Haunted by the Civil War

Cultural Testimony in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Shirley Samuels

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780691248585, 9780691248578
• eBook ISBN: 9780691248646
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Histoire de la guerre de Sécession

How the legacy of the Civil War—as presented by writers, poets, and artists of the time—has shaped American visions of democracy

In Haunted by the Civil War, Shirley Samuels explores the work of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others to investigate the long cultural shadow of America’s cataclysmic sundering. Juxtaposing these texts with images—ranging from paintings by Winslow Homer to newspaper and magazine illustrations of political controversies—Samuels argues that the Civil War still haunts our attitudes toward democracy. The recent toppling of Confederate monuments, the continuing protests over racial and sexual discrimination, immigration, and Indigenous land rights: each of these forms part of the war’s legacy.

Examining the fraught deliberations about an ideal American democracy in the early republic, Samuels turns to the language of sensation in the poetry of Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman alongside Lincoln’s relation to the poetic and visual culture of his time. She considers the haunted afterlives of war in the work of Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe as well as in popular nineteenth-century inspirational fiction. And she investigates the literature of men at sea (and on rivers, enabling both connection and escape), as seen in Melville and Mark Twain, while examining women’s wartime work and experience, in writings by Gilman and Frances Harper.

Why does the Civil War still haunt us? To find the answer, Samuels identifies not only the ghosts that cannot rest but also the cultural practices that name them.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Visions of Democracy
• Chapter 2: Poetry and War: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Abraham Lincoln
• Chapter 3: Democratic Mourning: Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Chapter 4: The Republic of Men at Sea: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain
• Chapter 5: Women at Home: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harriet Jacobs, Lucy Larcom, and Frances Harper
• Afterword: The History of the Present
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Further Reading
• Index