From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature, and: American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (review)

Vae Victis. No Confederate writers appear in Randall Fuller’s From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature. As Fuller has it, American literature in the Civil War period is purely an operation carried out in the northeastern United States, stronghold of the Unionist cause. Henry Timrod, Sidney Lanier, Augusta Jane Evans, the diarists (Mary Boykin Chesnut their eminence), the war memoirists (Richard Taylor their eminence) do not participate in the midcentury transformation of American literature, though it might be argued the Civil War transforms southern American writing, gives it a lost cause, a new subject, while northern American writing retains intact its justified Unionist narrative. What are the transformational texts in Civil War literature? Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, Lincolnian discourse, and the great documentary achievement of Civil War photography, the work of Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, A. J. Russell, and others, each photograph a text. These, and the epical enterprise of the 1887–1888 Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, along with Edward Pollard’s 1866 Confederate history, The Lost Cause, are the major cultural productions in American Civil War literature, the game changers, so to speak.

Fuller’s purview in From Battlefields Rising is therefore narrow, sectional, his notion of literature restrictive, excluding political and military texts. Throughout the book we are in a familiar neighborhood following well traveled roads looking at the Civil War texts of Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, with excursions to lesser sites, Louisa May Alcott, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and others. Fuller does a good job retelling the story of Hawthorne’s embittered alienation from the war effort. He appreciates Whitman’s Civil War reportage, presents Melville’s project in Battle- Pieces, draws a certain bead on Emerson’s travail as poet, orator, and protective father, but in all these instances we are always in the already said, Fuller’s readings of single texts without surprise.

The Civil War, it might be said, doesn’t transform this northeastern branch of American literature, the work of its great antebellum writers; it brings this literature to a ragged bleak closure. This is the story Fuller perforce tells in From Batttlefields Rising.

So we are mostly in Concord, Amherst, Boston, moving between families. When Louisa May Alcott comes back grievously ill from her arduous nursing duty at the front, the Hawthornes and the Emersons are promptly there to help with her care. Henry James Senior will shield his gifted older sons, William and Henry, from military service, sending instead his younger sons, Garth Wilkinson and Robert. And here is Emerson, like his friend and colleague, the senior James, a strong supporter of the Unionist cause, yet unable to part with his son, Edward, and finding all the special pleading and circumlocution necessary to keep Edward in college and not in the legendary Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth where he was wanted. Fuller, a noted Emerson scholar, gives us the letter Emerson wrote to Colonel Edward Hallowell in 1863: “But he [Edward Emerson] is not quite yet worth the sending as a soldier. With a taste for rough life, he is of a delicate health, & very easily disordered.” Et cetera. Chapter 6, “Fathers and Sons,” is the best chapter in From Battlefields Rising.

We have just completed celebrating a fairly quiet sesquicentennial celebration of the Civil War. Our first African American president delivered the official proclamation. David W. Blight’s American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era takes us back to the tumultuous centennial celebration in 1961 which began with the happy expectation of another Blue-Gray love feast, re-enactors signing up to refight the principal battles, even as Freedom Riders were heading south to Aniston and Birmingham, Alabama, new...