There Are No Good Deaths in War: Rebecca Harding Davis's "John Lamar" and the White Feminist Foundations of U.S. Antiwar Literature

Studies of (anti)war literature continue to devalue Rebecca Harding Davis's contributions to the genre. This essay reaffirms Davis's status as a foundational writer of U.S. antiwar literature whose exposure to emergent guerilla conflict in the borderlands of western Virginia made her critical of northern and southern attempts to reconcile the Civil War's carnage with martial codes of conduct and domestic narratives of mourning. Reibsome argues that Davis's 1862 short story "John Lamar" employs a multivalent Good Death/Bad Death rhetoric to convey the horror of unconventional warfare and to force readers to contemplate the irreconcilable differences between Confederate and emancipatory war aims. Combining contemporary criticism and new historical research, Reibsome problematizes the story's reconciliationist conclusion, suggesting that Davis's familial participation in slavery distorted her perception of race, as evidenced by her penchant for incorporating racist tropes and caricatures in her writing.

"Novels and magazines are filled nowadays with stories of gallant boys and noble old men from every free and every slave State dying for the cause they loved. We all like to think that great national convulsion was caused by an outbreak of pure patriotism, of chivalry, of self-sacrifice in both South and North.

Measurably that is true. But there were phases of the long struggle familiar enough to us then which never have been painted for posterity. There were, for instance, regiments on both sides which had been wholly recruited from the jails and penitentiaries.

This class of soldiery raged like wild beasts through the mountains of the border States. They burned, they murdered men, women, and children, they cut out the tongues of the old men who would not answer their questions."

—Rebecca Harding Davis¹

In his 2009 nonfiction account of the Iraq War, The Good Soldiers, David Finkel shares the story of Corporal Duncan Crookston, a nineteen-year-old infantryman who loses both legs, an arm, a hand, a nose, both ears, and his eyelids when an improvised explosive device (IED) pierces his vehicle and sets him on fire. In the months following the attack, the military transfers Crookston to the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, where he languishes with fever, tissue infection, and organ failure before dying on January 25, 2008. That day Crookston's mother, Lee, emails family and friends the tragic news, writing: "It is the closest thing to a 'good death' one could ask for a young man who fought so long and hard, only to have the limits of his body betray him."² Lee never explains what she means by a "good death," nor does Finkel, in part because he understands the scene's poignancy stems from a mother's struggle to situate her son's gruesome, premature wartime death within popular domestic narratives of mourning, but also because he, like Lee, assumes two things: (1) it is evident what a "good death" entails; and (2) soldiers rarely, if ever, experience good deaths—the best they can hope for is "the closest thing." When these ideas developed is a topic of critical debate.

The conventional narrative claims World War I inaugurated the modern tension between domestic expectations of death and the horrific reality of wartime casualties. In World War I and the American Novel (1967), Stanley Cooperman argued that sentimental WWI writers produced propagandistic texts in which "war was spectacle; it was authentically stirring, replete with trumpets, 'dignified death,' the red badge of courage, cheering populations, and bronzed warriors of tomorrow."³ Armed with these literary depictions of chivalrous combat, U.S. citizens enlisted in a Crusade to save Europe. Instead, they encountered trench warfare and mechanized slaughter, which shattered their romantic fantasies of individual agency and "dignified death," for "machines had turned dying into an obscenity […] and politics had turned the crusader into a pawn."⁴ In The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell famously suggested that the war's participants communicated their subsequent disillusionment through an ironic mode of storytelling, which became the "one dominating form of modern understanding."⁵ Thus, it was only after the war that writers like Ernest Hemingway could claim that "soldiers never do die well."⁶ According to Fussell, such ideas were simply unthinkable before World War I, which "took place in what was, compared with ours, a static world, where the values appeared stable and where the meanings of abstractions seemed permanent and reliable."⁷

Contemporary critics have questioned this narrative, pointing to a similar development during the U.S. Civil War. Historian Mark Schantz, for example, has revealed a robust antebellum culture of mourning in which "Americans created social frames for death that made it not only comprehensible but instructive, redemptive, and glorious."⁸ One such frame was the Protestant ideal of a Good Death, in which a dying person, surrounded by loved ones at home, passed peacefully from this world to the next. According to Drew Gilpin Faust, the Civil War's unprecedented devastation posed a formidable challenge to this ritual, for "the sudden and all but unnoticed end of the soldier slain in the disorder of battle, [and] the unattended deaths of unidentified diseased and wounded men [in hospitals] denied these consolations."⁹ On the contrary, Faust argues, "Civil War battlefields and hospitals could have provided the material for an exemplary text on how not to die."¹⁰

During this cultural crisis, many Americans nevertheless tried to preserve the Good Death. Michael Fellman claims that even though "women and men frequently violated peacetime moral boundaries, which they had to revise drastically in order to survive," they "clung desperately to shreds of their prewar values […] in order to prevent themselves from collapsing, in their most intimate relationships and in their self-conceptions, from acceptable humanity into amoral monstrosity."¹¹ A Good Death, which Faust describes as a "lifeline between the new world of battle and the old world at home," was one prewar value to which many clung.¹² Nurses served as surrogate mothers for their patients, mortally wounded men enacted deathbed scenes by addressing pictures of their loved ones, and fellow soldiers sent condolence letters to the next of kin containing the deceased's final words and descriptions of his physical deportment and spiritual wellbeing at the time of death.¹³

In addition to these concrete changes, the Good Death's symbolic significance underwent substantial revisions during the war. John R. Neff explains that "insofar as the dead could be equated with military success or failure, they could in turn reflect on the purpose, the nature, and even the morality of the war itself, and by extension the nationalist mission that it supported."¹⁴ This politicization of death—what Russ Castronovo refers to as "political necrophilia"—varied along sectional and racial lines.¹⁵ For example, Schantz has identified a "distinctively African American understanding of the 'Bad Death' and the 'Good Death.' The 'Bad Death' was the death experienced under the crushing weight of slavery. The 'Good Death' was the death experienced by free men battling to end evil in the world."¹⁶ This emancipatory frame of reference imbued the war dead with a regenerative potential, suggesting their deaths ensured the black community's rebirth from slavery's social death. Similarly, in northern mythologies of war, which Neff terms "Cause Victorious," the war dead "were made to serve the development of a stronger nation in the Northern image, a nation tempered in the fires of treasonous rebellion."¹⁷ Here, the regenerative potential remains, but its purpose has shifted from emancipation to Unionism. Finally, according to southern narratives of war, which "followed the dictates of a separate mythos predicated on difference and distinctiveness," rebel soldiers died Good Deaths while defending Confederate states from the tyranny of overwhelming foreign invaders.¹⁸ Together, these differing perspectives on the war's carnage fractured the Good Death's antebellum unanimity, belying the permanence of values that scholars like Fussell have retrospectively projected onto previous generations at war.

In recent years, critics have looked to literature to understand these tensions. Alice Fahs, for example, has documented the wartime proliferation of sentimental literature aestheticizing battlefield casualties and giving voice to dying soldiers' last words. According to Fahs, "The task of making soldiers' deaths meaningful was one that required constant effort; the sentimental meaning of the soldier's life could not simply be generated once but needed to be re-created over and over again. Hundreds of dying soldier poems were the result, both north and south."¹⁹ Similarly, Adam Bradford claims Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps, "not only provides" readers "with the opportunity to see that a loved one died a 'Good Death,' but it offers the consolation of being virtual witness to the funeral or 'vigil' held for that loved one."²⁰ Drum-Taps thus complements Whitman's wartime experience as a nurse trying to comfort dying soldiers and their families. But writers with a different relationship to death produced different literature. Unlike Whitman, Rebecca Harding Davis, who lived in the borderlands of western Virginia at the war's onset, was skeptical of prominent war narratives like the Good Death, which sought to make the conflict coherent by reconciling the war's carnage with martial codes of conduct and domestic rituals of mourning. For Davis, this reconciliation was simply untenable, for she had witnessed firsthand the horrifying nature of emergent guerrilla warfare that would soon engulf much of the nation, warfare that according to Daniel Sutherland operated "in more subtle, less visible ways, [and] undermined the very standards and expectations of wars, affecting not only the armies, but also untold numbers of noncombatants."²¹

The convoluted nature of guerrilla conflict, in turn, reflected the Civil War's broader ambiguity in the borderlands. As Davis explains in her autobiography Bits of Gossip, "Sectional pride or feeling never was so distinct or strong there as in the New England or lower Southern States. We occupied the place of Hawthorne's unfortunate man who saw both sides."²² Davis's ability to see "both sides" communicates not only her perception of the war as an equivocal struggle between comparable parties but also her sensitivity to martial appropriations of the Good Death for propagandistic purposes. In this essay, I suggest this combination of factors informs Davis's 1862 short story "John Lamar." Specifically, I argue that Davis employs a multivalent Good Death/Bad Death rhetoric to subvert popular necropolitical representations of the Civil War dead while reinforcing the racial dynamics of (post)bellum memorializations of the war.

In making this argument, I complicate the critical consensus surrounding Civil War literature, which continues to devalue Davis's contributions.²³ This oversight skews critical accounts of war literature, to the point that Cynthia Wachtell has recently offered a long overdue revisionist narrative of the antiwar literary tradition, locating its origins in the Civil War rather than WWI, that nevertheless replicates the narrow demographics of earlier studies by focusing exclusively on literature written by white, middle-class men. Wachtell justifies the limited purview of her critical intervention by noting that "women very rarely stepped forward to criticize war."²⁴ As I demonstrate in this essay, Rebecca Harding Davis was one such woman. As someone who published antiwar literature years (and sometimes decades) before Melville, Whitman, De Forest, Twain, Bierce, and Crane, she is a foundational figure in the U.S. antiwar literary tradition.

Finally, by placing Davis's antiwar aesthetic in dialogue with the Good Death, I build upon the work of previous scholars who recognize the importance of the borderlands in Davis's war fiction. Biographer Sharon M. Harris explains that throughout the war Davis "maintained a border-state sense of rights and wrongs on both sides. What she hated was war itself, and yet it seemed almost impossible to openly express this idea when the war was being fought on such important principles."²⁵ The "almost impossible" catalyzed Davis's antiwar aesthetic, forcing her to develop new literary structures to convey the horror of guerilla conflict. As Mark Canada has shown, it was precisely "because she lived in a border region" that Davis was "critical of stereotypes, as well as simplified and romanticized images of war," so she "doggedly strove to capture its realities and complexities in her fiction."²⁶ According to Alicia Mischa Renfroe, these complexities are why "Davis's work merits further consideration for complicating Civil War scholarship that relies on a North/South binary to situate writers and texts."²⁷ This is especially true of the Good Death. Arguably the most conspicuous, romantic, national narrative of combat during the Civil War, a Good Death provided Davis with a rhetoric to transcend regional divides and communicate her universal hatred of war.

_______

In the story, Confederate Captain John Lamar and his enslaved servant Ben are captured and imprisoned while transporting dispatches to General Lee. Held in a makeshift jail on what was once his grandfather's farm, Lamar writes a letter to his younger sister Floy in Georgia, discusses the war with his captor and cousin-in-law Union Captain Charley Dorr, and plans his escape. Meanwhile, Ben contemplates the promise of the North and listens to Yankee soldier and abolitionist Dave Hall rail against the southern "Legrees."²⁸ Eventually Ben recognizes the sinfulness of both the North and the South; and following a spiritual awakening, he kills Lamar in an effort to avenge his enslaved brethren. Afterward, Ben flees to the nearby mountains and fantasizes about claiming Floy as a lover.

Davis employs three pairs of characters to structure "John Lamar." The first pair, Captain Dorr and his wife Ruth, represents a familiar, idealized version of domesticity, which according to Gary Laderman had "popular appeal as a feminized symbol, frequently associated with women and set against the masculine world of war."²⁹ Like her biblical namesake, Ruth displays normatively feminine qualities of loyalty, duty, meekness, and selflessness. Dorr, an educated plantation owner turned Union officer, embodies the citizen-soldier ideal of the civilian farmer who takes up arms to defend his country. Together, Ruth and Dorr demonstrate both the restorative power of female sentiment and a harmonious balance between masculine and feminine attributes. Describing the couple, Davis writes:

Her clear thought, narrow as it was, was making his own higher, more just; wondering if the tears on her face last night, when she got up from her knees after prayer, might not help as much in the great cause of truth as the life he was ready to give. He was so used to his little wife now, that he could look to no hour of his past life, nor of his future coming ages of event and work, where she was not present,—very flesh of his flesh, heart of his heart.³⁰

Davis's characterization follows conventional conceptions of gender complementarity. As a model of sympathy, Ruth enables Dorr to maintain compassion amidst the horrors of war. Though deferential, her female sensibilities soften the rigidity of Dorr's martial disposition, allowing him to recognize that prayers and tears might be more useful than bullets in combatting southern rebellion. Her thoughts and feelings make him "more just." The couple's affective correspondence manifests itself in their shared physical features. Ruth becomes an extension of her husband—the "flesh of his flesh, heart of his heart."

Davis challenges the ideological effort to reconcile the Civil War with domesticity by presenting the conflict as hostile to Dorr and Ruth, insisting that "a gulf lay between them and the rest of the world."³¹ This gulf, which is more figurative than literal, marks the stark discontinuity between the values associated with domesticity and the Civil War, whose cataclysmic violence perverted gender codes and severed bonds of affection. Indeed, one of the horrors of the warfare in western Virginia was its erasure of any boundaries between a male world of aggression and a redemptive, feminized private space. As Davis reveals, there was no actual gulf between the two worlds, for warfare in western Virginia meant total warfare:

The guard-house was, in fact, nothing but a shed in the middle of a stubble field. It had been built for a cider-press last summer; but since Captain Dorr had gone into the army, his regiment had camped over half his plantation, and the shed was boarded up, with heavy wickets at either end, to hold whatever prisoners might fall into their hands from Floyd's forces.³²

Far from preserving the home front, war has literally subsumed the domestic space. Dorr's regiment, which "had camped over half his plantation," transforms the land. What was once a "cider-press" is now a "guard-house." What was once an apple farm (a place of food production) is now a Union camp (a place of martial destruction).

As Davis describes this martial occupation, she suggests the Dorrs' plantation, their home, and the land that feeds them is itself suffering a Bad Death, rather than a good one. Davis writes:

The November day was dead, sunless; since morning the sky had had only enough life in it to sweat out a few muddy drops, that froze as they fell: the cold numbed his [Lamar's] mouth as he breathed it. The stubbly slope was where he and his grandfather had headed the deer: it was covered with hundreds of dirty yellow tents now. Around there were hills like uncouth monsters swathed in ice, holding up the soggy sky; shivering pine-forests; unmeaning, dreary flats; and the Cheat, coiled about the frozen sinews of the hills, limp and cold, like a cord tying a dead man's jaws. Whatever outlook of joy or worship this region had borne on its face in time gone, it turned to him to-day nothing but stagnation, a great death.³³

Davis's anthropomorphic description enacts a deathbed vigil. "Covered with hundreds of dirty yellow dents," the landscape appears ill, contagious, infected by the deadly disease of war. Beneath a "November day [that] was dead," the farm becomes a wartime casualty, with the Cheat River wrapped around the nearby hills "like a cord tying a dead man's jaws." Trapped in his jail, this sickly visage shocks Lamar, for what was previously a space of fecundity and familial affection has now become a barren landscape populated by "uncouth monsters." Prior to the war, a Good Death provided individuals like Lamar an emotional, psychological, and spiritual framework for processing this sort of transformation. It sought to lessen the trauma of death by emphasizing its ephemeral nature. Yet here Davis denies readers the teleological certitude of a Good Death—not merely for men, but of their community. Unlike a person's last words, which provide mourners closure by signaling the transition from this world to the next, the language of the land remains inconclusive and "unmeaning." There are no signs of rebirth or afterlife. The farm—which Davis describes as "frozen," "sunless," and "swathed in ice"—instead suggests the permanent stasis, or "stagnation, [of] a great death."

Davis introduces another pair of characters to represent this world of war. A series of skirmishes by guerrilla forces have left the farm littered with rotting corpses, including Lamar's grandfather ("the old Colonel") and a young girl named Jessy Birt.³⁴ The spectacular nature of their deaths and subsequent desecration substantiates Ian Finseth's claim that unburied Civil War dead "represented an extravagant corporeality that made it more difficult to dispose of their complexities symbolically; their corpses embodied an unresolved, liminal, or transitory condition that was intrinsically volatile, both emotionally and politically."³⁵ Indeed, the Colonel's murder denies symbolic coherence. Executed by southern "Bush-whackers" and buried with "his old hands above the ground," his partial internment halts his transition from this world to the next.³⁶ Like the surrounding frozen landscape, he remains trapped in an indeterminate state of suspension, uncannily resisting, even in death, his own burial and any attempt at closure. Jessy's death is even more obscene. Unlike the Colonel, Jessy has never been a combatant. She is a child, who prior to the war would visit Ruth on the plantation to receive milk and writing lessons, both of which signal her youthful innocence. Yet war violates her all the same, something Davis stresses when "one of the men went into the hedge, and brought out a child's golden ringlet as a trophy."³⁷ As Vanessa Steinroetter notes, the scene provides "a direct inversion of mourning customs involving the preservation of a lock of hair as a cherished memento and reminder of a departed or absent loved one."³⁸ It also alludes to Eva's Good Death in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. But unlike Eva, Jessy does not willingly part with her ringlet of hair; she does not choose to share her body. Rather, the northern "Snake-hunter" forcefully takes it, committing one of the first symbolic sexual assaults in Civil War literature.³⁹ Together, the Colonel and Jessy signify a world in which antebellum values have been systematically violated and no longer have purchase. Unlike Dorr and Ruth, the Colonel and Jessy do not enrich one another's character. In fact, Davis provides no evidence of familiarity between the two whatsoever. Instead, their pairing is random. It is a matter of happenstance. Their affective correspondence consists solely of pain, and their ultimate union is one of death, a death that paradoxically consummates the birth of a monstrous world in which civil distinctions are obliterated and everyone—the elderly and children, women and men, soldiers and noncombatants—is at war.

Davis embodies the ultimate dissolution of antebellum civil distinctions in the story's final pair of characters: Ben and Lamar. Outwardly, the men could not be more dissimilar. Lamar is a wealthy, white southern plantation owner. Ben is a poor, black victim of the slave regime. Yet Davis immediately downplays these differences. "John Lamar" opens with Lamar's captivity, and his escape rests solely on Ben successfully sawing through the wicket. By juxtaposing Ben's empowerment with Lamar's imprisonment, Davis scrambles social and racial hierarchies. The hole that Ben cuts in the wall of the jail affords Lamar a literal way to return home, yet his freedom entails Ben's re-enslavement and social death. Conversely, this same hole allows Ben to enter the wicket unobserved and strike his symbolic "blow for freedom," but this requires Lamar's physical death.⁴⁰ Both men's escape thus directly prohibits the other's emancipation, an irony Davis highlights when Lamar promises Ben, "We will be free to-night, old boy."⁴¹

The men's mirrored narratives—at once similar and antithetical—create the story's central tension. Both men, for example, yearn for lost affection. Lamar volunteers to deliver "despatches (sic) to General Lee, that he might see Charley, and the old place, and—Ruth again."⁴² Meanwhile, Ben's father and lover fled Georgia, and he longs to reunite with them in "the North! Just beyond the ridge."⁴³ Both men fail to restore their lost affection. After Lamar refuses to take a Union loyalty oath, he watches Dorr and Ruth enter their house "with a kindly look, perhaps for the prisoner out in the cold. A kind look: that was all. The door shut on them. Forever: so, good night, Ruth!"⁴⁴ Similarly, when Ben overhears Dorr and Lamar discussing the war, he realizes that "there was no help for him,—none. Always a slave […] The pale purple mist where the North lay was never to be passed."⁴⁵ Both men's inability to access this lost affection perverts their desires. Lamar fantasizes about his prepubescent twelve-year-old sister Floy, a "little girl who had no mother, nor father, nor lover, but Lamar."⁴⁶ Ben develops a parasitic fondness for his enslaver, whose trousers he smooths "with a boorish, affectionate touch."⁴⁷ Both men seek spiritual guidance following their affective estrangement. Lamar "took the trouble of his manhood back to the same God he used to pray to long ago."⁴⁸ Ben attends a religious sermon, where he asks, "What shall I do?"⁴⁹ Finally, both men perceive their actions to be just. Lamar acknowledges that, had they met on the field of battle, he would have killed Dorr "for Liberty! I would have killed him, so help me God!"⁵⁰ Ben kills Lamar in his sleep "for Freedom, Mars' Lord […] Gor-a'mighty, it's for Freedom!"⁵¹ Davis employs this parallel narrative structure to represent the war's ambiguity in the borderlands of western Virginia. Her repeated references to God and family humanize Ben and Lamar, whose comparable experiences transcend racial differences. However, instead of clarifying the war's purpose, Ben and Lamar's shared humanity complicates matters. For if Davis's portrayal elevates Ben from a state of perceived inferiority, the inverse is also true: Her portrait downplays Lamar's pariah status as an enslaver of people. As such, the men's narrative correspondence defies easy resolution, for it lends credence to both sides of the conflict.

Davis further communicates this ambiguity in her representation of Lamar's death. Initially, Davis depicts a Good Death, suggesting Lamar's demise, though tragic, may be necessary and even justified. After receiving his fatal wound, Lamar is wrapped in blankets and surrounded by attendants. When he mistakenly asks his absent sister Floy for a kiss, Dorr "looked at his wife: she stooped, and kissed his lips. Charley smoothed back the hair from the damp face with as tender a touch as a woman's."⁵² Like so many Civil War nurses, here Ruth and Dorr become a surrogate family member, providing emotional and physical succor to the mortally wounded Lamar. Their sentimental gestures reinforce the couple's affective harmony and destabilize geographic, ideological frames of reference, so that the deathbed scene, brimming with domestic overtones, appears "not like a death in battle: it put them in mind of home somehow."⁵³ Having evoked the Good Death, Davis then denies its conventional resolution, however. She turns Lamar's Good Death into a Bad Death by making Ben, the story's clearest victim, its most sensational villain. After stabbing Lamar in his sleep, Ben—whom Davis now refers to as an "animal" and a "demon"—realizes that "it was his turn for pleasure now: he would have his fill! Their wine and their gardens and—He did not need to choose a wife from his own color now. He stopped, thinking of little Floy, with her curls and great listening eyes."⁵⁴ Davis's gustative diction—"fill," "wine," and "gardens"—transforms Ben into an insatiable black brute intent on sexually consuming Floy, whose "curls" recall Jessy Birt's golden ringlets. Intoxicated by the prospect, Ben issues "a wild, revengeful laugh from the hills" that literally reverses Lamar's Good Death, for his "departing soul rushed back, at the sound, to life, full consciousness."⁵⁵ Lamar's momentary resurrection, in turn, contaminates the afterlife, where "the negro's fierce laugh filled his ear: some woful thought at the sound wrung his soul, as it halted at the gate."⁵⁶ By never revealing whether the gate opens for Lamar, Davis undermines the spiritual certitude of a Good Death. Whether Lamar will reunite in Heaven with anyone, including Ruth and Dorr, remains unknowable.

Here, we see the crux of Davis's antiwar aesthetic. After presenting a series of Bad Deaths (the farm, the old Colonel, and Jessy) that unequivocally demonstrate the horror of borderland guerilla warfare, Davis forces readers to evaluate the individual merits and broader implications of an ambiguous death, which she presents as both good and bad. When the abolitionist Dave Hall sees in Lamar's lifeless eyes a simple question—"Was this well done?"—Davis is communicating Lamar's desire to assess the complex nature of his own death, but she is also asking readers to interrogate the irresolvable contradictions between the Confederate and emancipatory war efforts that Lamar and Ben respectively embody.⁵⁷ She is entreating readers to contemplate both sides of the conflict. Viewed alongside popular wartime evocations of the Good Death, which rarely questioned the war's efficacy, this invitation to contemplation signifies one of the earliest antiwar alternatives in U.S. Civil War literature.

However, we can also see its severe limitations. By telling a story about an enslaved black man who murders his white enslaver and then fantasizes about sexually dominating a young white girl, Davis indulges white fears of black insurrection and peddles the racist trope that white men and women promoted during and in the decades after the war to justify the lynching of thousands of black men. Moreover, Davis's depiction of Lamar's deathbed vigil, in which Ruth and Dorr symbolically become Floy to care for Lamar, creates a racially circumscribed spectacle of familial and national reunification, where black people are villains, and white northerners and southerners resolve their differences to mourn the Civil War dead. It is the sort of reconciliationist narrative that, according to David Blight, "took root in the process of dealing with the dead from so many battlefields, prisons, and hospitals and developed in many ways earlier than the history of Reconstruction has allowed us to believe."⁵⁸ These narratives suppressed the Civil War's emancipatory legacy to ensure that "some of the war's greatest results, the civil and political liberties of African Americans, were slowly becoming sacrificial offerings on the altar of reunion."⁵⁹ "John Lamar" participates in this early reconciliationist whitewashing of Civil War memory.

The degree to which such whitewashing reflects Davis's personal views is debatable. On the one hand, Davis had significant family ties to slavery. In 2001, Janice Milner Lasseter published a private family history that Davis wrote for her children. In it, Davis reveals that her maternal grandmother, Rachel Leet, "managed a large household in the old homestead 'Locust Hill,' made up of her children, of bound women and men, black slaves and white Redemptionists, with singular skill and wisdom. She had both a shrewd business head and a devout, tender heart."⁶⁰ Davis provides no additional information about these "black slaves," but the Fort Vance Historical Society has published a "Negro (Slave) Register" of Washington County, Pennsylvania, where Rachel lived. According to this register, on December 7, 1805, Rachel's husband (and Davis's grandfather), Hugh Wilson, claimed ownership of a "negro male child Othello born the last of August last past of Nancy a negro woman, slave for life."⁶¹ Three years later, on March 30, 1809, Hugh registered possession of Othello's siblings, three-month-old twins, "one male child and one female child, named Dorsey and Nancy born on the 19^th December of 1808 of the body of Nancy a negro woman a slave for life."⁶² The register raises more questions than answers—for example, who fathered Nancy's children, and did Davis, who was born one year prior to Hugh's death, ever encounter the people her family oppressed—but it does problematize Davis's quaint description of her family's participation in slavery. In Davis's mind, Rachel's "shrewd business head" and "devout, tender heart" enabled her to "manage" rather than enslave black children, two of whom were born the same year as Davis's mother.

Meanwhile Davis's father, Richard Harding, immigrated to the United States "literally to seek his fortune."⁶³ After reviewing his prospects, Richard became "a merchant in the cotton-manufacturing region of Florence," the seat of Lauderdale County in the west Tennessee Valley of northern Alabama.⁶⁴ According to Daniel Dupre, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the eastern portion of the valley, specifically Madison County, had "quickly shed its wilderness garb to become one of the wealthiest cotton regions of the Old Southwest."⁶⁵ Desiring more land for cotton cultivation, Madison County plantation owners formed the Cyprus Land Company, which founded Florence in 1818. Five years later, in 1823, Florence announced its second land sale, and Richard, who wanted "to make himself a more appealing suitor" for Davis's mother, joined a stampede of settlers hoping to get rich on the cotton frontier.⁶⁶ As Kenneth Johnson explains, people "were convinced that its [Florence's] location at the headwaters of the navigable portion of the Tennessee River would make it a great commercial center."⁶⁷ However, for that to occur, steamboats needed to traverse a dangerous section of the river near Florence known as Big Muscle Shoals, which Donald Davison describes as "the most unhealthy single stretch on all the great inland rivers."⁶⁸ Accordingly, in 1828 the federal government gave Alabama four hundred thousand acres of land to build the Muscle Shoals Canal. In 1831, the year of Davis's birth, construction on the canal began; five years later, in 1836, the canal officially opened to little fanfare. Historian Carolyn Barske writes, "The canal, with its 17 locks, did not even come close to solving the problem."⁶⁹ The following year, the Panic of 1837 triggered a prolonged economic depression. Credit dried up, cotton prices plunged, state officials abandoned the canal project, and the Hardings left Florence, not because they were morally discomfited by their participation in the cotton industry, which fueled a sixfold increase in Alabama's enslaved population from 1820 to 1840, but because "they hoped they would find better opportunities" in Wheeling, Virginia.⁷⁰

On the other hand, Davis opposed slavery.⁷¹ As a young woman, she attended Washington Female Seminary, a school co-founded by the prominent abolitionist Dr. F. Julius LeMoyne. LeMoyne was the first president of the Washington Anti-Slavery Society and a three-time Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate for the Liberty Party. His house, "which Rebecca often visited, [was] a central station on the underground railroad."⁷² After graduating from Seminary, Davis worked for the Wheeling Intelligencer, a daily newspaper which aligned "politically with liberal politics and soon thereafter with the Republican Party."⁷³ In 1863, she married a Philadelphia editor named Lemuel Clarke Davis, whose "strong antislavery views" further exposed Davis to "abolitionists, Quakers, and leaders of the underground railroad."⁷⁴ She wrote abolitionist literature.⁷⁵ She befriended abolitionists.⁷⁶ And she admired abolitionist leaders like Lucretia Mott, whom she considered to be "one of the most remarkable women that this country has ever produced."⁷⁷

These divergent influences shaped Davis's complex views of race, as evidenced in her writing. Sometimes, Davis intentionally employs racist rhetoric for ulterior purposes. For example, in her short story "Blind Tom," published in the Atlantic Monthly the same year as "John Lamar," Davis fictionalizes her attendance at a musical performance by a disabled, enslaved piano prodigy named Thomas Greene Wiggins, whom Davis describes as a "creature" and a "monster" with an "ape-jaw," "blubber-lips," and a "dog-like affection" for his enslavers.⁷⁸ For most of the story, Davis's incendiary description of Tom creates a racist spectacle for her contemporary white readers' voyeuristic pleasure. However, in the story's final paragraph, Davis reverses the spectacle's gaze to interrogate these white readers, writing: "You cannot help Tom, either; all the war is between you. He was in Richmond in May. But (do you hate the moral to a story?) in your own kitchen, in your own back-alley, there are spirits as beautiful, caged in forms as bestial, that you could set free, if you pleased."⁷⁹ Thus, what initially appears gratuitous is purposeful. Davis's inflammatory rhetoric anticipates Stephen Crane's 1898 novella The Monster, in which a physically maimed black man reflects the moral monstrosity of the town's white citizens.

But sometimes Davis espouses racist ideas that compromise her perspective. In her 1898 essay "Two Methods with the Negro," for instance, Davis decries the inhumanity of the slave regime, writing, "I came from a slave State, and the evils that I saw in slavery made me an Abolitionist before these excitable young men probably were born."⁸⁰ But six years later, in Bits of Gossip, Davis downplays the horrors of slavery, claiming:

Abolitionism never was a burning question in our part of Virginia. Nothing lay between any slave there and freedom but the Ohio River, which could be crossed in a skiff in half an hour. The green hills of Ohio on the other side, too, were peopled by Quakers, all agents for the Underground Railway to Canada. Hence the only slaves we had were those who were too comfortable and satisfied with us to run away.⁸¹

As Jean Pfaelzer has noted, this version of events contradicts Davis's previous account by parroting the nineteenth century racist myth of the happy, loyal slave who prefers involuntary servitude to the vicissitudes of freedom and waged-based labor.⁸²

Similarly, in her 1897 essay "Two Points of View," Davis engages what at the time was referred to as the Negro Problem, expressing her sympathetic support for African Americans while distinguishing between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington's strategies for uplifting black people, whom Davis acknowledges must contend with a "blind and suicidal" white prejudice.⁸³ After framing the debate, Davis offers her solution to the problem, admitting that she is encouraged by

a certain tendency to cohesion, an esprit de corps [that] has manifested itself among this people. It was strangely lacking at first. The mulatto graduate of Fisk or Oberlin was apt to cling to the race which had disowned him and to curse the black drops in his veins—damned spots that would not out. He was slow to perceive (what policy, if no higher instinct, might have shown him) that success and distinction were possible to him as a leader of the hosts of Ham, while he would be but a servant in the tents of his brethren of Shem.⁸⁴

Here, Davis expresses a prominent segregationist argument against black upward mobility by citing the curse theory, a racist idea claiming black people were the descendants of Ham, who was cursed by his father Noah as "a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren."⁸⁵ Initially popularized by southern enslavers and their apologists to justify the antebellum racial caste system, segregationists propagated the curse theory in postbellum America to promote Jim Crow legislation, arguing (as Davis implies here) that a government "policy" was necessary to separate white citizens from black people, whose lack of a "higher instinct" was providential and thus permanent. Having staked out an extreme segregationist position on race, Davis then voices her assimilationist alternative, reminding black men like Du Bois that "it is to the white man he owes his freedom, his right to vote, the chance of education—every chance that he has of a higher, climbing life. The prejudice of the white is strong, but it is weakening every day. In 1847 it was an offense punishable by law in the South to teach a Negro to read. In 1897 every district has its school or college for black pupils."⁸⁶ Davis's position—at once progressive and paternalistic—exemplifies Ibram X. Kendi's argument that "segregationist thinking is perhaps easier to identify—and easier to condemn—as obviously racist. And yet so many prominent Americans, many of whom we celebrate for their progressive ideas and activism, many of whom had very good intentions, subscribed to assimilationist thinking that also served up racist beliefs about Black inferiority."⁸⁷ Indeed, Davis's support for black education (and, by extension, black upward mobility) refutes segregationist views concerning the permanence of black inferiority, but her claim that black people owe white men their freedom reinscribes black inferiority by promulgating a popular postbellum Civil War narrative portraying enslaved people on southern plantations as docilely awaiting the arrival of northern white saviors. This racist narrative—a variation of the happy, loyal slave myth—suppresses the actual history of black liberation, ignoring the countless acts of sabotage by enslaved people, the decades of black abolitionist agitation, the hundreds of revolts, the thousands of black men, women, and children who fled enslavement, and the 180,000 black men who served in the Union army. As Herbert Aptheker notes, African Americans "consistently and courageously struggled against slavery in every possible way."⁸⁸ Davis's alternative history once again whitewashes Civil War memory and misrepresents the legacy of black resistance, not for any ulterior purpose, but because of Davis's personal views.

Ultimately, "John Lamar" bridges these categories, exhibiting Davis's intentional rhetorical racism and her implicit racial bias. As in "Blind Tom," Davis purposefully includes a dehumanizing racist caricature in "John Lamar." Ben's metamorphosis from innocent victim to black rapist disrupts Lamar's Good Death and calls into question the advisability of black emancipation by sensationalizing the amalgamative implications of racial equality. At the same time, Ben's devolution is part of a larger pattern in Davis's writing, which persistently portrays black people as morally, socially, historically, and biblically inferior. To date, few critics have engaged race in Davis's work, so the relationship between Davis's rhetorical and personal racism remains unclear.⁸⁹ What is evident is that Davis was well versed in racist ideas. They permeated the communities she navigated, and she frequently included them in her writing, often for cross purposes. In "Two Points of View," Davis culminates her assimilationist argument by citing an interracial couple's wedding announcement in a Philadelphia newspaper, noting: "Thirty years ago they would have been in danger of a mob. Whatever our individual opinion of amalgamation may be, it is certain that this generation regards it with less horror than did their fathers."⁹⁰ Davis would know. Thirty-five years prior, she had exploited these fears to produce one of the earliest pieces of antiwar literature during the Civil War.