Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil WarBelligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil WarDefining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home FrontCivil War Nurse Narratives, 1863–1870

Abstract

As Cody Marrs observes in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, the Civil War functions as a dividing line that organizes our field through literary histories, course structure, anthologies, hiring practices, and so on. And yet the literature of the war itself has traditionally been marginalized by period constructs such as the American Renaissance, transcendentalism, or realism—and by more recent critiques that maintain the ante- and post- division. This marginalization was theorized by Daniel Aaron’s The Unwritten War (1972), which posited a grand federal epic that never got written as writers in the North and South failed to respond substantially to the war’s meaning. Perhaps this marginalization is why Civil War literary studies have been especially amenable to interdisciplinary, expanded-canon, or multimedia approaches. The four books under review here are but a sampling of the field’s multivalent expansion since the sesquicentennial. Each suggests questions regarding the canon, concerning what we value and why, as it pursues its particular project.Marrs focuses on the less canonical writings of canonical “antebellum” authors—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson—to posit the category of “transbellum literature” as, among other points, a counter to the usual narrative of generational succession (3). These writers, Marrs argues, understood the Civil War as a temporal rupture within the terms of periodization initiated by the Enlightenment notion of secular universal history—a rupture that, for three of them, compelled reiteration. Marrs observes that in the antebellum Leaves of Grass (1855), diverse temporalities—from fragments and snapshots to long, regenerative cycles—all synchronize, whereas in Drum-Taps (1865) they do not. A turn to Hegelian dialectics enabled Whitman to resolve this tension and thus to incorporate Drum-Taps into Leaves. Whitman thus reframed the war as both “the prime moment of democracy’s advance” and a struggle for freedom that remained unresolved, as, for example, in the labor rebellions of the 1870s and 1880s (42). Douglass also viewed the Civil War as one battle in an ongoing struggle between freedom and slavery that included such events as the sixteenth-century Dutch wars for independence, the American Revolution, and the European revolutions of 1848. Marrs shows how Douglass drew on numerous scientific and social theories of change, force, and motion (for example, those of Louis Agassiz, Michael Faraday, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Herbert Spencer) to develop a philosophy of history as iterative, in which progress occurs through conflict and reversal. This iterative philosophy of history could be scaled down to the level of the individual as well, shaping Douglass’s late revisions of his autobiography in the two editions of the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (1881, 1892). If Whitman found inspiration for his philosophy of history in Hegel, Marrs argues, Melville found confirmation in Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he read late in life, after he had written Clarel (1876) and as he was assembling his last volume of poetry, Timoleon (1891). Contributing to the recent reevaluation of Melville’s postbellum career, Marrs argues that his poetry is structured around questions that the Civil War left unresolved concerning the shape of history and “legacies of violence” (92). Throughout this later work, Melville returned to the war as a discrete event, as one in a series of upheavals bridging past to future, and as a figure for internecine conflict generally. He found echoes and anticipations of his own work in Schopenhauer’s reframing of universal suffering as the result of the unfolding of the universal will. Melville’s sense of uniform repetition thus differs from Douglass’s and Whitman’s cyclically progressive philosophies of history. Dickinson, in contrast to these three, found in the war—in any war—“a radical annulment that eludes history itself” despite the historical particularity of a few of the poems (127). Death and mourning banish all temporal registers: “Pain—has an Element of Blank” (quoted on 130). If Dickinson’s poetic response to the war unmoors her from history, Marrs argues, this complicates her traditional location in the antebellum canon and our use of the war as a periodizing device. Marrs’s exploration of temporal boundaries complements the recent expansion of American literature’s geographical bounds by Paul Giles, Wai Chee Dimock, and others.Stephen Cushman’s Belligerent Muse concentrates on one aspect of the war’s history, tracing the ways in which verbal artistry emerged from select Northern writers’ engagements with military units and battlefield events. This approach provides new, tightly focused perspectives on canonical figures such as Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and Ambrose Bierce and introduces an unfamiliar one, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Whitman’s often-quoted phrase, “the real war will never get in the books,” becomes for Cushman a statement about historiographic conventions (quoted on 48). Here Whitman developed two innovations, argues Cushman. One was a bottom-up perspective, telling the stories of individual soldiers in contrast to the officers’ memoirs that proliferated following the war. Another was a claim to represent the general by means of the particular, which Cushman insists is not quite synecdoche, for the specimen must be not only a recognizable part but a representative part of the whole. This account of static historiographic technique at the local level complements Marrs’s emphasis on cyclical progression. Cushman also discusses the Memoirs of General William T. Sherman (1875), but the unexpected figure here is Chamberlain. Perhaps best known from Michael Shaara’s popular novel Killer Angels (1974) as the commander of the regiment that held the Union army’s extreme left flank at Gettysburg, Chamberlain is of interest to Cushman for his role as commander of Union troops at the surrender at Appomattox. At issue is Chamberlain’s command to shoulder arms. Was it intended merely to keep order among the troops or as a salute to the Confederates arrayed opposite? And if the latter, what degree of respect did it convey? Historians have debated facts and intentions as presented in each of Chamberlain’s six versions of the event, but the most popular version centers on his account of Confederate general John B. Gordon’s order to his troops to shoulder arms as they passed in review, “honor answering honor” (quoted on 160). Cushman does not pursue this text’s original, white reconciliationist context. Rather, he discusses its afterlife in recent books on business management, self-help, and pastoral counseling, thus suggesting that it continues to matter in ways that we academics might not recognize. In concluding, Cushman ranges the narration of military events on a spectrum from the mundane or utilitarian to a higher “yearning for dignity, strength, and grandeur” (176). While the latter are frequently objects of either skepticism or nostalgia, he argues that they are also valuable to the future as aesthetic qualities that outlive the particularities of history.J. Matthew Gallman’s Defining Duty in the Civil War takes a wider view of wartime virtue, concentrating on Northern civilians with occasional glimpses at soldiers. From a voluminous survey of print media sources (including visual materials), Gallman identifies a “set of coherent cultural messages” according to which duty did not necessarily require enlistment or great personal sacrifice but did require conscientious, enthusiastic support of the Union cause (20). Among Gallman’s sources are novels by Henry Morford that depict mainly civilian life in New York. Not noticed even by Alice Fahs’s exhaustive The Imagined Civil War (2001), the novels sold well and were prominently reviewed. Most interesting of these in Gallman’s description is The Coward (1864), apparently written in response to the conscription act of 1863, which follows a basically good man who knows he is a coward and thus procrastinates taking up the military commission that awaits him. Estranged from his fiercely patriotic fiancée, he enlists incognito, is honorably wounded, and regains his fiancée’s affection. The fiancée plays an appropriate role, according to Gallman’s survey of the ways duty was parsed by gender and race. While the press praised women who donated time to the cause, many women writers, such as Gail Hamilton and Caroline Kirkland, “gave northern women a sort of political permission to go about their daily lives” so long as they remained informed and accepted the sacrifices of their men (195). Where the question of duty for white men and women was cast in terms of individual choice, African American newspapers and abolitionist journals presented a community-oriented debate over “collective obligations and aspirations” and “questions of citizenship and reciprocity,” often focused on the question of military enlistment (225).If the Northern press valorized women’s domestic roles, the women of Daneen Wardrop’s Civil War Nurse Narratives turned this role to a public purpose. Faced with the challenge of gaining the reader’s approval—since close contact with men’s bodies could be seen as disreputable—the memoirists developed a conversational tone. Thus establishing a connection with readers, they could begin the work of reshaping cultural prescriptions regarding the questions of women’s rights and, often, race relations and a larger “democratic imperative” (161). If Louisa May Alcott’s nurse, Tribulation Periwinkle, did not especially embody this imperative, Wardrop argues that she did become more racially self-aware through her hospital experience than she had been in her abolitionist upbringing. Overall, Wardrop finds that the narratives published after the war show somewhat greater awareness of white privilege than those published during the war. The nurse memoir genre followed the general trend in Civil War literature noted by Fahs and others, with extensive publication through the 1860s, a comparative drought in the 1870s, and resurgence in a more conciliatory vein in the 1880s. How that general trend maps onto Marrs’s category of transbellum literature deserves further exploration.