Reporting Triumph, Saving a Nation: "Interesting Juxtapositions" in John W. De Forest's Civil War

Abstract

More than perhaps any other fiction of American Civil War, John W. De Forest's 1867 novel Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty depicts warfare as an indispensable component of domestic prosperity, with veterans and civilians collaborating to realize war's potential for social uplift. Scenes of combat show De Forest's reader what Union veteran endured and survived for sake of new nation, while central narrative of courtship, marriage, and sexual betrayal extends cultural trauma of civil war-the perpetual threat that meaningful social structure can be lost to a domestic, internal enemy--to comfortable world of reader's own recognizable personal space. Writing home front and battlefield as mutually supportive rhetorical locations rather than distinct and separate narrative subjects, De Forest militarizes postwar American family and turns epistemology of war into a domestic commodity. Published only two years after Appomattox, De Forest's Civil War signifies neither a struggle for racial justice nor a rejuvenated federalism but a crisis of individual responsibility to complementary ideals of family and nation. For De Forest, reading and writing war is logical extension of it, as reading and writing embody a necessary personalized reaction to event. In such acts of introspection, however, individuality becomes an illusion, surrendered to an imaginary political collective in service of postwar American nationalism. Personal and national destiny are linked in Miss Ravenel's Conversion from novel's opening sentence, which aligns beginning of war with first stirrings of a love story: It was shortly after capitulation of loyal Fort Sumter to rebellious South Carolina that Mr. Edward Colburne of New Boston made acquaintance of Miss Lillie Ravenel of New Orleans. (1) The first meeting of novel's protagonists is chronologically marked by start of war; not surprisingly, their eventual union in marriage happens only after war has been satisfactorily concluded. In between their meeting and their marriage, these lovers--like nation they represent--endure tribulations of betrayal and bloodshed, family division and sacrifice. The resolution of love story explains parallel triumph of Union victory: once-separated lovers and warring elements of their nation have sailed separately over stormy seas, but now they are in a quiet haven, united so long as life shall last (467, emphasis added). While De Forest was by no means first or only novelist to use creation of an American family as a metaphor for Civil War (or perhaps to use war as a metaphor for nationalist potential inherent within American family), (2) he was first to support such a metaphor with detailed descriptions of what actually happened on battlefield based on personal combat experience. He saw a causal relationship between war he had fought with army and an upper middle-class stability based on expansion of free labor that Union victory represented to him--what James A. Hijiya calls a pursuit of New World gentility. (3) The American future, De Forest predicts, will be marked by peaceful industry, as ennobling as [Colburne's] fighting (468). From opening lines quoted above, novel establishes a narrative scheme in which dramatic possibilities of love and war, both readily available to popular imagination of 1867, are comparable ways to organize knowledge and understanding across broadly symbolic political lines. (4) It was unquestionably, narrator continues, the southern rebellion which brought Miss Ravenel and Mr. Colburne into juxtaposition (3). The remainder of novel will show that interesting juxtaposition--of Lillie and Colburne, of North and South, of morality and vice, and ultimately of war story and love story--drives De Forest's vision of war and its legacy. …