Civil War Short Stories and Poems

A hundred and fifty years ago the war was all the rage! Not only were the politicians and leaders beating the drums for (and against) secession, for (and against) union, for (and against) war, they and the millions of Americans, North and South, were in the war’s midst, in its grip, and it can seem now that everyone who could write did write about their experiences and opinions at home and on the battlefields. Literacy was the day’s latest technology; the North, with more money, more social dynamism, had more of it. In the South, with its millions of slaves who were for the most part denied that technology, literacy was owned and operated by the same men who owned the slaves. The soldiers were all “home” in the land that had been everyone’s (slaves notwithstanding), and whenever periodicals and personal letters could be sent and delivered, they were. Though the land was being torn apart, mostly in the South, news of the movements and battles traveled fast, and the cries for justice or for revenge and the cries of grief and pride were expressed every day, every week, and every month in the hundreds of local and regional newspapers and magazines.

For this anthology I was inclined toward poems and short stories of not only typical or obsessional attitudes and demonstrations of feelings but ones that stood conventional feelings upside down and surprised their readers. For instance, the Elizabethan-inspired “L-E-G on My Leg,” published on September 26, 1863, in Harper’s Weekly by an anonymous soldier who had lost his leg at the Battle of Fair Oaks, must have given its amused readers pause:

Good leg, thou wast a faithful friend,

And truly hast thy duty done;

I thank thee most that to the end

Thou didst not let this body run.

Strange paradox! that in the fight

Where I of thee was thus bereft,

I lost my left leg for “the Right,”

And yet the right’s the one that’s left!

But while the sturdy stump remains,

I may be able yet to patch it,

For even now I’ve taken pains

To make an L-E-G to match it.

Readers of Civil War literature have always been struck by the countless allusions to amputated limbs—how many amputations were there? (At least 40,000!) Count four in “The Case of George Dedlow,” wherein the great American neurologist S. Weir Mitchell imagines the first-person story of a quadruple amputee who has plenty of time to reflect on his war experiences and his identity. Who is he, limbless?

At times the conviction of my want of being myself was overwhelming and most painful. It was, as well as I can describe it, a deficiency in the egoistic sentiment of individuality. About one half of the sensitive surface of my skin was gone, and thus much of relation to the outer world destroyed. As a consequence, a large part of the receptive central organs must be out of employ, and, like other idle things, degenerating rapidly. Moreover, all the great central ganglia, which give rise to movements in the limbs, were also eternally at rest. Thus one half of me was absent or functionally dead. This set me to thinking how much a man might lose and yet live.

Citizens could have wondered, having taken in Mitchell’s amazing story, how many limbs America “might lose and yet live”?

The most useful works I found for ready material were edited by Frank Moore (1828–1904), who assembled the colossal multivolume Rebellion Record over the course of the war. He collected and arranged so much material that for the next twenty years he continued to make little thematic anthologies of his work, particularly of the poems and anecdotes he had collected from the magazines, journals, newspapers and personal correspondence of the time. In 1886, introducing his Songs and Ballads of the Southern People: 1861–1865, he explained: “This collection has been made with the view of preserving in permanent form the opinions and sentiments of the Southern people.” That is, “their Songs and Ballads … better than any other medium, exhibit the temper of the times and popular feeling. The historical value of the productions is admitted. Age will not impair it.” Meanwhile, Kathleen Diffley’s scholarly, relatively recent To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861–1876 pointed me to at least a half-dozen of the eighteen short stories included here that I might otherwise have overlooked.

The most historically interesting of the stories were composed during the war—with life, death, and dismemberment being transformed into public entertainment. The most famous story included here is the “newest,” Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890). Another famous story, Mark Twain’s “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It,” was published only nine years after the conclusion of the war. Its veracity, as Huck Finn might say, may be doubted. But the emotional “truth” of the stories and poems, being written as they were in the midst of the conflict, is deep and real. The truth was that the South felt persecuted by the economically and politically more powerful North, while the North felt outraged not only by the audacity of the South’s desire for separation but the obtuseness of fellow Christians believing in the right to enslave human beings. The truth is that more than 600,000 people died as a result of the war, and there were, naturally, bad and hard feelings about that. The truth is that America’s idea of itself was being argued about with bayonets, guns, and cannonballs. The truth is that slavery, which the Founding Fathers unhappily accepted for the sake of union, was moral and economic poison, which infected the entire country and had to be treated. The truth was that the South, defeated, refused to concede, and that the North, in victory, was not itself transformed into a more moral or tolerant society. It is hard to think about the Civil War and not feel that however horrible it was, it was also inevitable.

In the introductory notes I have explained little about the authors or events described, sometimes simply from lack of information but usually from anxiety about distracting the reader’s attention from the raw and clear sentiments and plainly described occurrences. Among my favorite selections of verse, besides the witty, were those by or about the women back home: mothers, sisters, and wives. For one thing, except for the occasional firebrand oaths against the enemy, the outpourings seem indistinguishable. I have tried to arrange the poems and stories chronologically or, absent chronological clues, thematically. As we read through the years of the war, we witness the variety and development of feelings and experiences that very few people in America could have believed would have been possible.

Before the war, the abolitionist John Brown was the subject of enthusiastic poetry; mad with anger to the death, he became, for many, the war’s symbol and martyr. As secession erupted in December 1860 and spread throughout the South in the winter and spring of 1861, the rhetoric justifying secession, often by asserting the State’s “freedom” from the tyranny of the North but never doubting its right to take away the real freedom of fellow human beings, continues to be remarkably galling and appalling. As the war moved into actual battles, with Bull Run in July 1861 proving to be not the last but among the first of hundreds of battles, the rhetoric shifts. We hear the changes in the voices of the people of the time as they, astounded by the carnage, fearfully wonder at it all. The year 1862 gave hope to the South and doubt to the North, while 1863, with the Emancipation Proclamation and the shocking death of the most admired figure of the war, the Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, brought a terrible acceptance of what seemed an interminable struggle. Then in 1864, as Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Abraham Lincoln pushed the Federal onslaught to its limits, we feel the eyes of the people begin to lift toward the horizon. In 1865, the end comes—with relief, sadness, and finally bewilderment that such a manmade disaster could have happened at all.