Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America

Afterword

Afterword There is no denying that the Civil War was a pivotal moment in American history. Emancipation and national consolidation, important discoveries in medicine and technology, the reorganization of economic practices, and the institution of the income tax, to name only a few, all date from the war. As a literary scholar, I might add to this list the rise of realism as the dominant literary genre in the later nineteenth century. As Henry James notes in Hawthorne (1879): “The subsidence of that great convulsion has left a different tone from the tone it found and one may say that the Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind. It introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult .” Having “eaten from the tree of knowledge,” the “good American” will henceforth be, James concludes, “an observer.”1 That it is James’s own writings that will satisfy the needs of the “good American” troubles his assertion, however, as does the fact that it is articulated in a volume in which he wrestles with the legacy of his important predecessor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Were we to generalize the above skepticism, we might ask, as well, what other needs are served by drawing sharp distinctions between the “tone” of pre- and postwar America? What is at stake in our fascination, as potent now as it was on the eve of its centennial when Frank Sullivan wondered about the implications of “America’s most popular war”?2 220 / afterword As I hope this book has demonstrated, the idea that the Civil War fundamentally altered “the national consciousness” justified, at least in part, the incredible sacrifices made by men and women in both sections. Lives were not lost or ruined without purpose but were instead integral to the perfection of the nation, itself worthy of such extraordinary offerings. Associated with the reading of the war as a sublime purification of the United States (which becomes, in its wake, a singular, rather than a plural , noun) is the idea that the Civil War resists representation, that its period was one in which literature did not flourish, to paraphrase Edmund Wilson.3 On this view, because many of the authors who have risen to importance—Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry Adams—did not experience combat (or, in the case of Twain, did not experience combat for long), there was little worth studying from the period. Even as changing scholarly priorities and paradigms have reorganized the ways in which scholars engage with literary materials, however , the assumptions that excluded texts written by people of color or by women, no longer operative, seem to obtain. As Alice Fahs has convincingly demonstrated across The Imagined Civil War, the war bequeathed a legacy of literary production that has yet to generate sustained interest among literary scholars. Institutional organization also explains why the Civil War is regularly overlooked by nineteenth-century literary critics. Dividing the century at 1865, as we usually do, has had the unintended consequence of removing the Civil War almost entirely from view for scholars and students alike. While recent critical efforts, upon which this study has most profitably drawn, have focused a new light on the war’s effects, it remains the case that the 1860s, perhaps like the 1930s, function as a lost decade, neither here nor there, not yet realism but no longer romance, to draw on one of the distinctions associated with the narrative of rupture. This structural practice has had the effect, further, of exacerbating our understanding of the break introduced by the war, which did not end as quickly or as cleanly as is often assumed. Nonetheless, given the willingness of scholars to recognize the ways in which American literature is constituted by alternate configurations of spatial influence—represented by interest in, for example, the Atlantic world, transnational, multinational, or hemispheric interventions—lingering resistance to rethinking the ways in which historical models shape what we think we know about the nation and its culture are somewhat surprising. The funny thing about the Civil War is that, at the same time that it has provided an object of elaborate fetishized historical scrutiny, afterword / 221 it is also treated as somewhat mythical, a time that resists the realities of historical fact, a strange...