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 Catherine V. Bateson (bio) The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876. By Kathleen Diffley. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Pp. 268. Paper, $36.95.) Second-book syndrome is a mountain to overcome and doubly hard when the second book in question comes in the middle of a proposed trilogy assessing American Civil War and Reconstruction magazine fiction. That is the task Kathleen Diffley sets with The Fateful Lightning, a follow-up to Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861–1876 (1992). Previously, Diffley focused on [End Page 263] how northeastern periodicals expanded expressions about citizenship and liberty. The Fateful Lightning covers the same comparable period, following on from its predecessor while standing alone (you can read this book without reading the first). By marrying national context with divergent country-wide perspectives, the fictional Civil War stories examined in The Fateful Lightning “helped engineer a master narrative that was nonetheless open to regional challenges” (3–4). While maintaining an urban focus, Diffley notes how distinctive cultures “magazine by magazine” emerged around the country; the “four periodicals and the cities in which they arose” covered in this book offer “varying gauges of continued political unrest, emerging social opportunity, and dickering regional agendas as Reconstruction first unfolded” (6). “A latticework of intersecting print culture concerns materializes,” Diffley argues, that highlights how postwar memory making and emancipation reflections were prominent in areas beyond Washington, D.C., and the South (19). The Fateful Lightning’s four central chapters tour the print culture of midcentury periodicals, from Baltimore’s Southern Magazine (1886–75) and Charlotte’s The Land We Love (1866–69) to Chicago’s Lakeside Monthly and San Francisco’s Overland Monthly. Each of the four main chapters is divided into three sections. The first is an opening contextual discussion that lays the groundwork for the periodical being examined, its editorial focus, city (and region) of publication, and central wartime and Reconstruction story themes. This section includes snippets of article outlines and comparisons to the other magazines. The second section is a full short story complete with contemporary two-column-style periodical presentation. The brief third section critically analyses the short story’s meaning. The railroad runs like a literal and imagined metaphor across the whole book. “In magazine after magazine, story after story . . . the fictional platforms from which local heroes depart . . . were almost always cast as hurried and heterogeneous, crammed . . . with a hodgepodge of strangers” (103), who would meet in carriages, waiting rooms, and depots and share their stories of the civil conflict with messages for the Reconstruction present. The four main terminus/starting points reveal examples of how the lines between public and private blurred in mid-nineteenth-century cultural outputs. National changes and encroaching modernity come to the fore: “the medium was the message, and, thanks to federally funded postal routes [and ever-growing railways], the message spread” beyond the parlor into the zeitgeist (65). Yet the message was not necessarily about progress. Diffley develops a theme in chapter 4 that regards photography and the advent of thinking [End Page 264] stereoscopically in terms of wartime images and memory. This interesting framing works well for the entire study. By taking an enhanced look into the wider realm of Civil War–and Reconstruction-era historical scholarship, Diffley delves into how the nation’s competing immediate wartime memories evolved before Reconstruction ended. Take The Land We Love covered in chapter 2; its very name is revealing. The “land” stresses the moonshine and magnolia image of the Old South; unsurprisingly, Diffley notes that “in the immediate aftermath of defeat, [the periodical] would also become the magazine forum of choice for chronicling Confederate military action and kindling a fleeting nation’s Lost Cause” (63). This study shows that “during the 1860s and 1870s, the fraught terrain of postmemory coalesced almost immediately” to sanitize a vanished southern (and national) image before the Lost Cause became embedded (80). Drawing on David Blight’s Civil War memory and Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory scholarship, Diffley makes this point well. Indeed, she...