The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876 by Kathleen Diffley

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876 by Kathleen Diffley Cynthia Patterson The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876. By Kathleen Diffley. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 249. Paper, $36.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6065-2.) In The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876, the second installment of a planned three-volume series on Civil War magazine fiction, Kathleen Diffley extends her analysis both geographically and thematically to lesser-known periodicals published in cities radiating outward from the established East Coast publishing centers of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. In doing so, she highlights sectional differences in how people understood the war and its aftermath by examining Baltimore’s Southern Magazine, Charlotte’s The Land We Love, Chicago’s Lakeside Monthly, and San Francisco’s Overland Monthly. The book includes an introduction, four identically organized chapters— each treating one of the aforementioned magazines—forty-three illustrations, and a coda. Each chapter is broken down into three discrete sections: the first [End Page 369] provides the publication history of the periodical and historical background contextualizing the geographical and political idiosyncrasies of the respective cities of publication; the second reproduces a Civil War–themed short story published in that periodical; the third section, in Diffley’s words, takes “a closer look at the traces of one magazine’s agenda, its dodges, and its positioning in a larger literary marketplace” (p. 19). As the author asserts, “The Fateful Lightning examines the narrative innovations and colloquial vitality that early Civil War stories also provoked in American letters” (p. 1). The introduction, subtitled “Dépôt Culture,” references the Old French word depost and alludes to changes in U.S. mail delivery that relied on America’s expanding rail system and the “urban terminals and country stations” where eager citizens claimed arriving periodicals (p. 15). The opening sentence of this introduction ties the rail motif to the book’s title, The Fateful Lightning, by noting that the author of what would become known as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Julia Ward Howe, arrived in Washington, D.C., in November 1861 by train to attend a meeting of the U.S. Sanitary Commission with her husband. Subsequent chapters imagine the rail system radiating outward from the nation’s capital to four cities: Baltimore, Charlotte, Chicago, and San Francisco. Each chapter links the magazine under examination with one of four “key developments” that impacted magazine production, distribution, and consumption (p. 2). Chapter 1, “Potshots,” highlights how changes to copyright laws impacted the work of writers, editors, and publishers of periodicals such as Baltimore’s Southern Magazine. In chapter 2, “Old Times There,” Diffley examines the impact of the reorganization of the nation’s postal system on magazines such as Charlotte’s The Land We Love. In the third chapter, “Railroaded,” the author traces the impact of “railroad sprawl” on western regions of the war, as depicted in Chicago’s Lakeside Monthly (p. 102). Chapter 4, “Emancipation and Grizzly Reckoning,” treats the impact of photography on depictions of battle scenes, and the “doubling” effect produced by the new “stereoscope” on the magazine literature of San Francisco’s Overland Monthly (p. 159). The coda, titled “Depot, Culture, 1876,” reengages and weaves together earlier threads to examine how the “glory” imagined in Howe’s earlier “Battle Hymn” and imaged in coverage of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia belied a fading of American aspirations in the wake of Reconstruction. While the volume is copiously illustrated, readers might wish for the “magnifying glass” that Civil War–era gallery visitors used while examining battlefield photography on display (p. 153). The reproduction of many of the illustrations challenges an otherwise engaged reader to decipher the images, even when provided with the author’s detailed descriptions. And though it is “beautifully written” as a back-cover note avers, Diffley’s book will best be enjoyed by advanced graduate students and scholars in the field, unless one particularly enjoys parsing out difficult sentences with undergraduate students. That said, Diffley’s work continues to make vital contributions to our understanding of Civil War...