing the war for public memory (and consumption) proved to be an exercise not only of remembrance but of amnesia.

On April 15, 1865, a President lay dead in the Petersen House across from Ford’s Theatre; the South lay literally in ruins; and at least 1.1 million Americans lay dead or wounded. At no other moment in its history has the United States confronted anything close to that kind of devastation, and the country’s ability to move forward had much to do with explaining to itself the meaning of the ordeal through which it had passed. For what purpose had so many people suffered and died? What kind of place would the nation become, and what kind should it become, now that the violence had ceased? How should the war dead be remembered? Had the war fully resolved the conflicts that produced it, and if not, then what?

Such questions grew insistent in the late nineteenth century, and the writings collected in this section suggest how the meanings of the war, still unsettled, were interpreted and reinterpreted by people with very different ideas of American cultural identity. At the same time, they suggest that the desire for national reconciliation, for a release from the agonies of social conflict, made it more difficult to answer those questions honestly. Even for individuals, memory is not a straightforward transcription of the past, but an active process of magnifying certain experiences, distorting or suppressing others, and shaping the lot of them into some kind of coherent story. For an entire society, with many individual memories and interests at stake, the formation of historical memory, of a shared cultural narrative, becomes much more difficult. Rival versions of the past have to be sorted out, prioritized, officially recognized or officially discouraged. Agents of the state must figure out how to allocate limited resources toward commemorating the past and preserving its material traces. Cultural “authorities” in universities, museums, and historical institutions must decide what to emphasize and what to de-emphasize in representing the past. And all the while, every private actor with the means to do so—from a soapbox to a laptop—can seek to influence how the public perceives its own collective history.

The controversial meanings of the Civil War, like those of any other massive social trauma, have been framed by public monuments and memorials, by the activism of private interest groups, and by a torrent of literature and commentary. The main controversy, not surprisingly, concerns the racial dimension of the conflict, and the extent to which the war entailed upon a now unified nation the obligation to secure civil rights in practice as well as in theory. The problem of race did not simply disappear with the Reconstruction amendments. “What the war did not accomplish,” Paul Shackel has observed, “was to change the racial ideologies that had developed in American culture over several centuries.”¹ Particularly after the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877, the dynamic between war remembrance and the politics of race grew more complex as the widespread desire for national harmony had to contend with racial violence and the resurgence of white supremacism.

Beginning immediately after the war, battlefields, graveyards, and statues became the principal sites of Civil War commemoration and reflection. The very landscape of the country has changed because of efforts to memorialize the war dead and to preserve intact the fields where they fell. From the National Cemetery at Arlington, to the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, to the Shiloh National Military Park in Tennessee, these lieux de mèmoire share certain common purposes and principles. They make memory visible, public, and grand. They serve as a link between past, present, and future, embodying the nation’s sense of historical continuity. They imply permanence and coherence, in contrast to disorder and deterioration. They call upon us to invest them with emotional power, and to supply the missing context of the events they memorialize.

Similar purposes were served by the postbellum “reminiscence industry.” Well into the twentieth century, veterans’ groups (principally the Grand Army of the Republic), soldiers’ memoirs, and observances of Decoration Day and Memorial Day gave Americans a way of celebrating their common national identity despite the cataclysm of civil war.

Against that background, a number of historians have argued that the processes of memorialization and cultural reconciliation inhibited serious attention to the unfinished business of emancipation. From this perspective, the aura of heroism and sacrifice conjured up by both monuments and retrospective literature can seem like an anaesthetic, serving to neutralize more critical evaluations of the war and its aftermath. In this critique, nostalgia is less an escape from ideology than a form of ideology. Other scholars, however, have emphasized the shifting, unruly meanings of memorial sites and texts, suggesting that the very act of remembering served to draw out the conflict. “To commemorate the dead,” writes John R. Neff, “was to recall and honor the men themselves, the cause they championed, and especially the relationships between the dead, their cause, and the living.”² Certainly, the highly ideological edge of both “Lost Cause” writings—offspring of Pollard’s The Lost Cause (1867), which affirmed the principles of the defeated Confederacy—and the work of such writers as Albion Tourgèe who cried out for racial justice, kept the controversy of the war ever simmering.

And finally there are the many authors who sought to explore the war in its broad social impact and its lingering power over the thoughts and lives of individuals. The literary struggle to come to terms with the Civil War meant different things to different people. At times it meant using the power of words to imagine, and help bring into being, a new social reality. At others, it provided a retreat from reality into a less difficult past, or a creative reinterpretation of the past to suit the needs of the present. Most commonly, the postbellum literary response to the Civil War—in scores of novels and hundreds of short stories and poems—focused on the individual experience of war, and the psychological and social consequences of organized destruction. Some memories would not be buried, and they resurfaced throughout the period as claimants to the nation’s attention.

Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865)

Washington D.C. was a crowded place for Lincoln’s second inauguration—thronged with out-of-town visitors, sick or wounded soliders, army patrols, Confederate deserters, political dignitaries, along with all its regular residents. The end of the war was in sight, and Lincoln recognized that the time for national healing and reconstruction was at hand; hundreds of thousands of Americans lay dead, and there would be calls for punitive policies toward the South. Lincoln, speaking in the Senate chamber because of the day’s bad weather, once again turned his poetic and rhetorical skills to the task of defining the national moment, and directing both his listeners and posterity toward certain understandings of the meaning of the war.

Fellow- countrymen:

At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it - all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war - seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not b...