Hidden Assets: Expanding the Archive in Civil War Studies

Abstract

Hidden Assets:Expanding the Archive in Civil War Studies Sarah E. Gardner and Kathleen Diffley In a 2018 review essay, Coleman Hutchison decries the apparent sterility of current Civil War scholarship. Writing at the end of the war's sesquicentennial, Hutchison takes as his starting point an essay written more than fifty years earlier with the same lament. "Originality is a liability, not an asset, as far as mass appeal is concerned," Otto Eisenschiml argues in the pages of Civil War History, the leading journal in the field at the time of the essay's publication. "Only scholarly readers welcome the disclosure of new facts or fresh interpretations; the mind of the average person," he fears, "shies away from them" (250). Both Hutchison and Eisenschiml note the uptick in the number of publications occasioned by the war's anniversaries, though the sheer volume of new studies hardly guaranteed fresh interpretations. Anniversaries, it seems, encourage the repetitive and the banal. "Does the immense amount of new writing about the Civil War produce all that much new knowledge?" Hutchison asks. "Does that new writing help us to better understand the legacies of 1861-1865?" (332). Neither Hutchison nor Eisenschiml accuses scholars of laziness. For his part, Eisenschiml blames the general reader for being unimaginative, unappreciative, and rather dull. Hutchison targets a market "that sells the same kind of book over and over again" (333). Still, Hutchison is less willing to let the scholarly community completely off the hook. With notable exceptions, he observes, the intervening scholarship on Civil War literature and culture has made very few interventions. While Hutchison's observations are well taken, this special issue of Mississippi Quarterly suggests that the state of the field is more robust than he allows. The essays here assembled turn away from the supersaturation of nostalgia, romanticism, and sentimentality, as well as the impulse to write about the same authors, the same texts, and the [End Page 385] same moments. Instead, these essays highlight what is new in Civil War studies and thus point several ways forward. Recent work in literary studies has questioned, for instance, the reification of 1865 as the watershed moment that determines how we write and how we teach the nineteenth century.1 Such periodization assumes that Union battlefield victory was "so transformative," in the words of Cody Marrs, that it destroyed "one literary period" and gave birth to another (1). In Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, Marrs identifies a number of conceptual problems that such a reading of 1865 invites, not least its refusal to consider that realist sensibilities might have developed before William Dean Howells entered the scene. Equally problematic is its ironic eclipsing of the war years. "If the nineteenth century consists in a passage from the antebellum to the postbellum, then the war is essentially an antiperiod, a transition that matters only to the extent that it demarcates what precedes and follows it" (1). For those who work in the century's middle decades, that is a hard pill to swallow. As Marrs points out, standard periodization also ignores the literary careers of many of the century's writers whose work might best be described as "transbellum" (3), an invitation to restore the war years to the century's literary unfolding. The pages to come thus enlarge a narrow focus on the first half of the 1860s. Todd Hagstette considers a southern ghost story from William Gilmore Simms that anticipates the Civil War's internecine fighting by reaching back to a roadside murder in post-Revolutionary South Carolina. Christopher Hager turns to the northern disdain for semi-literate rural Virginians, which preceded the fall of Fort Sumter and, in the work of Rebecca Harding Davis, led to a postwar northern impatience with illiterate African Americans. Eric Gardner follows Francis Ellen Watkins Harper and her advocacy on the lecture circuit for African American civil rights as well as the rights of women, not only during the war but into the later 1860s without pause. Neither 1861 nor 1865 transformed the writing lives of these American authors, just as neither Fort Sumter nor Appomattox resolved opportunities or injustices so long in...