The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861–1865 (review)

The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861-1865. By Alice Fahs. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xi, 410. $39.95.)

For years, the literature of the Civil War era has received a second-class status. Scholars found little that was inspiring or noteworthy in the vast outpouring of cheap novels, magazine short stories, and sentimental poetry that held the attention of the American reading public in these years. Indeed, in 1973, literary historian Daniel Aaron claimed that the Civil War was an "unwritten war" because of the absence of any great literary accomplishments.

Alice Fahs has set out to redeem this seemingly mediocre body of writing from the bin of historical obscurity. Not that she intends to find any literary masterpieces amidst the reams of wartime publications. She does intend to show us, however, how much insight can be gained about Northern and Southern attitudes toward the war, how people confronted a wide array of issues raised by the conflict, and how this literary outpouring spoke to ordinary peoples' real concerns. She hopes, too, to suggest that a distinctive sense of nationalism emerged in this literature, one that gave more room for individualized expressions of patriotism. Fahs succeeds on all these counts.

From the outset, Fahs makes clear that a certain sectional imbalance must, of necessity, influence her analysis. As she explains in her initial chapter, the South continually faced hindrances to publishing that the North did not. Lacking printing supplies as well as money, the South was never able to compete fully with the North in creating an extensive literary marketplace. This in itself, she notes, was a reflection of some of the sectional differences that had initiated the conflict. Fahs is generally successful in surmounting the obstacles posed by such imbalance. She usually manages to draw telling contrasts between the literature of the two sections, thereby mining effectively those Southern sources that were available.

Fahs goes on to survey a wide array of literary genres and themes that were prevalent in the literature of the Civil War period. She examines the sentimental stories of soldier suffering, the sensationalist tales of wartime adventure, the many stories that dealt with black experiences, as well as works of humor, history, and juvenile interest. Her book is filled with rich insights about how this literature reflected Americans' changing concerns about race, gender, political conflict, and national allegiance. Some of her most valuable observations in this regard concern tales dealing with women and African Americans. In both the North and South, the issue of race was clearly a foremost preoccupation, seen in the many stories that featured African American characters. While the proslavery bent of the South's literature seems unsurprising, Fahs's discovery of the more positive features of the North's race-conscious literature is especially noteworthy. African Americans figured prominently as independent actors in Northern wartime dramas and by 1864 were celebrated for their heroism and citizenship. Although the premature death of black actors placed limits on Northern readers' acceptance of full African American participation in national life, the literature nonetheless evoked a popular democratic impulse that, albeit tentatively, acknowledged black personhood.

Throughout the book, Fahs also calls attention to the centrality of gender in Civil War literature. When mothers allowed their sons to go fight, or when the dying soldier turned his thoughts to the women at home, female emotions served to validate men's wartime contributions; at times, in fact, Union literature placed women's emotional sacrifices on a par with men's heroism. Moreover, in the sensational tales of adventure, women might become even more active heroines, defending the flag at the point of a gun or donning a male disguise in order to enlist. While this literature never erased gender distinctions, it did give women a new relationship with the nation that transcended their ties to the nuclear family. Again, Southern literature...