Civil War Literature and the News

In the 1987 preface to a new edition of The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War(1973), Daniel Aaron reflects on the "still elusive, still unfolding" nature of his subject. Given how "pliable historical and literary 'evidence' can be," he concludes, "new writing about the Civil War era" illustrates, even more than with other historical inquiries, how the "shocks and disorders" of critics' own times influence the versions of the past they present to their readers (xvi). One way we might understand Aaron's point is as a more or less humdrum truism: that, whether or not historians embrace modes of presentism in their scholarship, current events will revivify topics that previous generations have left unexplored. However, when Aaron elaborates that the Civil War "remains … a live volcano, a Rorschach test often more revelatory of the perceiver than what is being perceived," he suggests that there's something exceptionally pressing about Civil War history. Studying the Civil War in particular, he intimates, turns us into what Jeffrey Insko, in his study of abolitionist historiography, terms "Romantic presentists," hailing us into a vision of "history as an always-unfinished activity happening nowand remaking—as opposed to trying to know— then" (5, 6).

There's an obvious reason romantic presentism remains so palpable within Civil War studies: the nineteenth century left its signature event obscenely unresolved, with the military victory of the Union more than offset by the cultural victory of the Confederacy (O'Leary 203). Or, following Ta-Nehisi Coates, we may more accurately say that the nineteenth century failed to resolve the problem of vicious, unrelenting antiblackness it inherited from its two predecessors, merely naming and reconfiguring rather than settling a "war [that] commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America's first black codes." The Civil War exists within the continuum of the ongoing. Sometimes it lurks in the barely perceptible background; sometimes it's driven into sharp and too frequently violent relief.

This ongoingness matters for how we write and study the war's literary history, particularly given the racial makeup of such scholarship. As Coates observes, Civil War history, including Civil War literary history, is a field pursued, even more than other areas of Americanist study, overwhelmingly by white scholars. Those of us comprising the racial majority of the field remain shielded from the everyday hostilities of antiblackness, meaning that forces making the Civil War newly prescient in our research are frequently mediated through the stories of others' experiences. Looking back on the forces influencing his own monograph, Aaron cites the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the Vietnam War: "[t]he former underscored the invisibility of black Americans in Civil War literature; the latter pointed back to a war no less savage, divisive, frustrating, and mismanaged" (xvi). As a white professor at Smith and then Harvard, Aaron, like his 1860s predecessors, experienced these signature moments of history as they were refashioned and represented by the media of his day. The event had first to become the news. It had, as Stuart Hall puts it, to become "a 'story'" before it could become " communicative" (508). For most Americans alive from 1861 to 1865, these mediated stories constituted the bulk of the war. And for most critics working within Civil War literary studies today, mediated stories continue to comprise the present through which we come to understand the past.

To read these four books together is to consider history not as a chronology of events but as an unfolding of forces shaping what events become noteworthy, when they do so, and for...