The Poetry of the American Civil War

Chapter One. The War Scene

1 1 The War Scene I. THE WORK OF DEATH Although Civil War poets frequently used the war as a convenient sounding-board for their ideas concerning society, religion, man’s place in the universe, a considerable number strove to capture something of the immediacy of war and its impact on soldiers and their families. Very few of the poems which resulted from this effort, however, approach a vivid realism , since poets, in keeping with the sentimental and melodramatic temper of their era, characteristically employed a highly colored diction in describing the war scene. The clash of arms provided one of the more popular subjects. Some poets poetically described specific battles which had captured their imaginations . Others, usually in amusingly sketchy fashion, recounted the military highlights of the entire war. A third group of poets treated battles in what might be termed the history-of-the-campaign approach. These poets were usually soldiers who put into verse, frequently of a humorously poor quality, the history of their regiment. The full title of George S. Rutherford’s Poetic History (Muscatine, Iowa, 1863) typifies the aim of these soldier-poets: The Poetic History of the Seventh Iowa Regiment, Containing All Its Principal Marches, and All the Battles They Have Been Engaged in, from the Day of Their Entering Service to the Present Time. Composed and Written by One of Their Number Who Has Passed through, or Borne His Part in, Nearly All the Scenes He Has Described. George E. Reed’s Campaign of the Sixth Army Corps Summer of 1863 (Philadelphia, 1864) and the anonymous A Journal of Incidents Connected with the Travels of the Twenty-Second Regiment Conn. Volunteers, for Nine Months. In Verse. By an Orderly Sergeant (Hartford, 1863) lie in the same tradition. That these poets accomplished their task in thirty-five pages or less indicates that one should not expect an over attention to detail from these veterans of the campaign. 2| Lee Steinmetz The reunions of regiments, which were being held before the decade closed, afforded other soldier-poets an excuse to give poetic histories of the campaigns. E. E. Ewing thus wrote The Story of the Ninety-First. Read at a Re-Union of the Ninety-First Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, Held at Portsmouth , Ohio, April 8, 1868, in Response to the Toast, “Our Bond of Union” (Portsmouth, O., 1868); and Samuel B. Summer read A Poem Delivered at the Reunion of the Forty-Ninth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers, at Pittsfield, Mass., May 23, 1867 (Springfield, Mass., 1867). Excerpts from George S. Rutherford’s Poetic History of the Seventh Iowa Regiment represent the treatment given the war by various soldiers. Entering service July 16, 1861, the regiment, at the time Rutherford wrote his history in 1863, had seen action in the major engagements of Donelson, Shiloh, and Corinth. Although Rutherford describes these engagements, he is careful to avoid the impression—too frequently given by poets whose knowledge of army life had been garnered second-hand—that regiments did nothing except engage in one colorful, melodramatic clash of arms after another. Dividing his poetic history into twenty-four sections, Rutherford devotes ten sections to battles, five to the frequently hum-drum and inconvenient life in camp, and nine to the inevitably unpleasant marches the regiment was obliged to make. Rutherford’s history, then, taken as a whole, constitutes an honest if amusingly prosaic attempt to tell the folks back home what it was like to be a member of the Seventh Iowa Regiment. What prompted Rutherford to tell his story in verse can be explained partially, if at all, through a realization that during the period of the Civil War the province of poetry was considerably wider than it has since become. Rutherford begins his history by describing various movements in and around St. Louis. Next the poet describes the trip to Fort Henry and the Battle of Donelson. Following the surrender of the fort, the Seventh Iowa make a trip up the Tennessee River, camping at Mineral Landing. Then follows the excerpt printed below, in which Rutherford pictures the regiment marching, fighting, and living the everyday life of a military camp. Following these parts of the poem, Rutherford closes by describing the march to Iuka and the Battle of Corinth, during which battle, the author informs us, he received a ball in his leg, which set him “to spinning like a top on its peg.” Rutherford closes by asking rhetorically, “Who can define what the future will...