Reconstruction Matters in the Revival of Civil War Literature

There is a revival of interest in Civil War Literature. In addition to numerous monographs and articles there are new anthologies, collections of essays, and an MLA teaching volume. Sparked by the Civil War's sesquicentennial, the revival coincides with today's heightened awareness that the nation has not yet lived up to the promise of racial equality that has come to be associated with emancipation. That awareness was also present when a flurry of new publications accompanied the centennial celebration. But in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and with the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, there was also hope. Robert Penn Warren, who wrote The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial, embodied that hope. Although he saw the Civil War and Reconstruction in terms of tragedy for their failure to create a "union, which is in the deepest sense a community," Warren also knew personally that change was possible.¹ In 1930 he had contributed to I'll Take My Stand, a southern agrarian manifesto dedicated to Walter Fleming, a student of William A. Dunning, a critic of Reconstruction, and a teacher of many of the contributors. But over the course of his career, having developed friendships with Ralph Ellison and the progressive southern historian C. Vann Woodward, Warren came to support the Civil Rights Movement that Woodward called a second Reconstruction.

Hope, however, began to fade as the nation retreated from the second Reconstruction as it had from the first. Woodward was unable to finish a synthetic history of Reconstruction, leaving the task to a younger Eric Foner, who produced Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Thirty years after Foner's book, with the Confederate monument controversy and continued police brutality against African Americans, the revolution seems as unfinished as ever, causing the press frequently to describe a nation refighting the Civil War. Similarly, in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (2015) Cody Marrs asks: "What was the Civil War, after all, but a protracted conflict—not a sudden clash, but a long struggle that in certain respects is still not resolved?"² For me, however, it is more accurate to say that we are still fighting over Reconstruction. Thus, despite my admiration for superb work being done in literary studies of the Civil War and the much smaller field of Reconstruction, I feel it is important to make a case for why Reconstruction should matter in the revival of Civil War literature.³

There are good reasons why Foner calls Reconstruction, not the Civil War, the nation's unfinished revolution. Initially fought to preserve the Union from rebels who appealed to the Spirit of '76, the Civil War eventually brought about a momentous change through emancipation. Nonetheless, when the Confederate armies surrendered there was no agreement on what emancipation should entail. Reconstruction matters because it witnessed a contentious debate over the status of freedmen once the Union was preserved. The debate was not confined to former enemies. Many who fought valiantly to preserve the Union and abolish slavery opposed Radical Reconstruction, the first attempt to realize the still unrealized goal of racial equality. Howells' Silas Lapham, who fought in the war, cherishes an Italian statue of Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, but hates "to see them stirring up those Southern fellows again. … Seems to me it's time to let those old issues go."⁴ Nonetheless, although today's revival includes numerous works written during Reconstruction, many of which are about Reconstruction, most of today's scholars follow Edmund Wilson who subtitled his 1961 Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. There is, however, a crucial difference between Wilson and today's scholars. Skeptical of centralized governmental power, Wilson described how the "needling and meddling of Reconstruction" imposed a new order on the South.⁵ Today's scholars do not share that view. Nonetheless, their relative neglect of Reconstruction helps explain why the Library of America has entrusted the historian Brooks Simpson, not a literary critic, with editing Reconstruction: Voices from America's First Great Struggle for Racial Equality...