The Literate War/The Literacy War

Abstract

The Literate War/The Literacy War Christopher Hager In early January 1862, a Boston newspaper reprinted a (West) Virginia newspaper's printing of a distinctive textual artifact of the Civil War. A written order from Sampson Elza, the leader of a Confederate guerilla unit operating in the Allegheny Mountains, was taken from one of the unit's "Dixie Boys" when he was captured by Union forces under Lieutenant Fabricius A. Cather. Cather evidently gave the document to his uncle, a state senator in fledgling West Virginia, who shared it with the editor of the Wheeling Intelligencer, which had of late been employing the young writer Rebecca Harding Davis. Among these highly literate hands passed the following text: I hear By Notify all men that don't Be long to the dry fork Company such as Robes lyres theaves and falce dispatch Barrowes that has usurped the power of the officers this dry fork Company and I all sow Notify such men Never to set foot of the soil of said Dry fork Such as Read White Blue and many other that I could name if necessary at other ways sholder thear weapon and defend this Country in which they are leading Enmey in on us at the time Wee Need them they fley to south to Reffuge and leav us to stand Befor the miserable miscreants and herelings of the North to purputrate thear dark deed on A portion of our country wee will oppose them with all the means that the god of Batle can place in our power But not to defende those Robes to purpitrate thear dark deeds and us stand the Blunt Now man come in this Company and Control them on less sent By proper Athority from them in A Command if they do the wadgeous of sin is deth And the wadeious of such is death. Newspapers frequently ran dispatches from the front to inform readers about the progress of the war, but Sampson Elza's order was not printed in the interest of reporting. Sneeringly introduced by the Intelligencer.'s editor as a "rare contribution to the world's literature," the transcription is followed by this editorial commentary: "Wadgeous" for wages is stupendous, so is the variation, 'wadeious.' The "god of Batle can place in our power" is very fine. Much depends on his ability to furnish "means," it appears. If he should chance to be hard up, it wouldn't be near so well with the "dry forkers" as if he should have plenty. Sampson is very jealous of his authority, and makes death the penalty of impertinent interference with it. ("A Model" 74) Mockery's well runs dry fairly quickly. Casting about for something beyond spelling to make fun of, the editor winds up acknowledging, [End Page 409] in spite of himself, that the text is in fact an entirely intelligible communication. He shifts from deriding literacy to deriding logic and offers what amounts to a close reading of the text as a cosmology of warfare. In the invocation of a "god of Batle," he observes a fatalism understandable amid the chaos of guerrilla fighting in the mountains. In Elza's anxiety about "Athority" and soldiers switching sides, the editor perceives concerns that were not unwarranted in this border region, where sympathies often were split within families and some individual towns changed from Union to Confederate control and back more than ten times over the course of the war. What we witness in these few column inches of a Civil War-era newspaper is an encounter between alien cultures—an intrusion of one world of literacy into another, inhospitable one. Sampson Elza's dispatch was preserved, shared, and published so that educated people could hold it at arm's length, scrutinize it, and define themselves in opposition to it—the Hottentot Venus in a textual freak show.1 But once the editor impishly goes through the motions of taking Elza's order seriously—taking it as a "contribution to the world's literature"—he discovers that it actually can be taken seriously. Or, if he doesn't quite make that discovery, he comes close enough that we...