“Brother against Brother”: Reconstructing the American Family in the Civil War Era

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

—Abraham Lincoln, 16 June 1858

Oh my God! what vengeful madness, Brother against brother rise; See them fall upon each other Rage and hate flash in their eyes.

—“My God! what is all this for? Air—Rosseau’s Dream,” Civil War song sheet

Images of a family in crisis and especially of brothers armed against each other dominate rhetoric surrounding the Civil War. Although the war first called up broadly familial terms, brotherhood—often represented by the phrase “brother against brother”—became a primary way to describe the horrors of civil conflict. A search of literary works written between the beginning of the war in 1861 and the turn of the century supports this analysis: at least four novels published and two plays produced during this period bear the title “brother against brother,” while only a single work utilizes Lincoln’s phrase “a house divided.”¹ “A house divided” may have suggested to Americans of the time a minor domestic disturbance and so would not have sufficed to render the trauma of a nation’s people at war with each other; “brother against brother,” on the other hand, foregrounds violence and brings with it the Bible’s fratricidal imagery of Cain and Abel. Understanding why brotherhood became a preferred means for talking about the ruptured nation is crucial to considerations of American personhood because the language of brotherhood, in this context, both encapsulates the brutality of sustained civil conflict and offers the potential for reconstituting the national family.

While brotherhood’s prominence comes through in the number of fictional works that pit “brother against brother” in their titles, it also makes itself readily apparent in the culture of fraternalism that blossomed in the last decades of the nineteenth century.² This proliferation is manifest in appeals to brotherly compassion (such as an unsigned editorial from the 3 April 1865 New York Times asking readers to consider Southerners “worthy to be our brothers”)³ as well as in brotherhood’s more “public” face: secret fraternal organizations. According to W. S. Harwood in the North American Review of 1897, the final decades of the nineteenth century “might well be called the Golden Age of fraternity,” given the thousands of secret brotherhoods in existence, the estimated participation of one of every five American men in at least one such organization, and the extraordinary growth of these orders by tens of thousands of new members each month.⁴

Overfamiliar as the subject may seem, further attention not just to the prominence of the idea of brotherhood but also to its various deployments in Civil War representations is productive because brotherhood marks significant transformations in the way the nation and its people have conceived of themselves, often in apparently contradictory forms. With remarkable flexibility, brotherhood spans a wide spectrum that can include everything from broad-based, voluntary fraternal organizations (the Freemasons, the Ku Klux Klan, and so on), to strict consanguineous relationships, to legal or contractual brotherhoods (marriage and the creation of brothers “in law”). Brotherhood, viewed in this context, embodies the contradictions of what Lauren Berlant describes as the two different models of citizenship that dominate in the United States: birthright (combining place of birth, jus soli, with the nationality of one’s fathers, jus sanguinis) and consensual.⁵ Brotherhood, in other words, can be seen both as entirely biological and as simply social, thus making the term highly contested, particularly in an era regularly characterized using familial imagery. What Cindy Weinstein has noted of nineteenth-century American sentimental fiction’s redefining of the family “as an institution to which one can choose to belong or not” is especially true for literary representations of brotherhood.⁶ A reconsideration of brotherhood also furthers Shirley Samuels’s exploration of “how an identity bound up with racial, ethnic, or gendered embodiments is harnessed to the national project,” as brotherhood became one of the most prominent frameworks for discussing the Civil War and negotiating its racial and gendered effects.⁷

In this essay I explore brotherhood’s contested meanings...