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100 7 The Civil War Rewritten in the Postwar Decades But to lie inglorious beneath showers of shrapnel darting divergent from the unassailable sky—meekly to be blown out of life by level gusts of grape—to clench our teeth and shrink helpless before big shot pushing noisily through the consenting air—this was horrible! —Ambrose Bierce, “What I Saw of Shiloh,” 1881 near uniform reluctance to challenge the idealized representation of the Civil War shaped American literature published during the 1860s. Even in the 1870s and early 1880s, the voice of dissent remained nearly silent. However, as the war receded into history, American writers gradually became more outspoken, and more overtly antiwar works began to appear in print. Herman Melville, John William De Forest, and Walt Whitman all questioned the basic morality of armed battle and defied, at least in their private works, the prevailing literary conventions for writing about the Civil War. According to the romantic norm, soldiers marched fearlessly into the fray. They squarely and fairly met their foe. If they were shot, they usually were shot in the breast. If they died, they were buried in tranquil, wooded glades. Hundreds upon hundreds of Civil War writers, amateurs and professionals, helped perpetuate this highly pleasing image of warfare. The three northern authors presented familiar subjects of war literature—soldiers, casualties, hospitals—in new and disturbing ways. They offered a graphic and grisly picture of what took place on the battlefield. Diverging from what was deemed to be in good taste, they showed the brutal damage that war could wreak upon the bodies of men. They presented corpses bloated, blackened, mutilated, frozen, burned, and barely recognizable as human. Melville, Whitman, and De Forest ventured onto dangerous literary ground; nonetheless, they all supported the Union cause. They depicted the horrors of combat and criticized military mismanagement, and in their Ֆ Ֆ 101 The Civil War Rewritten in the Postwar Decades diaries, letters, poems, memoirs, and novels shine glimmers of a bold, shockingly explicit way of writing about war. But none of the authors took a steady stance against the Civil War. Despite their intermittent doubts, they shared a common sense that the North’s call-to-arms was, in Melville’s words, a “sanctioned sin.” Even so, the published works of these three iconoclastic writers were not well received in their day. Melville’s Battle-Pieces sold poorly, as did De Forest ’s novel Miss Ravenel’s Conversion. Whitman, who of the three seems to have practiced the greatest degree of self-censorship, reported in the late 1880s that Leaves of Grass, of which the Drum-Taps sequence had become an integral part, was “from a worldly and business point of view . . . worse than a failure.” As Whitman wrote, “I have not gain’d the acceptance of my own time.”1 To break from literary conventions and question, even indirectly, war’s morality during the sensitive decade of the 1860s was to court professional failure. Other potential antiwar writers did not challenge the standard representation of the Civil War at all. Even traditional peace advocates, who might have been expected to present a moral argument against the pursuance of the war, largely fell silent during the war years.2 The American Peace Society , which had opposed the Mexican War in the 1840s, was essentially inoperative during the early 1860s.3 In any case, the organization did not even recognize the Civil War as such. As Charles Chatfield explains inPeace Movements in America, “The official line of the Society was that the Civil War was not a proper war at all; it was a rebellion against rightful authority or an assertion of Southern iniquity which would have to be quashed in order to make peace possible.”4 Nor did other war opponents step forward during the four years of the war to shape a body of antiwar literature. Aside from overtly political tracts written by “Peace Democrats” in the North and “Croakers” in the South, who opposed the Civil War but not war per se, and religious tracts written by Quakers, Mennonites, and members of other historically pacifist religious sects, almost no explicitly antiwar literature was published during the war.5 And as Peter Brock observes in Pacifism in the United States, even new literature on “the [Christian] peace testimony”—pamphlets bearing such titles as “War and Christianity Irreconcilable: An Address to Christians” and “On the Incompatibility of War with the Spirit of Christianity”—was meager during the war years.6 [18...

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