The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865

7. The Sensational War

7 The Sensational War Along the line, with star and plume, And crimson waving sash, A horseman rides, all reckless of The battle-lights that flash; But why that check, that quiv’ring start? Ah! see the tide gush from his heart That bears his life away! His hands relax, he reels, he falls, But on a loving breast; While o’er him bends a Young Dragoon, With snow-white flowing crest: ‘‘My Harry, ’tis thy Jennie speaks!’’ She cried, while o’er his brow and cheeks Her tears of anguish fell. ‘‘Look up, and in the Young Dragoon, Long known, thy Jennie trace!’’ His eyes unclose; with sweet surprise He gazed into her face; He smiled—to hers his lips were press’d, His head sank back upon her breast— The hero’s heart was still. One long, despairing look she cast Upon her love, her life, And cried, ‘‘I will avenge thee!’’ rushed Into the fiercest strife; And many from that field now tell That ‘‘bravest of the brave,’’ there fell The beautiful Dragoon! —Mrs. B. M. Z. [Bettie M. Zimmerman], ‘‘The Young Dragoon,’’ Southern Illustrated News, October 17, 1863 In May 1863 a full-page New York Times advertisement for a new war story by the prolific author John Hovey Robinson announced ‘‘Startling News from Tennessee! Love, War, Adventure! Desperation, Devotion, Heroism!’’ Extolling The Round Pack as a ‘‘series of wonderful adventures in the very heart of the guerrilla region of Tennessee,’’ it invited ‘‘the million to a peep’’ into this ‘‘grand story’’ soon to run in the New-York Mercury, which offered ‘‘such delectable ‘notions’ as hair-breadth escapes, heroic exploits, thrilling situations, plots and counterplots, and delightful little episodes of a tender nature.’’ ‘‘Romance and reality’’ were most ‘‘wonderfully interwoven’’ in a story that would ‘‘stir the Northern heart.’’1 Beginning in late 1861, but especially from 1863 through the end of the war, a number of Northern story papers and publishers produced sensational literature that stressed the romance, excitement, and adventure of war. The American News Company, for instance, the most important distributor of ‘‘cheap’’ literature late in the war, advertised ‘‘a series of original and choice romances of the war’’ in 1864, promising a ‘‘stirring story of the war’’ in The Border Spy; an ‘‘exciting tale’’ of ‘‘the terrors of life on the border’’ in The Guerrillas of the Osage; ‘‘one of the most exciting and exhilarating romances of the war yet produced’’ in Old Bill Woodworth; ‘‘an exciting tale of scouting life in the West’’ in Bob Brant, Patriot and Spy; and a story ‘‘full of all that is novel in war, exciting in adventure and stirring in love,’’ in The Prisoner of the Mill, among other war novels.2 Although it has often been suggested that the war acted as an impetus for the development of realism in American letters, popular wartime literature reveals that the experience of war acted just as much—if not more—as the impetus for the development and wide dissemination of adventurous romance, the domain of ‘‘cheap novels.’’ Although such cheap literature was already popular before the war, as David S. Reynolds, among others, has pointed out, the war itself—not just as imagined experience but also, especially, as commercial opportunity—gave a tremendous push to a 226 : The Sensational War cheap literature of adventurous romance within American life. Indeed, adventurous romance became a keynote of American popular literary culture in the postbellum period, reminding us that the usual story of the ‘‘rise of realism’’ in the Gilded Age tells only a partial truth about the development of literature in that era.3 Sensational novels occupied a particular niche in commercial literary culture in wartime, distinguished from other popular literature by a set of conventions including price, physical appearance, subject matter, and distribution. Priced at a nickel, a dime, fifteen cents, or a quarter, sensational novels were published in pamphlets running from forty-eight to a little more than a hundred pages. Often published as a series, such as T. R. Dawley’s ‘‘Dawley’s Camp and Fireside Library,’’ they had garish, crudely drawn color covers—often but not always yellow—that acted as a visual signal to their contents. Sensational novels emphasized bold action, striking effects on the emotions , sharply drawn heroes and villains, and highly conventionalized, florid, even lurid language. War novels and stories were only a small part...