War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914

4 Herman Melville: "Battle No More Shall Be"

41 4 Herman Melville: “Battle No More Shall Be” Dismantle the fort, Cut down the fleet— Battle no more shall be! —Herman Melville, “The Conflict of Convictions,” 1866 espite tremendous resistance from readers, editors, and critics , some authors did stray from the accepted conventions in their depictions of the Civil War. Among the war’s early chroniclers in the 1860s were writers, although few in number, who painted a more graphic and morally complex picture of the war than was typical. Not surprisingly, these writers found themselves out of step with the literary tastes of their era. Herman Melville, John William De Forest, and Walt Whitman all were unwilling to subscribe to a conventionally romantic view of the deadly contest. Yet they were uncertain about how to interpret—for themselves and for their potential readers—the conflict that engaged their torn nation. Throughout the war years and in the years that followed, these three authors , all northerners, struggled to sort out their opinions and emotions about the deadly contest. To borrow a phrase from Herman Melville, they felt a “conflict of convictions.”1 Although they were all Unionists, they wavered in their stance on the war. They wanted to support the North but were unable to reconcile themselves to the brutality of the battlefield and the moral compromises involved in waging war. Consequently, they could neither fully reject nor fully embrace the popular literary norms of the war era. In their texts, both published and unpublished, these three established writers revisited certain standard topics of war literature—battles, deaths, graves, nature—but did not turn out standard descriptions. Each of them, in his own way, challenged the lofty and sentimental vision of war that was Ֆ Ֆ War No More 42 so popular in the era of the Civil War. Yet each writer was reluctant to share publicly the full range of his views on the morality and the horror of the war. Herman Melville was long past his writing prime by the time of the Civil War. Or so, at least, it was generally believed. When he published a volume of seventy-two war poems titled Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War in the summer of 1866, the collection received scant praise. A reviewer for the prestigious Atlantic Monthly judged, “Mr. Melville’s work possesses the negative virtues of originality in such degree that it not only reminds you of no poetry you have read, but of no life you have known.”2 Only slightly more generous was a reviewer who wrote for the Ladies’ Repository—a women’s monthly magazine devoted to literature, arts, and religion—who described Melville’s volume as “another book of poems, war-inspired, not exhibiting a very high order of poetry, but interesting as detailing in measured form many of the stirring incidents and events of our country’s great strife.” By contrast, the assessment of a new Latin primer that appeared on the same page of the Ladies’ Repository was far more positive. Describing An Introductory Latin Book—an elementary drill book on the inflections and principles of the language—the magazine’s reviewer giddily enthused, “Beyond question, the many excellencies of this book will secure for it a very general acceptance.”3 Herman Melville’s volume of war poems failed to win “general acceptance ” in the 1860s. The book was neither a popular nor critical success. But was it general acceptance that Melville was after? Herman Melville’s Civil War poetry is best viewed against the backdrop of his failed literary career. With Battle-Pieces, Melville was at once courting the audience that had deserted him during the 1850s and challenging his critics to take his true measure and appreciate his genius. He was both conceding to popular dictates and boldly challenging the conventional representation of the Civil War. In his volume of war poems, Melville offered support for the northern cause but moved far beyond the flowery romantic tropes favored during the war years. But he did not go quite as far as he might have. He invited popular recognition and risked it at the same time. He retreated from the strong antiwar stance that he had marked out for himself in the 1840s, but he retreated only so far. The morality of war was a subject that had long occupied Melville’s 43 Herman Melville: “Battle No More Shall Be” thoughts, and confronted by the Civil War, he...