The Sexuality of Civil War Historiography: How Two Versions of Homosexuality Make Meaning of the War

Abstract

The Sexuality of Civil War HistoriographyHow Two Versions of Homosexuality Make Meaning of the War Andrew Donnelly (bio) The central scene in James K. Hosmer’s 1865 novel The Thinking Bayonet takes place in a Confederate prison camp. Two men, a Union solder and a Confederate soldier, say farewell: “Hands for a moment on one another’s shoulders; bearded faces, damp with the rain now falling, coming together under the dark in a kiss.” At a college in Massachusetts, the pair had been intimates who, as a classmate wrote, “have a love for one another, almost surpassing the love of women.” They broke up over the issue of slavery, when the Southerner returned to his family’s slave plantation in Louisiana and the Northerner became involved in Massachusetts abolitionism. The Southerner enlisted in the Confederate army, declaring, “I hate the North . . . and yet the only man I ever loved was a Northerner.” Coincidentally overhearing this declaration, the Northerner resolved to fight his onetime friend, “I say it while I love him.”1 The prison kiss is their last. The novel ends with the Southerner, his Confederacy, and their romantic friendship all dead, deaths necessary both for national reunion and the Northerner’s eventual heterosexual marriage. Hosmer, a Harvard graduate who served as an infantryman in the Union campaign for the southern Mississippi River, framed the crisis in his novel within the broad “we are not enemies but friends” framework of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address: “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”2 Hosmer’s novel did so by narrating the war [End Page 295] as the destruction of romantic and homoerotic bonds between white men. The novel’s antebellum nostalgia celebrates their intimacy as of the past, strained already equally by their advancement beyond college and by their places in the sectional conflict. Even then, the novel suggests that a paired adulthood was impossible, requiring the intervention of the Civil War to end it. The war transforms their intimacy to a thing possible only in the past, ruptured by death and replaced by marriage. Antebellum white men had celebrated romantic friendship as a stable model of republican society and the ties that bind male citizens; postbellum novelists like Hosmer imagined these friendships within a developmental framework that moved from youthful intimacies to disunion to adult heterosexuality.3 His and several other novels written during and after the war continued an antebellum trend of using intimate male friendships to think about the problems of national unity.4 In these novels, the Civil War became an event within a trajectory of male development, necessary for the maturation from youthful homo-eroticism to adult heterosexuality. As such, the novels offered an interpretation of the war: the more intense the intimacies between the two young men, the more the war appears as the tragic loss of a past that cannot return. The closer the men advance toward the impossibility of a same-sex paired adulthood, the more the war appears as fatalistically preordained for antebellum society. Hosmer’s interpretation of the war is not simply about the outcome on the battlefield but is narrated as a tragedy for the relationships between men. The war ended the homoerotic relationship, and reunion offered a new stage of heterosexual maturity. Hosmer interpreted the war not only as a novelist but also [End Page 296] as a Civil War historian. Forty-two years after The Thinking Bayonet, he wrote a history of the conflict for Albert Bushnell Hart’s American Nation series in volume 20, The Appeal to Arms, 1861–1863, and volume 21, Outcome of the Civil War, 1863–1865.5 Unlike his 1865 novel, Hosmer’s history contains no cross-sectional kisses; nonetheless, his history plays out at grand scale the relationship between his male heroes. Like the novel, Hosmer’s history made the war primarily about the intensity of feeling between white men: Northerners led to war by aggressive abolitionist voices and Southerners, with misperceptions of their power, launching a misguided effort to defend the already doomed system of slavery. This essay covers the roughly four decades for which Hosmer’s novel and two-volume history...