Numbered, Numbered: Commemorating the Civil War Dead in Woolson’s “Rodman the Keeper”

Abstract

At the height of Radical Reconstruction and US Constitutional amendment, when the fates of ex-states and ex-slaves were most insistently joined, Constance Fenimore Woolson set a story of remembrance, a story that turns a sacrificial past into a revolutionary future. First published by the Atlantic Monthly in March 1877, “Rodman the Keeper” has recently been selected by the Norton Anthology of American Literature to demonstrate for growing numbers of students how the opportunities of a tempestuous period were once imaginatively conceived. Because this story will therefore embody Reconstruction’s artistry for years to come, it is important to appreciate its historical nuance as well as its author’s surreptitious choices. Woolson set aside the open violence in Southern states, their occupation by federal troops, and the spread of the Ku Klux Klan as she focused on early 1870, the year when suffrage for African American men was constitutionally ratified. Her story thereby became a selective and widely celebrated gauge of Southern political currents after the war, as white Southerners contemplated bankruptcy and new African American citizens began exercising their rights.