"How Changeable Are the Events of War": National Reconciliation in the Century Magazine's "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War"

Abstract

"How Changeable Are the Events of War": National Reconciliation in the Century Magazine's "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War" Timothy P. Caron In the October 1884 issue of the Century Magazine, editor Richard Watson Gilder began his column, "Topics of the Time," with an auspicious announcement: beginning in the next month's issue, the Century would inaugurate a new series, "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War." In Gilder's words, the new series would feature essays "written by officers who wore either the blue or the gray;—in most cases by generals who, on one side or the other, held either the chief command in the battles described, or commands so important as to clothe them with special authority to speak of events of which they were a part." 1 The series went on to run for three years (November 1884 to November 1887) instead of the projected two and helped to drive the magazine's circulation from 127,000 at the series' beginning to over 250,000 at the height of its popularity, making the Century the most popular magazine of the age and Gilder the most powerful arbiter of literary tastes in late nineteenth-century America. Gilder and the Century's editorial staff agreed that the timing for beginning such a project was perfect; enough time had passed since the war to allow for calm reflection and summing up, and most of the principle players of both the Union and Confederate generals were still living and would eventually be convinced to write for the magazine. Gilder went on to announce the aims of the new series: "It is not part of the plan of the series to go over the ground of the official reports and campaign controversies, but . . . to clear up cloudy questions with new knowledge and the wisdom of cool reflection; and to soften controversy with that better understanding of each other, which comes to comrades in arms when personal feeling has dissipated, and time has proven how difficult are the duties and how changeable are the events of war—how enveloped in accident and mystery." 2 [End Page 151] Gilder's pronouncements regarding the Century's "Battles and Leaders" series proved to be even truer of the "literary" pieces which accompanied the official statements of Northern and Southern strategists. Freed from the constraints of writing official "history," the authors of the "literary" pieces printed during the series' run proved just how "changeable" the narratives of the war actually were once these stories entered the communal exchange of the nation's largest magazine. The essays, poems, and short stories which helped to fill out the pages of the magazine during the series' run provided a forum in which the North and South could express their views on the war. What emerged from the exchange of sectional loyalties and viewpoints between and among Northern and Southern contributors was a cultural narrative—shaped and inflected by the editorial staff of the Century—that proved to be instrumental in promoting sectional reconciliation without blame and in constructing a national romance of reconciliation in the aftermath of the Civil War. Whereas the war years themselves were filled with rhetoric justifying the bloody conflict on the grounds of ending slavery, the historical and literary pieces published in the Century during the run of its "Civil War Series" were willfully silent on matters pertaining to the freedmen, preferring instead to emphasize a knitting together of the nation's white citizens. Most of the essays commissioned for the series and written by Union and Confederate strategists were collected into a four volume compendium, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, which has become the cornerstone of Civil War historiography. 3 A quarter of the material in Battles and Leaders originated in the magazine series, which occupied about one third of each...