1861 The attack on the Union fort in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, would convulse the country in a four-year conflict that would change America profoundly and for ever. Slavery would be abolished in the South, the North pushed into rapid industrialisation. Because the technology of weaponry (like the repeating rifle) outran tactics and adequate medical care, more Americans would lose their lives in the Civil War than in all other American wars put together.
These were events as cataclysmic – if not more so – as the Napoleonic wars that raged across Europe in the early 19th century. But where were the great works of fiction proportionate to this monumental conflict? Where was the American The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), or Les Misérables (1862), or Vanity Fair (1853)? Above all, where was America’s War and Peace (1869)? Like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that didn’t bark in the night, the American literary voice signified by its silence.
It wasn’t for lack of novelists. By mid-century the American renaissance was in full swing, with Hawthorne, Melville and others producing their major work. Henry James, apparently kept out of the conflict by an ‘obscure hurt’, might nevertheless have found his imagination piqued when his brother Wilky nearly lost his life in the suicidal assault on Fort Wagner by Colonel Shaw’s black 54th Regiment – but it was not to be (see 18 July). Of course, there was Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which, though it might have helped to start the war (see 20 March), wasn’t about it.
By contrast, Ambrose Bierce went through the whole war, including the horrific Battle of Shiloh, fighting bravely and getting shot in the head, but his literary expression of the experience is limited to a few sharply observed short stories, of which ‘Incident at Owl Creek’ is now the best remembered – probably for its surprise ending. As for later work, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) survives as a poignant study in the psychology of fear on the battlefield, but hardly as a match for War and Peace, which ‘made [it] … seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war’, as Hemingway commented in A Moveable Feast (1964).
Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place, though. Maybe big, turbulent democracies reflect their national trauma, not so much in fiction, as in more demotic prose – say, in the work of journalists like Frederick L. Olmsted, or the writings of generals Grant, Sherman and Robert E. Lee – above all, in the powerful speeches of Abraham Lincoln. How do you weigh the Gettysburg Address against War and Peace? Depends on the kind of scales you use.