THE DARK TURN—LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY STYLE

It has become fashionable among scholars to emphasize the “dark side” of the Civil War. Troubled by what they consider a literature gone stale with old questions and topics, these historians seek to revitalize the field by examining the conflict’s often disturbing underside. Among the genres that come under fire as repetitive and unfruitful are books that revisit storied campaigns and commanders, especially the ones that deploy words such as “heroism” or “gallantry” in narrating tactical events. That kind of drum-and-bugle history too often cloaks the war in romantic trappings, insist the dark side advocates, as do studies that find a soaring purpose in a war for Union, or even one for Union and emancipation. The overlooked war, they counter, featured cruelty, atrocities, cowardice, brutal guerrilla activity, and physical and mental wounds that left veterans profoundly damaged. A striking example of how succeeding generations fashion their own interpretations of seismic historical events, the turn toward the dark side reflects the impact of the American military experience in Vietnam and, more recently, in the Middle East.

Late in the nineteenth century, a handful of authors anticipated some of the directions this new scholarship has taken. Frank Wilkeson and Ambrose Bierce, both Union veterans, illustrate this point. A New Yorker whose father wrote for the New York Times, Wilkeson lost his older brother, Bayard, to a mortal wound at Gettysburg. Frank subsequently enlisted as a teenager and saw action with the Eleventh New York Light Artillery in the Overland campaign and at Petersburg. His Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac opens with an unsparing portrait of men who accepted bounties to enlist. “If there was a man in all that shameless crew who had enlisted from patriotic motives,” he writes dismissively, “I did not see him. There was not a man of them who was not eager to run away.” Yet “dishonest Congressmen who desire to secure re-election by gifts of public money and property to voters,” continues Wilkeson, “say they were brave Northern youth going to the defence of their country.”35

An entire chapter of his Recollections deals with severe wounds. During action on May 5 in the Wilderness, a young soldier’s “head jerked, he staggered, then fell, then regained his feet.” Wilkerson noticed that a “tiny fountain of blood and teeth and bone and bits of tongue burst out of his mouth.” A round had passed through the man’s jaws, and “the lower one was broken and hung down.” Adopting an almost clinical tone, Wilkeson adds: “I looked directly into his open mouth, which was ragged and bloody and tongueless.” At the North Anna River, an infantryman passed between the guns and caissons of the Eleventh New York battery. “A solid shot, intended for us, struck him,” recalls Wilkeson. “His entire bowels were torn out and slung in ribbons and shreds on the ground. He fell dead, but his arms and legs jerked convulsively a few times. It was a sickening spectacle.”36

Wilkeson also chronicles how the war’s destructive hand crushed civilians. Deployed to the Tennessee/Alabama border area later in the war, he encountered white refugees who had suffered from guerrilla activity. “Defenceless women and children . . . starved out of their homes” had been given shelter in camps set up by the Union army. “Their features were as expressionless as wood” and “their eyes lustreless.” Gaunt, unwashed, and infested with vermin, “all were utterly poor. It seemed that they were too poor to ever again get a start in life.”37

Ambrose Bierce also enlisted while in his teens, joining the Ninth Indiana Infantry and seeing action in many of the most famous battles in the Western Theater. Badly wounded in the head at Kennesaw Mountain, he later served as a staff officer before leaving the army in early 1865.

Bierce achieved considerable postwar fame as an author and wrote both fiction and nonfiction pieces about the war. Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War, edited by William McCann, offers a convenient selection of his work that reveals why Bierce has been described as, among other things, sardonic, bitter, cynical, disenchanted, and misanthropic.

Bierce offers a fascinating discussion of why “brave troops could retreat while their courage was still high.” Discussing action at Pickett’s Mill in May 1864, he explains that where both sides fight without cover “each has its ‘dead-line,’ and between the two is a clear space—neutral ground, devoid of dead, for the living cannot reach it to fall there.” At Pickett’s Mill, Union corpses littered the ground in front of the enemy’s line, “a third were within fifteen paces, and not one within ten.” The perception on the part of the “still courageous soldier” that he cannot cross that last bit of ground explains why he would withdraw without coming into actual contact with his foe: “He sees, or feels, that he cannot.”38

Bierce also takes occasion to describe terrible deaths. In his short story “Chickamauga,” a soldier comes upon a dead woman—“the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood.” Close inspection reveals that the “greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.”39

Grimly humorous passages abound in Bierce’s fiction and nonfiction pieces. Two examples will suffice. The battle of Franklin, where the Army of Tennessee lost a dozen generals, proved “a great day for Confederates in the line of promotion.” And in the midst of chaos at Chickamauga, when Bierce offered to guide General James S. Negley to the action, the general rejected him “a little uncivilly.” “His mind, I think,” remarks Bierce, “was in Nashville, behind a breastwork.”40

Anyone who explores the dark side of the war should consult Wilkeson and Bierce. Yet even they occasionally slip into a different voice, as when Bierce, recalling fallen comrades at Chickamauga, confesses that for all who struggled there, “the place means much.”41