The Sentimental Soldier in Popular Civil War Literature, 1861-65

The Sentimental Soldier in Popular Civil War Literature, 1861-65 Alice Fahs These Hospitals, so different from aU others—these thousands, and tens of twenties of thousands of American young men, badly wounded, all sorts of wounds, operated on, pallid with diarrhea, languishing, dying with fever, pneumonia, etc., open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights, new things, exploring deeper mines than any yet, showing our humanity (I sometimes put myself in fancy in the cot, with typhoid, or under the knife) tried by terrible, fearfulest tests, probed deepest, the living soul's, the body's tragedies, bursting the petty bonds ofart. To these, what are your dramas and poems, even the oldest and tearfulest? —Walt Whitman "Oh! it is great for our country to die," began a poem pubUshed in the Boston Transcript on May 28, 1861; "Bright is the wreath of our fame; glory awaits us for aye." "It is well—it is well thus to die in my youth,/A martyr to freedom and justice and truth!" proclaimed the narratorofthe October 1861 SouthernMonthly poem "The Dying Soldier."1 At the startofthe Civil War, numerous popular poems and songs both North and South offered variations on the classical adage dulce et decorum estpropatria mori, imagining the subordination ofindividual interests to the needs of the nation.2 Diarists, too, approvingly noted the patriotic 1 James G. Percivial, "It Is Great For Our Country To Die," in The Rebellion Record: a Diary of American Events, with Documents, Narratives, Illustrative Incidents, Poetry, etc., ed. Frank Moore, 11 vols. (NewYork: G. P. Putnam, 1861-63; D. Van Nostrand, 1864-68), 1:105; Southern Monthly ? (Dec. 1 861): 249. 2 Similarities between Northern and Southern wartime poetry and songs far outweigh their differences . Thus a study of popular literary culture during the war buttresses Reid Mitchell's assertion that a "shared American culture" can be found in the experiences of soldiers during the war. See Reid Mitchell, '"Not the General but the Soldier': The Study ofCivil War Soldiers," in Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand, eds. James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper (Columbia : University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 88. Civil War History, Vol. xlvi No. 2 © 2000 by The Kent State University Press ??8CIVIL WAR HISTORY sentiments of such literature: Caroline Cowle Richards of Canandaigua, New York, for instance, reported in May 1861 that it seemed "very patriotic and grand" to hear departing soldiers singing '"It is sweet, Oh, 'tis sweet, for one's country to die.'"3 Yet by 1862, and then in increasing numbers as battle deaths mounted during 1863 and 1864, popular poems and songs that asserted the importance and individuality ofthe ordinary soldier acted as a counterpoint to literature that stressed the subordination of individual interests to the needs of country. Hundreds of sentimental stories, songs, and poems focused intently on the individual experiences of the ordinary soldier on the battlefield and in the hospital, especially imagining that soldier's thoughts at the moment of death. As the mass movements of armies increasingly defined the war, and the outcome of battle was increasinglymass slaughter, an outpouring ofsentimental Uterature fought against the idea of the mass, instead singling out the individual soldier as an icon of heroism. An examination of wartime sentimental soldier literature, part of an extensive popular war literature that both explored and shaped the meanings of the war, forces a reassessment of a long-lived paradigm of the cultural history of the war. In 1965 George M. Fredrickson wrote in The Inner Civil War, his influential study of Northern intellectuals and their responses to the war, that during the war "a process of natural selection was occurring which was giving more relevance to impersonal efficiency than to pity or compassion." At the same time, because "there were clear limitations to what could actually be accomplished for the reUef of the wounded and dying, a stoical and fatahstic sense of the inevitability of large-scale suffering was also being inculcated. Implicit in both developments was a challenge to those antebellum humanitarians who believed that sympathy was the noblest of emotions and that all suffering for which human beings could be held responsible...