The Civil War was a written war. It was written by soldiers who kept diaries. It was written by family members who corresponded with soldiers at the front. It was written by journalists who reported from the battlefields and by editors who reshaped their newspapers and magazines to accommodate the desire for news of the war. And it was written by the nation’s writers. These writers—the novelists, essayists, and poets—struggled to capture the texture of the extraordinary and the everyday. One writer who contemplated more deeply than most the meaning of this written war was Walt Whitman: “I have become accustomed to think of the whole of the Secession War in its emotional, artistic and literary relations.”1
The literary dimensions of the Civil War have eluded us. From the start, critics have searched for timeless works of literature inspired by the war. In seeking some American version of The Iliad, they have focused on what was written about the war following the war and have neglected what was penned at the time. As early as 1862, John Weiss, a Unitarian minister, expressed his hope that the conclusion of the war would make a great literature possible: “the pen is becoming tempered in the fires of a great national controversy.” Five years later, the impatient William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was ready to pass judgment. He set the terms for future critical discussion when he lamented that the war “has laid upon our literature a charge under which it has hitherto staggered very lamely.”2
The two most important studies of the literature of the Civil War—Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962) and Daniel Aaron’s The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973)—brilliantly probed the “literary reverberations” of the Civil War. Both authors worked within the framework suggested by Howells, seeking to assess the literature, defined mostly as fiction, that came out of the war. Wilson observed that the war produced “a remarkable literature which consists mostly of speeches and pamphlets, private letters and diaries, personal memoirs and journalistic reports,” but he lamented that it was not a period in which “belles lettres flourished.” Aaron covered even more ground than Wilson and gave greater attention to what was written during the war, but as a literary critic he felt compelled to point out the “literary dearth” of the Civil War, the “paucity of ‘epics’ and ‘masterpieces,’” hence the title of his book.3
To a certain extent, Wilson and Aaron, in evaluating the literature of the war, took their lead from the writers themselves, who felt cut off from their creative wellsprings. In different ways, the best-selling writers of the day lamented how difficult it was to write while the war raged on about them. Harriet Beecher Stowe asked “who could write fiction when fact was so imperious and terrible?” William Gilmore Simms announced: “I am literally doing nothing in letters.” Lydia Maria Child proclaimed: “I can never write unless my mind is free.” And Nathaniel Hawthorne declared himself “mentally and physically languid.” By looking only for sustained works of fiction, and by taking these authors at their word, we have forsaken the moving and remarkable literature of the Civil War—the letters, diaries, speeches, and essays of the nation’s leading writers. Despite their concerns, Stowe and Hawthorne published probing pieces in the Atlantic Monthly; Simms and Child sent stirring letters to a variety of correspondents. It is one of the paradoxes of writing and the war that whenever these authors lamented their inability to compose they did so in some of their finest prose.
This volume gathers portions of those writings. The personal letters, diary entries, and journal articles of the most distinguished writers at the time constitute a striking literary and intellectual landscape. These wartime writings expose the connections between the political, the personal, and the creative. They illustrate how art grows out of experience and how experience is understood through literary art. The fourteen individuals included in this volume labored to find the words by which they could comprehend, and with which they hoped to influence, the war that fixed their attention. Their words ring with immediacy and authority not only because of their talents as writers but also because they addressed the central issues of the day. These writers examined secession, military life, emancipation, and the transition from slavery to freedom. They provided biographical sketches of those well-known and those almost unknown—Abraham Lincoln, P.G.T. Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert Gould Shaw as well as soldiers dying in hospitals and African-Americans struggling for freedom. In whatever they wrote they told stories, stories about womanhood and manhood, stories that were by turns comic and tragic, romantic and realistic. In some of their stories, these writers also revealed the paternalistic racism characteristic of their class. Events compelled them to think hard about the individual and society, truth and falsehood, nature and death. In doing so, they charted the contours of American culture at the time. Both as literary and historical sources, the work produced by the nation’s preeminent writers during the war provides an original perspective on the conflict.
Nearly all of the writers included in this volume were nationally prominent at the time of the Civil War, though reputations have fluctuated since. Some of these writers—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—were widely known and read then and are widely read today. Others—Lydia Maria Child, William Gilmore Simms, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and John De Forest—were best-selling authors in the nineteenth century but, except by scholars, are largely forgotten and unknown today. Still others—Henry Adams, Louisa May Alcott, and John Esten Cooke—had the bulk of their writings and reputations ahead of them, whereas at least one talented young writer—Charlotte Forten—abandoned the pen.4
The selection of writers in this volume is not intended to be comprehensive. The very notion of who is prominent, of who is worth reading and accordingly whose work is preserved, is embedded to a certain extent in the outcomes of the Civil War.5 This volume is unable to redress that imbalance. For example, there are too many Northerners and too few Southerners and Westerners. In large part, there is more available material by Northern writers than Southern or Western ones. The most prominent Southern writer associated with the Civil War, Mary Chesnut, is not included here because much of her diary was composed long after the war and her unrevised Civil War diary is readily available in print. Two additional Southern writers deserving of attention are Augusta Evans and Charles Henry Smith. But Evans’s wartime novel resists editing and the original dialect in Smith’s letters, published under the pseudonym Bill Arp, makes for difficult reading. Fortunately, Evans’s Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice (1863), and Smith’s Bill Arp, So Called (1866), as with numerous additional Civil War titles, have been recently reissued.
Many professional writers experienced the Civil War and left creative work from those years (the poets Henry Timrod and John Greenleaf Whittier, for example). Other writers and critics were either too young at the time of the war or failed to write extensively about the conflict in extant novels, stories, essays, letters, or diaries composed during the war. Among these are Ambrose Bierce, William Wells Brown, George Washington Cable, Emily Dickinson, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Sidney Lanier, James Russell Lowell, John Trowbridge, and Mark Twain. To be sure, the war had an impact on each of these writers, but this volume is limited to writings about the Civil War penned during the war.
The fourteen writers are arranged alphabetically. This order has resulted in some happy coincidences. The book begins with Henry Adams, the most aristocratic of the group, and concludes with Walt Whitman, the most democratic. Louisa May Alcott felt liberated by the war; Lydia Maria Child, who follows, felt constrained. Another fortuitous pairing is John Esten Cooke and John De Forest, the two writers who saw the most military action during the war. The intellectual ruminations of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals are succeeded by the personal confessions of Charlotte Forten’s diary; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had his doubts about the conflict, is followed by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had none. Wherever possible, the selections that follow preserve the original capitalization, spelling, and punctuation schemes of the authors. It does not matter in what order these writers are read. Each selection stands alone as a testament to the struggle for understanding and each is enriched by comparison with another.
A recurring issue for these writers was how to construct literature from real life, how to make words out of war. This was not a new issue for everyone. Nearly a decade before the Civil War, Melville anticipated what every writer would soon attempt when he advised Hawthorne to take “a skeleton of actual reality [and] to build about [it] with fulness & veins & beauty.”6 For each writer, there was no escaping the skeletons of the Civil War. Cooke, De Forest, and Higginson, found them in battle; Alcott, Emerson, Forten, Hawthorne, and Melville, found them on temporary journeys to the front; Adams, Child, Douglass, Stowe, and Simms, found them in their homes.
Whitman too lived with the skeletons of reality. No one was more determined than he to put flesh on experience, to convey in words the meaning of the war. His poems, letters, articles, and recollections speak simultaneously to the deepest truths of the war and the impossibility of ever knowing those truths. As he tended to the wounded and dying in various army hospitals, he jotted down facts and thoughts in little notebooks. Years later, he declared that simply by looking at these pages “the actual army sights and hot emotions of the time [come] rushing like a river in full tide through me.” These leaves of war, whether Whitman’s “tiny, … blood-stain[ed] leaves,” Emerson’s “iron” leaves, or Cooke’s “stray” leaves, are collected in this volume. Taken together, they introduce the literary Civil War. They illuminate “the real war” that Whitman, better than anyone, knew “will never get in the books.”