Apples and Ashes

Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America

Coleman Hutchison, Riché Richardson

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780820342443
  9780820337319
• eBook ISBN:
  9780820343655
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

Apples and Ashes offers the first literary history of the Civil War South. The product of extensive archival research, it tells an expansive story about a nation struggling to write itself into existence. Confederate literature was in intimate conversation with other contemporary literary cultures, especially those of the United States and Britain. Thus, Coleman Hutchison argues, it has profound implications for our understanding of American literary nationalism and the relationship between literature and nationalism more broadly.

Apples and Ashes is organized by genre, with each chapter using a single text or a small set of texts to limn a broader aspect of Confederate literary culture. Hutchison discusses an understudied and diverse archive of literary texts including the literary criticism of Edgar Allan Poe; southern responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin; the novels of Augusta Jane Evans; Confederate popular poetry; the de facto Confederate national anthem, "Dixie"; and several postwar southern memoirs. In addition to emphasizing the centrality of slavery to the Confederate literary imagination, the book also considers a series of novel topics: the reprinting of European novels in the Confederate South, including Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables; Confederate propaganda in Europe; and postwar Confederate emigration to Latin America.

In discussing literary criticism, fiction, poetry, popular song, and memoir, Apples and Ashes reminds us of Confederate literature's once-great expectations. Before their defeat and abjection—before apples turned to ashes in their mouths—many Confederates thought they were in the process of creating a nation and a national literature that would endure.

Apples and Ashes

Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America

COLEMAN HUTCHISON

Contents

List of Figures

Introduction. Great Expectations: The Imaginative Literature of the Confederate States of America

One. A History of the Future: Southern Literary Nationalism before the Confederacy

Two. A New Experiment in the Art of Book-Making: Engendering the Confederate National Novel

Three. Southern Amaranths: Popularity, Occasion, and Media in a Confederate Poetics of Place

Four. The Music of Mars: Confederate Song, North and South

Five. In Dreamland: The Confederate Memoir at Home and Abroad

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Figures

1.1. Southern Literary Messenger, August 1834

3.1. John Hill Hewitt, War: A Poem with Copious Notes

3.2. “The Last Race of the Rail-splitter”

4.1. Harper’s Weekly, 11 January 1862

4.2. “Dixie for the Union” cover

Apples and Ashes

INTRODUCTION

Great Expectations

The Imaginative Literature of the Confederate States of America

For nearly 150 years there has seemingly been a critical consensus that Confederate imaginative literature is not worthy of extensive consideration. Despite consistent, even obsessive interest in the most obscure aspects of American Civil War culture, literary historians have largely ignored the poetry, fiction, drama, music, and criticism produced in the Confederate States of America between 1861 and 1865. When literary historians have engaged this literature, it has often been in a comparative mode, with Confederate literary culture read in relation to a much more developed U.S. literary culture. Not surprisingly, such a methodology has led to two conclusions about the literature of the Confederate States: There wasn’t much of the stuff, and in any case it wasn’t very good.

For instance, the two best-known literary studies of the American Civil War, Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (1962) and Daniel Aaron’s The Unwritten War (1973), both assume the meagerness of Confederate literary culture. As a result, Wilson and Aaron base their discussions of the Confederacy almost entirely on postwar, retrospective southern publications. While Wilson finds flashes of brilliance in writers like Mary Chesnut (whose diaries were heavily revised after the war and not published until the early twentieth century), Aaron remains unconvinced, declaring that “[v]ery little fiction or poetry written in the South during the War came to much” (234).¹

Unfortunately, Confederate literature has not fared much better when placed in broader literary contexts. It has garnered only scant attention from southern literary studies, the disciplinary field perhaps best positioned to give an account of it. This has led one Civil War historian to conclude that Confederate literature is the “perennial poor relation of Southern literature” (Muhlenfeld 178). If southern literary studies has neglected its Confederate cousin, then nineteenth-century American literary studies has disowned it outright. With a handful of notable exceptions, the literature of the South during the American Civil War is simply not on the “c19” map.²

One can imagine a number of reasons that Confederate literature has eluded both southern and nineteenth-century American literary studies. First and foremost, the assumption that critics like Wilson and Aaron make about the paucity of Confederate literature is a sensible one. The Confederacy lasted for four short years, during which time its littérateurs were perpetually beleaguered. Among the persistent and structural problems faced by Confederate writers and publishers were severe shortages of paper, ink, type, skilled labor, and printing presses—“in short, everything needed to produce a successful publishing industry” (Fahs 5).³ These material hardships were exacerbated by economic and logistical hardships, including rampant inflation, a shoddy interstate mail system, and the omnipresence of Yankee troops on southern land. This is to say nothing of relatively low literacy rates in the new Confederate nation. In truth, many southerners remained dubious about the prospects of a southern literature before, during, and after the American Civil War.⁴

Faced with such challenges, the emergence of a literary culture in the Civil War South would have been no small wonder. And yet, as this book demonstrates, the Confederacy gave rise to a robust literary culture. The war had thrown the South for the first time “upon its own literary resources” (Hubbell, South 454); among other things, the federal blockade denied southern readers access to northern literature. This, in turn, provided southern, white elites with an opportunity to claim cultural autonomy from the North. As Michael T. Bernath argues persuasively in his recent intellectual history of Confederate cultural nationalists, their success in creating a “native literature” was “startling, almost unbelievable,” particularly in light of the difficulties outlined above (152). Although this book largely avoids recursive debates about literary quality, one of its organizing principles is that the Confederacy produced a quantity of literature that warrants closer examination.⁵

Military defeat may provide another reason for the ongoing critical neglect of Confederate literature. The Confederate States of America failed, and failed spectacularly. Perhaps literary historians see little reason to study in depth an abortive literature. To be sure, the Confederate national moment was whirligig, and scholars have few models for thinking about the emergence and collapse of a nation over the course of a mere fifty-one months. Moreover, in light of the eventual failure of Confederate nationhood, it is all too easy to read Confederate literary nationalism either proleptically or palinodically. Knowing what we know about the future that was to come, how can we engage the Confederate past in all its complexity and contingency? That is, how can we return to a moment when both a Confederate nation and a Confederate national literature were possibilities, not merely lost causes? As the first epigraph of this book suggests, many wartime writers worked in earnest to achieve a “magnificent future” for their new nation. We need to think creatively—if not counterfactually—about such literary nationalism, emphasizing its great expectations rather than its stultifying disappointments.⁶

The difficulties inherent in such thinking bring us to a final reason for Confederate literature’s “poor relations.” Perhaps literary historians have eschewed the literature of the Confederacy because of what Gary Gallagher calls the “aroma of moral disapprobation” that surrounds any serious, scholarly conversation about Confederate nationalism (Confederate 70). To write about the Confederate nation is to risk being seen as endorsing its right to exist. Let me be clear: This book is by no means an apology for the Confederacy or Confederate nationalism. I find almost nothing that is admirable in the politics and culture of the Civil War South. Much of Confederate literature was deeply conservative. Emerging from a fiercely nationalistic milieu, it resounds with both racist and racialist rhetoric and makes the case again and again for an antidemocratic republic. Thus, the story told in the following pages is that of both the losers and the “bad guys.” No matter how unsavory that story proves, I think it is important that it be told. Per Jay Fliegelman, the reactionary voices of Confederate literature—in all their complexity—have a great deal to teach literary studies.⁷

It is the broad claim of Apples and Ashes that Confederate literature allows us to trace the development of a national literature both in process and in miniature. Several themes emerge from the texts of this nation struggling to write itself into existence: the messiness of history (literary and otherwise); the provisional nature of American nationalism during this period; and a less exceptionalist account of the United States, its southern other, and their purportedly civil war. Confederate literature was an essential vehicle for Confederate nationalism, a sinewy and multifarious phenomenon that historians have begun to take seriously. Confederate literature was also in intimate conversation with other nineteenth-century literary cultures, especially those of Britain and the United States. Finally, Confederate literature has profound implications for our understanding of American literary nationalism and the relationship between literature and nationalism more broadly.⁸

In the wake of Benedict Anderson’s ubiquitous study Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983, 1991), literary studies of the 1980s and 1990s championed the textual nature of nationalism. Perhaps flattered by Anderson’s emphasis on newspapers and novels, literary and cultural critics like Homi K. Bhabha redefined “nationness as a form of social and textual affiliation” (201). In more recent years, literary and cultural critics have labored to “think and feel beyond the nation,” to write, that is, postnational, transnational, hemispheric, and global literary histories (Cheah and Robbins). Despite an immense amount of productive scholarship in these modes, we seem no closer to a full understanding of the relationship between literature and nationalism. A wide range of scholars agree that there is something fundamentally “literary” about the construction of nationality, but details remain vague.⁹

Although this book does not offer a theory of literary nationalism per se, it does tout the usefulness of the Confederate example for thinking about the role of literature in the imagining of political communities. Indeed, Confederate literature provides an urgent case study because it represents a literary nationalism that was not only internationally minded but also more durable than its state apparatus. Thus, the literature produced in the South during the war offers an endorsement of Ernest Gellner’s influential dictum that “[i]t is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round” (54). Apples and Ashes identifies, in turn, a number of specific mechanisms by which literary nationalism helped to engender the Confederate States of America.¹⁰

“Ethnogenesis”: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Confederate Literature

At the risk of being too programmatic, I want to introduce the dominant features of Confederate literature using a familiar example: Henry Timrod’s poem “Ethnogenesis.” In early 1861, Henry Timrod was a promising young poet and critic from South Carolina. He had just published his first collection of poems after gaining acclaim as a regular contributor to Russell’s Magazine (1857–1860), the Charleston-based literary journal edited by Paul Hamilton Hayne. With the secession of the southern states, Timrod’s romantic and formal poems would take on a decidedly Confederate nationalistic cast.¹¹

Like so many Confederate poems, “Ethnogenesis” circulated through a number of media. It first appeared in an issue of the Charleston Daily Courier dated 23 February 1861 as “Ode on Occasion of the Meeting of the Southern Congress”; a broadside version of the poem, “Ode on the ...

Table of contents

• Apples and Ashes