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

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Now there may be those who would save me all trouble by the assertion that there has been no real poetry produced during the war. I hope to convince you that there has been a great deal of good readable verse, and some genuine poetry written during the past four years, under the inspiration of the times through which we have passed. —Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘‘The Poetry of the War,’’ 1865 ‘‘The real war will never get in the books,’’ Walt Whitman wrote in his 1882 Specimen Days. For years, historians and literary critics alike accepted Whitman’s remark as a central truth of the Civil War: the war was the ‘‘unwritten war’’—the title of Daniel Aaron’s influential 1973 study—because no masterpiece resulted from this most dramatic of conflicts in American history. ‘‘The period of the American Civil War was not one in which belles lettres flourished,’’ Edmund Wilson affirmed in his classic Patriotic Gore.1 This book starts from a different premise. Far from having been an ‘‘unwritten war,’’ the Civil War catalyzed an outpouring of war-related literature that has rarely been examined: war poetry, sentimental war stories, sensational war novels, war humor, war juveniles, war songs, collections of war-related anecdotes, and war histories—literature that has often been designated, then dismissed, as popular. Appearing in newspapers, illustrated weeklies, monthly periodicals, cheap weekly ‘‘story papers,’’ pamphlets , broadsides, song sheets, and books throughout the conflict, such literature was often widely distributed, sometimes to hundreds of thousands of readers in the North and to a smaller separate audience sometimes reaching thousands in the South. In both the North and the South, popular war literature was vitally important in shaping a cultural politics of war. Not only did it mark the gender of men and women as well as boys and girls, but it also explored and articulated attitudes toward race and, ultimately, portrayed and helped to shape new modes of imagining individuals’ relationships to the nation. Feminized war literature, for instance, explored the nature of new connections between white women and the nation in hundreds of stories, articles, and cartoons appearing in popular magazines and weeklies. Much of this literature demanded recognition for women’s allegiance to the nation, arguing that white women’s war-related experiences constituted authentic participation in the war—and in the ‘‘imagined community’’ of the nation—on a par with that of male soldiers. Similarly, illustrated weeklies explored the new, postemancipation connection between African Americans and the nation in stories and illustrations that featured black soldiers (but not, significantly, black women). Northern wartime boys’ war novels portrayed boys’ new allegiance to the nation through the medium of individualized adventures and exploits that emphasized the excitement of war. In a different key, war humor both north and south explored the limits and problems in the new links between individual and nation. All these different forms of popular war literature participated in a cultural conversation concerning the evolving relationships between diverse individuals and the nation in wartime.2 Popular war literature reveals that a discussion of the meanings of the war occurred across a much wider range of representations than is usually thought to be the case. A study of these wartime writings and illustrations forces us to expand our ideas of the cultural meanings of the war. Many writers have assumed, for instance, that Northern imaginative writers chose to avert their eyes from the subject of race in wartime and failed to center racialized themes in their fictions. African Americans ‘‘figured only peripherally in the War literature’’ of canonical writers such as Hawthorne and Melville, Daniel Aaron has noted. Yet the pages of popular literature reveal a very different picture: issues of race were omnipresent in the major Northern illustrated weeklies throughout the war, revealing an intense preoccupation with the changing status of African Americans in American life. Likewise, Confederate popular literature showcased numerous illustrations and poems concerning African Americans throughout the war. Popular literature also explored women’s experiences of the war in ways not true of canonical literature. Turning to the pages of popular literature allows us, in short, a more inclusive view of literary representations of race and gender in wartime.3 Popular war literature also adds an important chapter to cultural histories of the war that have focused primarily on elites, canonical writers, 2 : Introduction and...