Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War by Jonathan W. White (review)

Sir Paul McCartney has insisted, in utter earnestness, that the hit song "Yesterday" came to him in a dream. Jonathan White opens his enjoyable book with Julia Ward Howe reporting that the lyrics to her celebrated poem, drawn from "John Brown's Body," came to her "in a half dreaming state" (pp. xii–xiii). Beyond its purpose of better understanding the sensory elements of life amid war, Midnight in America is a clear-sighted testament to the ways in which soldiers and loved ones at home alike willed themselves to "visit" in dreams, saw prophetic possibilities, and generally coped with psychological trauma.

Sleep was often sacrificed to the fearful sounds of guns. Letters routinely contained references to the conditions of wakefulness and repose. "Soldiers found that writing about their sleep was one of the best ways to commune with those at home," White notes (p. 24). It also seeded the ground for words of passionate attachment: "I can sleep no more until I see you. And oh if I do it will be dreamy sleep I ashure you" (p. 26). Sweet kisses populated countless dream-inflected letters to and from the barracks.

Many preferred to allay the fears of those who related anxiety dreams by insisting on their unreliability as prophesy. For that matter, far more soothing dreams were transmitted home than were nightmarish visions from the front. That said, the author captures some truly horrific firsthand dream reports, none so acute as those of Virginian Alexander S. Paxton. He saw in his mind's eye bursting shells, a flashing blade; he was insulted, got into fights, choked a comrade, suffered wounds––all while asleep. In one dream, he messed with a ravenous pig: "old sow knocked me down and was chawing at me at wonderful rate" (p. 45).

A big chunk of chapter seven is devoted to the question of just how much truth is contained in Abraham Lincoln's dream forecasting his own violent death. The author takes pains to prove it a contrivance, dismissing all scholars who regard Lincoln intimate Ward Hill Lamon as a plausible authenticator of the dream. While my own Lincoln Dreamt He Died: The Midnight Visions of Remarkable Americans from Colonial Times to Freud (2013) is treated respectfully, both White and I esteem the prize-winning Lincoln specialist Douglas L. Wilson, who, when queried, endorsed the essence of Lamon's text. (Presumably, White was aware that my book's title is metaphorical, not literal, and arose in conjunction with the publisher's marketing strategy. Moreover, White's disparagement of the scholarship of the erudite Charles Royster [pp. 166–68] is too severe.) Suffice it to say, White's labored interpretation is ultimately compelling but not ironclad, and it could not hurt to leave a little room for doubt. No study of dream culture can be devoid of creative interpretation––indeed, much of the pleasure in reading White's excellent book is owing to his very creativity as a scholar. He admits that most dreams discussed in chapter five were not published until years after the fact, yet he gives them credence. He is to be forgiven his speculative mood when he submits that the Civil War might be "the most sleepless period in American history" (p. xix); or his agnostic stance in the racially charged debate over the literality of Harriet Tubman's dreams.

The open communication of individual dreams in friendly letters grew in leaps and bounds after the 1820s, before which time medical theorists uniformly associated the bizarre in-night visions as something closer to madness than to healthy self-revelation. Because the war years amount to a small blip in the history of American dream lore, it is critical to bear in mind the complex literary, religious, and medical traditions that influenced the character of dream records of Civil War soldiers. The historian's challenge...