Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America

Two. A New Experiment in the Art of Book-Making: Engendering the Confederate National Novel

63 In the scant criticism that attends Augusta Jane Evans’s Confederate nationalist novel Macaria; or Altars of Sacrifice (1864), there is an anecdote retold with almost absurd regularity: that Evans’s immensely popular wartime novel was deemed “contraband and dangerous” by Union general G. H. Thomas, who, it is said, forbid his troops from reading it (Fidler, Augusta Evans Wilson 107). Here a self-congratulatory Evans writes to her editor, J. C. Derby: “Are you aware that ‘Macaria’ was seized and destroyed by some Federal general who commanded in Kentucky and Tennessee, and who burned all the copies—Confederate edition—which crossed from rebeldom?” (Derby 393). This perhaps apocryphal anecdote about the ideological threat Evans’s redblooded novel posed to Union “hearts and minds” is a seductive one for writchapter two A New Experiment in the Art of Book-Making Engendering the Confederate National Novel For wars are not men’s property. Rather, wars destroy and bring into being men and women as particular identities by canalizing energy and giving permission to narrate. —Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War We seem unable to entertain the possibility that traditions, or even individual texts, could be radical on some issues (market capitalism, for example) and reactionary on others (gender or race, for instance). Or that some discourses could be oppositional without being outright liberating. Or conservative without being outright enslaving. —Lora Romero, Home Fronts 64 Chapter Two ers, editors, and literary critics because it affirms that, in times of war, literature does indeed matter.1 Whether or not General Thomas really suppressed Evans’s dense, ferociously pro-Confederate novel is somewhat beside the point. Macaria was certainly a well-read novel in both the South and the North during and after the American Civil War. Following its April 1864 publication in Richmond, Virginia, Macaria became the “literary sensation of the last years of the Confederacy ,” entering an unprecedented second edition and selling some twenty thousand copies by the end of the year (Harwell and Crandall xiii; Fahs 143). Despite its “dangerous and contraband” status, it was also reprinted in both New York and London within months of its Confederate publication. However , in the nearly 150 years since its sensational publication, Macaria has fallen out of critical and popular favor. Perhaps because the southern Confederacy for which it advocated was short lived, or perhaps because it remains bewilderingly difficult to read, today Macaria is treated as a piece of wartime propaganda and largely ignored. This challenging novel was written by an equally challenging historical agent, Augusta Jane Evans, who cuts a confounding and contradictory figure . Because her novels evince an unshakable belief in the “ambitions and capabilities of women,” she is often read in progressive, quasi-feminist terms (Skaggs 227). Yet Evans was also a “proper southern woman” who throughout her long career promulgated a profoundly conservative social politics. To take but one example, while she saw the deleterious effects of slavery on southern womanhood, Evans was also a steadfast racialist who remained largely silent on the most pressing social and political issue of her day. Such contradictions notwithstanding, Evans was among the most popular novelists of the nineteenth century. Her 1867 novel, St. Elmo, is believed to be the century’s third-best-selling American novel, behind only Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur (McCandless, “Augusta Jane Evans Wilson” 151). An early advocate of international copyright law and a would-be Confederate historian, political theorist, and military strategist, Evans put herself in contact with such Civil War luminaries as General P. G. T. Beauregard and Confederate congressman J. L. M. Curry. Her wartime novel bears the mark of that contact ; it also speaks resoundingly to her total investment in the Confederate cause. As Evans would later say, “The sole enthusiasm of my life was born, lived, and perished in the eventful four years of the Confederacy” (qtd. in McCandless, “Augusta Jane Evans Wilson” 152). And her “very heart beat in [Macaria’s] pages” (Derby 393). While such “enthusiasm” and “heart” are indeed everywhere in the pages of Macaria, my interest here is in charting the relationship between Evans’s novel and its immediate historical context. As the cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes, one of the “major difficulties” in offering a social history of New Experiment in Art of Book-Making 65 literature comes in reconstructing the “spaces of original possibles which, because they were part of the...