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Lawrence S. Thompson received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina and is now Director of Libraries at the University of Kentucky. He has been Advisor on Library Problems to the Turkish Minister of Education and has been a frequent contributor to bibliographical journals. The Civil War in Fiction LAWRENCE S. THOMPSON when ? returned t? the united states in the fall of 1945, I stopped by the moribund Southern town of my childhood to pay my respects to a nonagenarian lady whose greenest memories belonged to her teen-age years in the sixties. The world-shaking events of 1939-45 had only made a casual impression on her, and even the tragedy of Hiroshima was insignificant to her by comparison with the burning of Atlanta. But somehow or another she realized that World War II had a real message for her. Over a cup of weak tea she murmured, "If only General Lee had had one, just one tiny little atom bombi" The dear old lady didn't quite realize that for almost a century the real secret weapon of those who still fight the last romantic war has been the American novel. A dozen wings of supersonic jets, evenly divided between Uncle Billy Sherman and Jeb Stuart, would have had less effect on the ideas of twentieth century Americans about the Civil War than the thousand or more full-length novels set in the stirring years of 1860-65. We Kentuckians (who joined the Confederacy after the war) know better than anyone else how the novel has shaped our sentiments. No true Bluegrasser has failed to weep with Chad Buford, the Little Shepherd, and Margaret Dean when they chose opposite sides in 1860. We are moved deeply by the first chapter of any Civil War novel describing the surrender of Sumter by that gallant Louisvillian, Major Robert Anderson; and the fantastic escape of John Hunt Morgan from the yankee concentration camp in Columbus is thrilling even in the dull prose of one of Mr. Beadle's hacks. Beyond all sentiment, however, the significant thing about Civil War fiction in the history of American letters is that it reflects national literary trends more accurately than any other type of historical novel. This we may ascribe to the abundance of the genre and to the fact that it has attracted many of our ablest writers. 83 84LAWRENCE S. THOMPSON The fiery gospel wasn't written nearly as effectively in the rows of burnished steel as it was on the sulphite pages of American fiction from 1862 on. Charles F. Brown had Artemus Ward holding forth on the war before the smoke had cleared from the First Bull Run, and Rebecca Harding Davis and Louisa May Alcott were grinding out short stories on the war before Chancellorsville. If the Unionists produced no literary swamp angel, the Secesh did little better. Possibly Jeff Davis' propaganda ministry had vague notions about boring the unionists into surrender by unleashing the Southern branch of the feminine school. Augusta Jane Evans turned on the yankees with all the raw power of a charlotte russe in Macaria; or, The Altars of Sacrifice (1864). Almost simultaneously Sallie Rochester Ford produced her Iliad of the rebellion, Raids and Romance of Morgan and His Men ( 1864). If Mrs. Ford's misbegotten epic was a "cornerstone of Confederate literature," as one bibliographer has argued, it is just as well for the sake of belletristic writing in America that the Cause was lost. She embellished her prose narrative with some snatches of balladry that endow her with the same variety of immortality that The Sweet Singer of Michigan enjoys. Take the half dozen lines celebrating Morgan's number one man (and later the robber baron of L.&N. fame), Basil Duke: A sad mischance occurred to the heroic Duke, Who's bold as a lion, but mild as St. Luke; This brave hero, who is scarce less than Morgan, Was severely wounded on the cranial organ, While repelling an attack made on his rear, He fell by a shell that exploded too near. In spite of the crudity of the great bulk of imaginative prose dealing with the war in the sixties...

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