The Fable of the Southern Writer

VIII: The Last Casualty of the Civil War: Arthur Crew Inman

VIII The Last Casualty of the Civil War Arthur Crew Inman ith the brutal actuality of the War for Southern Independence appreciably fading by the i88os, southerners, Robert Penn Warren says, "mystically converted" the "human disorder" of the Confederate States of America into a "City of the Soul," and, "absolving" the leader of the fallen Confederacy from blame for their defeat, elevatedJefferson Davis to the presidency of this transcendent dominion. At the same time the former rebels, redeemed but unforgetting , and slow to forgive, accorded Jefferson Davis7 beloved daughter Varina Anne—more frequently than her mother Davis' companion on ceremonial occasions—to the status of "Daughter of the Confederacy." But unfortunately, having become a symbol of the Lost Cause, "little Winnie" (as her family called her) fell in love with a young lawyer from Syracuse, New York. Although Winnie's suitor was, Warren says in his remarkable essay on Davis, a gentleman possessed of "every virtue, every grace," he was by unalterable fact of birth and rearing not only a Yankee but the grandson of a well-known abolitionist. To ask for the hand of the Daughter of the Confederacy her lover courageously confronted the proud leader of the lost war at Beauvoir, the palatial cottage at Biloxi, Mississippi, where Davis had found refuge following his imprisonment for treason and where he had written The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. Davis, as he must, refused Winnie's suitor. Later, seeing her desperate unhappiness, he indicated that he would relent, but it was too late. Educated both at home and abroad, fluent in German and French as well as English, Winnie filled her empty days pursuing a literary inclination, writing among other things two romantic novels, an esw 156 The Fable of the S o u t h e r n W r i t e r say entitled "The Women of the South before the War," and, after his death in 1889, an essay on the virtuous character of her father. Yet, while her writings, according to one biographer, shone with "the moonlight" of the "idealism" of a "beautiful pure soul," Winnie Davis did not find the sublimation of her lost love in literary labor. Having undergone a lengthy "decline" (as they used to say), she died in 1898, by then, according to the social convention of the day, an old maid. Ironically, at the time of her death the Daughter of the Confederacy was living in the North, where she and her mother (also a writer) had gone several years earlier in search of brighter literary opportunities. That Winnie died in voluntary exile in the land of the conqueror contributes an additional note of poignancy to Warren's epitaph for her: "the last casualty of the Civil War."1 But in memorializing Varina Anne Davis, Warren sounds a note that neither she herself nor the members of her generation of southern writers generally would have quite understood. Although born either during the years of the fighting or in the early part of the bitter Reconstruction era, the writers of the Winnie Davis generation were singularly conformist and unimaginative. Numbering in their ranks Julius Madison Cawein, Frances Boyd Calhoun, Molly Elliot Seawell , C. Alphonso Smith, and Edwin Anderson Alderman, they scrupulously equated pious allegiance to the Lost Cause with a faithful adherence to a stifling genteel social and literary decorum. Judging by their literary tone as preserved in that egregious monument to the Lost Cause mentality published in the first decade of the twentieth century, The Library of Southern Literature, we may almost think that they were self-conscious parodists of the late nineteenth-century sentimental manner. The one exceptional mind of little Winnie s generation was the founder and first editor of the Sewanee Review, William Peterfield Trent. Leaving the South for a position on the Barnard College faculty at Columbia University, and eventually becoming an editor of The Cambridge History of American Literature, Trent anticipated the possibility Ellen Glasgow (born in 1873) first truly envisioned, that through the subjection of piety to the scrutiny of irony southern literary talent might be redeemed from the prisoni . Robert Penn Warren,Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back (Lexington, Ky., 1980), 90-93; Chiles Chilton Ferrel, "Varina Anne Jefferson Davis," in The Library of Southern Literature , ed. Edward Anderson Alderman, Joel Chandler Harris, and Charles William Kent (1907-1909), 1334. 157 The Last Casualty of the Civil War...