Shirley Samuels
In a lecture first delivered on 14 April 1879, the fourteenth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death, Walt Whitman declared that the “secession war” was still too recent to describe. Of course, he had already written about the war in the poems of Drum‐Taps (1865), but on this day he announced that “A great literature will yet arise out of the era of those four years” because they present “an inexhaustible mine for the histories, drama, romance, and even philosophy of peoples to come” (Whitman 1882: 309). Whitman ended his eulogy by noting that the “grand deaths of the race – the dramatic deaths of every nationality – are its most important inheritance‐value – in some respects beyond its literature and art” (Whitman 1882: 314). To place literature in a position to make such deaths significant was the great challenge for writers who depicted the landscapes within which humans engaged in this absorbing war. To make literature out of the fabric of war became an even greater challenge.
The Civil War carved a new landscape into the territory labeled as the United States. The map of this carving included key legal decisions that shifted populations as well as producing railroads and telegraph wires to respond to the urgent needs of humans in motion. Writers had to take notice. The transformation of humans in relation to the environment affected battle plans as well as technological innovations and significantly shifted the focus that writers brought to a national landscape. Not only poets and creative writers, but also diarists and letter writers showed affection for and attention to presence of the landscape in personified projections.
Such attention led me to consider opening this chapter with two epigraphs. The first, “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth,” is a familiar opening from Stephen Crane’s slim novel about the trials of Henry Fleming, The Red Badge of Courage (1895). The second, probably less familiar, is from Rebecca Harding Davis, writing about West Virginia before the war: “The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable,” an action by the sky that forms part of a series of personifications in her “Life in the Iron‐Mills” (Davis 1861: 430). To include this second work is also to consider that the labor undergirding the transportation revolution was in part based on producing iron, the iron that made the rails, the rails that made the trains go, the trains that delivered weapons, soldiers, nurses, and reporters to the front lines.
The dates of composition for these works, bookending the drama of battles and the aftermath of Reconstruction, remind us of the temporal spread of the war. The disruptions caused by war persist as an element of the American imagination that existed before and after the “events” of the war and that converted landscapes into sounding boards for and corollaries to human experience. Such personifications do not appear as a direct reflection of the war’s impact – as a literary device, personification has ancient roots. Yet the visualization of landscapes conveys a residue of how lost bodies felt as war spread over thousands of miles. The devastation to both bodies and landscapes recorded in photographs such as those republished in Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War (1865–1866) has a technical corollary in the detail that the exposure times of cameras conveyed ruined landscapes more easily than living bodies. The captions for the photographs that Gardner provides are famously inaccurate as they distort how both bodies and weapons arrived at the locations he shows. The attention paid to the bones that littered those landscapes includes an agony that the rocks among which they appeared seem to have swallowed them. Gardner comments of his image “Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter” that the soldier’s “bones lie bleaching […] between the rocks at Gettysburg” (Plate 41). Nowhere does this appear more poignant than in the simple notations made by Walt Whitman in Specimen Days when he observes how many bodies were swallowed up by the land and remain in “secluded spots” as “skeletons” (Whitman 1882: 79).
To open with writers such as Stephen Crane and Ambrose Bierce might initially appear to endorse the idea that the war presents as a crisis about masculinity and the bodies of white men. Such a condition of understanding the war appears in the literature of both the North and the South. Troubling these persistent implications, we will first consider the effects of the environment and then turn to other forms of witnessing the aftermath of battles. The language of Crane’s famous opening, “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth …,” includes the imputation that the earth has a face (Crane 1895: 3). That the faces of humans can be merged with the landscape appears after the “youth” who has come to fight as a heroic investment, Henry Fleming, finds himself first running from battle and then encountering a corpse: “he was being looked at by a dead man” (41). The personification in Crane persists throughout the opening: the “retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting” as though on purpose seeking to end its rest. The “low brows of distant hills” contain “the red eye like gleam of hostile camp fires” (3). To encounter battlefields in this novel is to find out what might be pictured back to you about your body in a landscape.
The look of death in the landscape that the writer Ambrose Bierce finds in stories such as “The Affair at Coulter’s Notch” (1889) includes a confusion of gender and loyalty. There the curious sight in the basement of the house of Captain Coulter is the eponymous Union hero cradling the corpse of his Confederate wife. Edging between the beard of Captain Coulter and the hair of his dead wife, but also merging them, is their political loyalty. As revenge for a suspicion about that loyalty, he has been ordered to fire on his own house until it collapses onto the bodies of his wife and infant son who have taken shelter in the basement. The notoriety of such horror in Bierce’s writing overshadows the extent to which it might be realistic reporting, and even possibly understatement. In “Chickamauga” (1889), for instance, the “inarticulate and indescribable cries” of a mute child who finds his mother apparently raped and definitely murdered after he has been wandering in the woods and trying to ride on the backs of injured crawling soldiers might also be the mute need to cry a language that cannot be cried, to speak words that cannot be spoken (Bierce 1891: 53). When the body subsides into the landscape, language subsides as well.
Such encounters with the landscape permeate the political imagination as well as the literary and artistic imagination in the nineteenth‐century United States. The turn to the land potentially mobilized the energy of the westward movement into a landscape of forgetting. That forgetfulness, the thread pulling cultural and political energies westward, was enhanced by the railroad. That the “golden spike” was driven into the landscape of the West just after the war ended meant that the war took place against a background of commerce and mobility. The transcontinental railroad project that was begun in the earliest days of 1863 reached a ceremonial end on 10 May 1869. Able to reach the western landscapes more quickly, the photographers who had followed troops across stony landscapes to find dead bodies now turned to the stony sublimity of Yosemite; their images were reinforced by the large landscape paintings of painters like Albert Bierstadt, whose vast mountains drew the eye away from small bodies in the foreground and reinforced the shift in popular attention from the loss of bodies in landscapes to landscapes that dwarfed bodies.
When, on 22 February 1854, the westward‐reaching railroad first arrived at the Mississippi River, the newspapers called it a marriage: “the nuptial feast of the great Atlantic Ocean to the mighty father of waters” (Smith 2007: 180). Smith adds that “the coming of the railroad oriented the country to two metal tracks running from east to west” and quotes presidential candidate John Fremont saying that, during the war, “whoever controlled the river would ‘hold the country by the heart’” (181, 177). The bridge across the Mississippi that was completed in 1856 drew the wrath of the steamboat interests, and the fire that burned it down after a steamboat collision resulted in a suit against the Rock Island Railway, which hired Abraham Lincoln to handle the case. Lincoln’s arguments in support of rebuilding the bridge included the assertion that the railroad’s desire to move traffic involved a more absolute fact: “there is a travel from east to west whose demands are not less than those of the river” (quoted in Smith 2007: 181). A turning point of the war might have occurred seven years later, when, on 4 July 1863, the Union army captured Vicksburg and the Mississippi River, as well as railroad access to it, became controlled by the North. The equivalence and the spatializing provided as the river and the railroad marked out the routes through which both commerce and imagination could travel west find a difficult interruption in the many battles that took place along both rivers and railroads.
The crossing and overlapping lines of railroad and telegraph that followed each other to the West create a narrative trajectory that had previously moved from north to south, conveying words and bodies, and, crucially, words that could command the appearance of bodies in battle. The historical territory of describing transportation routes in marking the significance of the railroad involves describing the movements of humans in terms of technological advances. Such comprehension of how the war operated to reimagine humans has also been investigated in terms of the effect of photography. The idea of a “harvest of death,” a title used by Alexander Gardner for a photographed landscape of corpses, mocks the activity of men gardening in more peaceful landscapes and emphasizes the sense that the earth has grown these bodies. Among the stones, bones.
Within the United States, to describe the historical events and consequences associated with the series of battles that came to be known as the Civil War has become a familiar exercise. Yet to present the relation the Civil War might have had to a literature that could explain that span of years or synthesize their implications has repeatedly been declared an impossible task. The stalwart attempts of Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore (1962), and Daniel Aaron, in The Unwritten War (1973), demonstrate both a rich tradition and the frustrations attendant on the possibility of a summary account. Wilson’s book opens, familiarly, with the sentence: “Let us begin with Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” His treatment of the participants in a literary landscape presents itself as varied and ecumenical, and it extends to the work of southern women writing diaries. In contrast, Daniel Aaron’s chapter titles present a more canonical view and only mention male writers. More recent revisionist work by Faith Barrett, Alice Fahs, and Elizabeth Young, among others, introduced shifts in considering gender as well as popular culture in accounts of the war. I want to express gratitude for this thorough work as well as to probe gently at the possible margins that could still use interpretation. These include ideas about the environment and the territorial claims that accompanied the war.
Beginning with the environment produces not only a relation to environmental criticism, as in the work of Timothy Sweet, but also a way to reimagine the relation of humans to the natural world that gave them both metaphors and a sense of danger. One soldier, Joseph Collingwood, writing home to his mother, describes the effects of the landscape in such terms. After explaining the duties of camp life, he discusses a lovely walk that he takes: “it was the wildest and most romantic place that I ever saw. we went by a narrow path over hills back by Water Falls and surrounded by large Trees of different kinds. some monstrous large Buttonwood Trees. it was a wild place.” He continues, shifting focus, “and looked like a nice place for Rebels to carry on their peculiar style of fighting.” When he writes to his wife, the same landscape becomes a site for potential tourism: “It seems strange to look around on the beautiful scenery spread before us, and have to realize that this woods and valies are filled with soldiers eager to shed one another's Blood. yet so it is. all is rough life in these pleasant looking places. I have often thought that after the war is ove [sic] I should like to travel through Virginia with you and visit some of these Places I have got to spend so many Days in.”1 The tourism in Virginia that Collingwood anticipates will follow the war seems to be part of what drives Nathaniel Hawthorne to visit during the war, viewing landscapes where he laments the “devastation of great tracts of woodland scenery,” a visit he stumbles through in “Chiefly About War‐Matters” (1862: 50). A rather different view of the landscape drives Oliver Wendell Holmes the same year as he travels in the aftermath of the terrible battle of Antietam, noting the debris of war as he looks for his son near the battlefield, a journey he reports on in “My Hunt After ‘The Captain’” (1862). Hawthorne anticipates that the fortifications, “now so unsightly,” will remain “as historic monuments, grass‐grown and picturesque memorials of an epoch of terror and suffering” (1862: 49). Unable to find pleasure in the devastation he views, Hawthorne asserts that the remnants of war will eventually “serve to make our country dearer and more interesting to us, and afford fit soil for poetry to root itself in for this is a plant which thrives best in spots where blood has been spilt long ago” (49). Not yet, however. The war is a present event and the ground is too raw.
Over and over, men find beauty in the landscape even as they also find dead bodies and the possible view of their own deaths, a fear that usually subsides as they scramble over muddy ditches and then recurs as they reach a place of rest on the other side. In Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), John William De Forest describes life under siege during the ill‐fated Red River campaign in Louisiana in a way that turns the landscape into a surreal precursor of the activity that Stephen Crane describes in The Red Badge of Courage. The energy that goes into making the landscape into a small element of protection against the whizzing of bullets becomes in De Forest's account a micro‐measuring of an elongated ditch in which men cower. When they seek to shift position, they find exposed places where they might die. That threat lasts for weeks. In contrast, when Thomas Wentworth Higginson heads south to join the newly formed 1st South Carolina, a journey he recounts in Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870), he finds “soft and graceful” riverbanks where “glimpses of soft tropical vegetation appeared along the banks, with great clumps of shrubs, whose pale seed‐vessels looked like tardy blossoms” (7).
The landscape also allows for the possible fact checking of earlier journeys, as detailed in the journals of the Civil War soldier John Burrud (1828–1883). Tracing the route he has read about in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), he finds himself on the plantation from which Northup was rescued, questioning its inhabitants. For Burrud, the land is “the most beautiful I ever saw” (19 May 1863) and yet it hides horrors. Even as he admires how “the Slaves have cleared it off and converted the Wilderness into beautiful Plantations,” he notes that such labor was coerced: “I have examined ther [sic] instruments of torture the Stocks Whip and Paddle and Strap” (21 May 1863). After looking at the instruments of torture and seeing “poor creatures come out of the woods,” he notes, “Solomons Book is true to the letter Only it dos not portray the system as bad as it is it is not in the power of man to do it” (21 May 1863, lack of punctuation in the original).2
Beyond such attention to personification, imaging, and the environment, this chapter seeks to understand literary movements. The desire to write historical epics and to produce a model of national struggle in historical fiction appeared so fragmented by the damaged bodies and fractured landscapes of war that the very framing of literary genres seemed to shift. An argument could be made that would condense the effect of the war on genres to the following bald statements. Instead of romance, novel writers turned to realism. Instead of epics, poets produced short lyrics. And last, but far from least, instead of typology, as my epigraphs suggest, personification took center stage.
These simplified accounts overlook the extraordinary letters, diaries, essays, personal narratives, and political orations produced during the war. To elaborate for a moment – the American Revolution, with its deification of George Washington, spurred the production of historical romances in the attempt to identify founding legends for the country. The potential enshrining of figures like Thomas Jefferson was severely challenged by early nineteenth‐century works such as David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) and William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853). But the slaveholding of the first president did not appear to shift his eminent position in a formation that resembled the iconography of images of Christ in religious households of the United States. Not until Abraham Lincoln did another president appear whose picture might occupy such a prominent position within households.3
Nothing challenged the ability of writers and artists to make claims about the “United States” more than this fracturing war. These confusions between body and landscape, between a yearning affection and the grim fatalities of war, have long been associated with the poetry of Walt Whitman. In Drum‐Taps (1865), several poems find the narrator with his hands clasping the hands of soldiers, or caressing them. Such homoerotic longing makes the war a masculine preoccupation that includes the identification of the bodies of young men with states, with the national body. The notes that he took during the war, later lightly revised and published as Specimen Days (1882), continue the listing and cataloging of types of young men with details and addresses from the families they left behind.
To look at how the Civil War affected poetry is to address the relation between intimacy and violence in the language of the writers who addressed the conflict. Often their words aroused images. To talk about images with this poetry is to invoke “ekphrasis,” a term developed as a way to look at how images appear in writing. The structures of interpretation that focus on democracy overlap and infuse that focus on the experiments in language by a poet like Whitman. He uses convoluted language to make foregrounds and backgrounds change places, so that a poem like “The Wound Dresser” can appear intimate and specific in its attention to how men touch each other or, possibly, it can stand in for the thousands of bodies left on fields during the Civil War. If the poem is understood as an instantiation of wartime encounters, then the letters that Whitman helped transcribe for wounded soldiers, the songs they sang around campfires, the sheet music that copied those songs, can all become part of a critical interpretation. If the poem addresses the possibility of male intimacy, then the photographs of Whitman with male friends with whom he shared his life become part of a story of sexuality and intimacy in the nineteenth century.
Such melding of landscape and bodies also appears in Herman Melville’s “Shiloh: A Requiem (April 1862).” The restraint in the poem, published in the short collection Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), stands in contrast to the attention to battlefield intimacy in Whitman’s poems. The stray, spare lines of “Shiloh” connect at once to the sight of the battlefield, emptied of combat, but strewn with the wreckage of warfare, and to the continuation of the natural order. The poem opens, “Skimming lightly, wheeling still, / The swallows fly low.” Their flight takes them “Over the field where April rain / Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain / Through the pause of night / That followed the Sunday fight / Around the church of Shiloh –.” The reference to the battle that has left “parched ones stretched in pain” acts like the line of sight in Whitman’s poem “A March in the Ranks Hard Pressed and the Road Unknown” to take the reader in from the sky to the enclosed formation of the church that has been adapted as a field hospital. The poem continues, “The church so lone, the log‐built one, / That echoed to many a parting groan / And natural prayer / Of dying foemen mingled there –.” The men who lie in the church are described as “Foemen at morn, but friends at eve – / Fame or country least their care.” The identifications with glory or patriotism have been eroded by pain.
With a parenthetical aside, Melville continues his attention to the suffering men: “(What like a bullet can undeceive!) / But now they lie low, / While over them the swallows skim, / And all is hushed at Shiloh.” The silence that falls over the poem, with the sibilance and internal rhyme that both focuses and distracts the reader, moves the sight line from the landscape inside the church back out to the pattern of wings against the sky. The slant rhymes work with the deceptive ways that “What like a bullet can undeceive” creeps into the poem in parentheses. The poet asks, in effect, what can act like a bullet, and answers, implicitly, a poem. A poem, like a bullet, can undeceive. The soldiers who confront each other in death find that “Fame or country” are “least their care.” The swallows that skim over the fields draw a visual network of relations with the pattern of their wings (Melville 1866: 63).
The withdrawal from touch and the intimacy of metaphor that occurs in Melville’s poetry about the Civil War can make it appear as though the poet has removed words. The tactility of language in the poems of Emily Dickinson, as we will see in a moment, has received somewhat less attention. When Whitman published Drum‐Taps (1865), he introduced the melodrama of battlefield vigilance as well as touch in poems such as “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” “A March in the Ranks Hard Pressed and the Road Unknown,” and “The Wound Dresser.” In “Vigil Strange,” the speaker who watches over the man who has died on the battlefield remembers not only “One touch of your hand to mine, O boy, / reach’d up as you lay on the ground,” but also “a look I shall never forget” (Whitman 1865: 42). The place of the look in remembering the war alternates with the intimacy of the poet’s voice when he writes of touching the flesh of wounded men. Whitman returns to that touch repeatedly in his poems and notes. To reach into the darkness that surrounds wounded and dying men, Whitman uses language that spells out the first line as trochaic pentameter. In their attention to the sense of touch that the poems repeatedly evoke, critics often cite Whitman, who in “So Long,” the farewell poem in Leaves of Grass, declares, “who touches this, touches a man.”
The Civil War presented a challenge because its fragmented struggles could not be presented in the linear form of an epic poem. That the story of the United States as an emergent nation should be told as an epic had been a charge often made to poets in the early American republic. Whitman might be seen to answer that call, however unconventional his lyrics, in the elaborate production of “Song of Myself.” Even as he asserted in the introduction to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass that “the United States themselves are the greatest poem,” he presented variations of himself as the subject of that poem. It may, perhaps, be interesting or indicative that the multitudinous narratives of the Civil War did not produce a call for anyone to tell it as an epic. Rather, in works such as Battle Pieces and Drum‐Taps, writers like Melville and Whitman found themselves bound up with brevity. They produced lyrics whose strength may appear in the very formal limitations of short lines.
In addition to their articulations of metaphor and belonging attached to the stories of soldiers, those poets and novelists who took on the Civil War often referenced Lincoln at the background of the events they depicted. Only Whitman seems to have more or less obsessively identified Lincoln as the tragic figure in the middle of events – for Whitman, Lincoln stood in for death even before his assassination. The deaths that Whitman witnessed in the field hospitals in Washington, DC, were punctuated by the sights of Lincoln in his carriage riding out to the Soldier’s Home. For Whitman, the natural landscape, the flora and fauna of the United States, evoke the man who had emerged from that landscape. Like his earlier poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” his elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” echoes the song of a bird commemorating death.
The residue of the assassination inspired many mourning poems in Walt Whitman, but I find this one the most moving as it articulates loss in the context of “battle corpses.” Remembering the loss of the president, who is never named in the poem, the poem actively becomes part of natural events such as the song of the thrush, and also the unnatural work of mourning carried out by so many others. In the “long panoramas of vision” that Whitman sees appear the “white skeletons of young men.” In “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman remembers April as the time for lilacs but also the loss of “him I love.” This memory, this synesthetic version of a sight evoked by a smell, remains. Whitman evokes the hagiography that followed an assassination on Good Friday and the general sense of erasure attending the elision of Lincoln’s flaws as he became identified with Christ.
Perhaps in contrast to Whitman, who wrote in his journal far more than he wrote poems during the war and later mined those journals for poems and reminiscences, Emily Dickinson was at her most prolific as a poet during the crucial early years of the war. Long understood to be removed from its influence, she has begun to be read as a commentator on the war’s effect on the home front. The explicit references in lines such as “When I was small, a Woman died – / Today – her Only Boy / Went up from the Potomac – / His face all Victory” (596) tie in the poem’s remembrances of death with others such as “Because I could not stop for Death” (479).4 Critics have only begun to consider how it might change their interpretations to read these lines as responses to war since the poems were read for so long as part of a brooding isolation, rather than as reflections of the sorrow in New England as young men went off to die. The Civil War was the most productive time for her as a meditation on longing and grief. In her poem “I died for Beauty” (449), the language presents itself as extremely abstract. The invitation to the reader seems to be to understand that a metaphorical relation to truth and beauty, one that draws on the classic formulations of John Keats, must be what the poem calls for. But what if that beauty is at once the beauty of an ideal of democracy and also the beauty of young men? What if the meditation in the poem “I felt a funeral in my brain” (280) reflects the beating of drums or marching of the funeral processions that resonated in her small town of Amherst, Massachusetts? And as she put it all too eloquently, “Pain has an element of blank” (650). The blank pain of losing family members, the sensation of lost touch, reaches almost every home in the United States.
One of the few nineteenth‐century novels understood to be classically about the Civil War has the virtue and the problem common to historical fiction of understanding war through romantic choice. Despite the title, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty concerns itself with the positioning of Miss Ravenel with respect to handsome young men whose rivalry draws her. The novel has the distinction of being the unsteady container of memories from North and South that the author, John William De Forest, also transcribed in essays for the Atlantic Monthly and in his posthumously published memoirs. De Forest changed literary history in one fell stroke when he coined the term “great American novel” in a postwar article in the Nation. When war broke out, he helped to form the 12th Connecticut Volunteers and was posted to the dreaded “Red River Campaign” as part of the Army of the South. His grim days in Louisiana in 1862 appear in fictional terms in the novel, but also in his memoirs A Volunteer’s Adventures (1946) and A Union Officer in the Reconstruction (1948). The general understanding is that the author appears as Colburne in the novel, or that it is at least in part based on his own life: in 1856 De Forest married Harriet Silliman Shepard, who was in favor of the Confederacy, while her father opposed it.
The momentum of this novel begins with the outbreak of war: “It was shortly after the capitulation of loyal Fort Sumter to rebellious South Carolina that Mr. Edward Colburne of New Boston made the acquaintance of Miss Lillie Ravenel of New Orleans.” So many things have been compressed in that one line as it presents a chiastic structure that puts North and South, hero and heroine, in juxtaposition with the idea of capitulation and loyalty. When Lillie’s father, Dr. Ravenel, explains life in New Orleans, he says that it provides an “excellent place for a dissecting class” because “negroes are whipped to death” and conveniently become specimens. People in the South “have fed on the poor blacks until they can't abide a man who isn’t a cannibal” (De Forest 1867: 1, 5, 7). A fruitful contrast could be made between the romantic dilemmas in this book, involving white people who have some sympathy with the problematics of slavery, and Lydia Maria Child’s attempt at polyglot transracial reconciliation in A Romance of the Republic (1867). In Child’s novel, the daughter who thinks she is at home there leaves New Orleans because she has been sold; the daughter who returns to New Orleans, for De Forest, is happy because she believes it to be home. The location of New Orleans as a bastion of southern culture means that Miss Ravenel longs to return. The characters who meet in the rarefied world of Boston find themselves terribly intertwined in the muddy fields of the South as Colburne faces grim scenes in battle.
De Forest wrote several other works that took on the war and its aftermath, including the novel The Bloody Chasm (1881). The chasm of the title refers to the rift between the North and South, and it again appears as a romantic schism. After she accepts the absurd sum of $500 000 as a bribe for marrying the northern intruder, the veteran Captain Underhill who fought on the same field at Gettysburg where her brother died for the South, Virginia Beaufort still refuses to speak to him. He is advised to “Be gentle”; he replies, “I will win her as surely as the North won the South.” The southern general who advises him says, “You are the North incarnate”; predictably he answers, “my wife is the South” (144‐5). Since she has now become wealthy, she runs away to Paris to avoid him; there, to her surprise, Virginia finds that she “yawned – actually yawned over the question of North and South” (De Forest 1881: 158). Anticipating the novels of Ernest Hemingway, the characters of this novel use their fortunes to escape the postwar United States and spend time as expatriates in Paris. When he catches up with her in the assumed guise of a southerner, Underhill finds that Virginia wants to reminisce extensively about the war (229). She urges him to write poems about the “lost cause” and he seduces her by obeying her request to write a song about “Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg” (231) – where her brother died. Underhill was also at Gettysburg, fighting for the Union side, but he writes as she requests. She proclaims, “I do so want a poet […] to mourn suitably for our dead” (232). His song begins, “The war had robbed the cradle” (237). She replies, “The whole war ought to be written over with song” (238). “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the wildly popular song by Julia Ward Howe (1862) that rephrased the melody from “John Brown’s Body,” would not have pleased her.5
Another form of expressing the clash of romantic longing with the racial passing that informs several postwar novels appears in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? (1872). In that novel, the loss of families appears against a backdrop of satirical recollections of the war, including a parody of Abraham Lincoln as a storyteller whose “majestic foot” begins to “oscillate most waggishly” as he talks (Ruiz de Burton 1872: 354). In Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1893), the ambition to enlist draws young men across the southern border from slavery into the Union Army: “Robert waited eagerly and hopefully his chance to join the Union army; and was ready and willing to do anything required of him by which he could earn his freedom and prove his manhood. He conducted his plans with the greatest secrecy” (Harper 1893: 36). That secrecy involves enlisting in the war as freedom from slavery, though Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment also shows the bitterness of troops whose pay was withheld despite the promises made by the federal government.
Women and landscapes, women and tears – the back story of war often seems to involve the soldier’s desire to return home to a mother, a wife, a sister. What history adheres to such locations? The relation between representation and witnessing, over and over, finds that the personal relations of family and friends severed by war, in part because of the repeated action of loss, cannot accrue as much interest. The home that had been built we now find burned. Or shelled. Or abandoned. Even the White House, symbolic location of the nation as home, of course, had to be abandoned by the first family when the president was shot. That is the sad story told by Elizabeth Keckley of Mary Todd Lincoln packing her once splendid wardrobe as she retreats to Illinois in ignominious silence. One story of war might be understood simply as the story of women who travel together toward the battlefield to provide relief or to retrieve lost or wounded bodies. Louisa May Alcott heads to the hospitals of Washington, DC, to work as a nurse, later to tell the story of “The Brothers” (1863a). Elizabeth Keckley goes to New York during and after the war, leaving an account in surviving letters from Mary Todd Lincoln as well as in her own story, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868).
On the topic of women writers and the war, it has become difficult to ignore the anecdote that Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe as “the little woman who made the book that started this great war.” That apocryphal start, a beginning in the tears that her novel sought to produce, becomes sometimes condensed to the assertion that readers need to learn to “feel right,” a location in feelings that overlooks the difficult set of relocations that the novel presents. As Martha Schoolman (2014) has suggested, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) can be read as a story about geography, the geography of those escaping slavery as well as the landscape of those alternately chasing or protecting them. That landscape can appear as a landscape of natural threats, such as the ice on the Ohio River that needs to be crossed, or as a space of domestic interiors, such as the safety to be found in the Quaker home.
To imagine the landscape stitched with the borders and boundaries of war is to enter a territorial understanding of a land that had already been fought over as part of colonial possessions as well as to understand the ways that bodies and the land intersected and collided. For women writers for whom the war was a topic, the landscape was itself a character. The land provided shelter, provided escape, provided food. To ask questions about the category of mourning in the nineteenth century must mean topics that include slavery, and I will close by looking briefly at the work of women writers who consider slavery as well as war. Such a consideration appears, for example, in Louisa May Alcott’s stirring story “The Brothers” (1863) as well as within the more domestic world of Little Women (1868). The juxtaposition between the mourning for Beth in Little Women and the battlefield deaths of “The Brothers” might suggest a form of displacement from slavery that resembles how the mourning for “little Eva” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin contrasts with the mourning for lost children in her more outlandish novel Dred (1856). Other forms of mourning appear in the poetry of Frances E.W. Harper. The point to make with this literature, before remembering the stirring passions of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps in her classic novel of mourning, The Gates Ajar (1868), is that there is at once present and proleptic mourning, mourning for the ravages and deaths of slavery in advance of the mourning for the deaths in the war. The most popular novel of the southern woman's survival repeats and challenges that motif. The novel by Augusta Evans, Macaria, or Altars of Sacrifice (1864), presents the rise of the southern woman and the loss of the southern soldier as somehow embedded in each other. A great mourning for the lost cause appears articulated in the frail bodies of men, the strong bodies of women. The sadness in the writing of Augusta Evans cannot be said to participate in such grief since she so definitely supported a southern view of slavery. Nonetheless, her writing presents a passionate grief for the loss of an idealized South, whether in Texas or closer to the Mason–Dixon line.
In Alcott’s Little Women, a novel celebrated for its portraits of four sisters who model their destiny on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the resolution to emerge triumphant from the family has an agenda often hidden from popular understandings of the novel. For most of the first book, they are simply waiting to hear if their father has survived the war. Such a novel about the home front emphasizes disciplinary order and the civil war nation. Subversion and carnivalesque activities nonetheless dominate. Is there a gendered subversion as well? The desire to work, a desire that Alcott built into her later novel Work (1873), appears interlaced with the masculine soul in the woman's body that the wildly popular character Jo declares she possesses.
When she begins her travel to Washington, DC, to work as a nurse, in Alcott’s account of her own war service, Hospital Sketches (1863b), the fictional Tribulation Periwinkle has to struggle simply to leave Boston. Her ideals of independence are shaken since she needs a male protector just to secure a ticket for free passage. The entry into handling the torn bodies of the soldiers who have arrived damaged by the Battle of Fredericksburg becomes her initiation into warfare, and having cleared off the mud and fueled the bodies she moves into the activities that transfix Whitman in Specimen Days. As she begins to find heroes, especially moving is her account of the death of the man she calls John, a man whose body is left in state as a mark of respect when most are moved swiftly to what she calls the “dead house” for dissection.
Most of the postwar book by Frank Moore called Women of the War; Their Heroism and Self‐Sacrifice (1866) treats the work women did to organize nursing and supplies for male soldiers; most of the women featured in the book come from the North and travel to the South or the West to provide extraordinary support. The chapter called “Loyal Southern Women” discusses what it was like for women to live in the South and support the North. Typically, there would be no man present. The chapter discusses mostly the search for plunder, the slaughter of chickens and other livestock, and the resourcefulness of such women, including one who confiscated the guns of inebriated Confederate soldiers and marched them off as prisoners. The book also considers the category of cross‐dressing women, in a chapter called “Women as Soldiers.” Some are shown to enlist from loyalty, but both the action and the cause are treated with a certain amount of disinterest. We are told that the fact of women enlisting occurred during “all periods of the war,” that they were “fighting as common soldiers,” and that motives were often “unknown.” Some, the writer concedes, went from a “pure love of romance and adventure.” Others had “a mental hallucination that victory and deliverance would come to the war‐burdened land only by the sacrifice of their lives.” A particular instance appears of a “destiny” felt by a “young lady of Brooklyn, New York, who was killed at the battle of Chickamauga” because she thought of herself as “an American Joan of Arc” (Moore 1866: 529).
An even more extraordinary and controversial account appears in Unsexed; or, The Female Soldier, The Thrilling Adventures, Experiences, and Escapes of a Woman, as Nurse, Spy, and Scout, in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle‐fields (1864). Presented as true‐life adventures, the account, illustrated with a number of engravings, details her disguise as a “contraband,” as a “female contraband,” and as an ambivalent white southern soldier. The author, Emma Edmonds, who had already been passing as a man before the war, delights in fooling northerners as well as southerners. Dedicated to the “Sick and Wounded Soldiers of the Army of the Potomac,” the volume was published while the war’s outcome was undecided.
Southern women also served as soldiers. One of the best‐known accounts is that of Loreta Janeta Velazquez, who served in the Confederate army as Lt. Harry Buford. Unlike the account of Emma Edmonds, who managed to receive a pension for her service and is the only woman listed in the Great Army of the Republic, the authenticity of Velazquez’s story remains controversial. Still, the extraordinary feats that both women recount have a basis in their own ability not only to counterfeit the deeds of a soldier but also to write movingly about the grim details of war. Blanton and Cook (2002) look at women who disguised themselves in both Union and Confederate armies. They argue persuasively that, like male soldiers, women were typically from “agrarian, working class or immigrant backgrounds”; in such circumstances, in addition to concealing their cross‐dressing, they were even less likely to be literate and have left fewer traces of their wartime experiences (125). Probably some skepticism is still in order. For example, Edmonds repeats that a “Southern clergyman” saw “Yankee skulls” for sale and explains that “it is a common thing to see rebel women wear rings and ornaments made of our soldiers’ bones” (Edmonds 1864: 299). Similarly, in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, De Forest reports that a southern woman jeers at the Union soldiers: “My brother makes beautiful rings out of Yankee bones” (De Forest 1867: 260). To convert bodies into ornaments suggests a further conversion of bones into stones.
In my attention to personification, metaphor, and subversion, I am not indifferent to the details. Mourning and war go together because both men and women died. Attention to the landscape still means that, even as bones might be swallowed by the land, to view bodies is not an abstraction. Not only in Whitman’s poetry but also in the recollections of Elizabeth Keckley, who made dresses for Mary Todd Lincoln, and then wrote of the failed attempts to sell them in New York after the assassination, the remembrance repeatedly returns to the sense of loss and reclamation of national vision. In her remembrance, Keckley passes quickly by the death of her own son, but she lingers on the losses suffered by Abraham Lincoln. And of course, his words of mourning and reconciliation have become the literature of the Civil War.
What the war became remembered for as well is as a terrible atonement for the sin of slavery as a nationally sanctioned crime. During the time of abolitionist agitation before the war, the southerner Angelina Grimke, who had grown up with slavery, wrote the passionate Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. In its attention to Christianity as a rebuttal of the proslavery justification from the Bible, the work begins with Adam, turns from Genesis to later examples, and then asks, “do the fathers of the South ever sell their daughters?” (italics in original). She answers, “my heart beats and my hand trembles, as I write the awful affirmative, Yes!” (Grimke 1836: 6). The loss of families, North as well as South, appears on a tragic continuum with ripping families apart from locations.
The war’s isolation of families from their origins appeared on the battlefield as well. One of the most famous examples was at Gettysburg:
a Union soldier was found in a secluded spot on the battlefield, where, wounded, he had laid himself down to die. In his hands, tightly clasped, was an ambrotype containing the portraits of three small children […] and as he silently gazed upon them his soul died. […] It is earnestly desired that all papers in the country will draw attention to the discovery of this picture and its attendant circumstances, so that, if possible, the family of the dead hero may come into possession of it. Of what inestimable value will it be to these children, proving, as it does, that the last thought of their dying father was for them, and them only.
(Cited in Dunkelman 1999: 79)
The engraving made from the photograph was widely distributed in newspapers and reached the small town where his wife discovered she was a widow by seeing the image.
Finding the relations among bodies, widows, and orphans preoccupied Americans for years to come, and reenacting the battle scenes has continued into the twenty‐first century. Walt Whitman reenacted the war though his repeated staging of the eulogies he wrote for Abraham Lincoln. As the war recurs for him, the loss of all the young men and the crisis of nationalism recurs. Meditating on the dispersal of corpses through the landscape, Whitman announces that they have been absorbed into the land. Along with the “tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing,” the bodies of soldiers have mingled with the soil and become dust; they are now to be found “in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw” (Whitman 1882: 79).
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 14 (PROSLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY LITERATURE); CHAPTER 15 (GENDER AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ANTEBELLUM SLAVE NARRATIVES); CHAPTER 16 (ANTEBELLUM ORATORY); CHAPTER 18 (DISABILITY AND LITERATURE).