Confederate Visions: Nationalism, Symbolism, and the Imagined South in the Civil War

4. “Thoughts That Breathe and Words That Burn”: The Confederate Nation in Wartime Literature

4 “ThoughtsThatBreatheandWordsThatBurn” The Confederate Nation in Wartime Literature Southern Independence has struck the lyre as well as unsheathed the sword. That it has inspired many a song no less truly poetical than intensely patriotic, our newspapers amply testify. But the newspaper can only give an ephemeral life to “thoughts that breathe and words that burn.” The book embalms if it does not immortalize. William G. Shepperson, War Songs of the South (1862) The role of white Southern writers in imagining a Confederate America before the Civil War began is clear. We might anticipate finding a continuation of that imagining in the war years, and we would not be disappointed . Confederate writers were living the creation of an imagined Confederate America, and they recognized, perhaps without consciously realizing so, that the written word plays a powerful role in creating, defining , and sustaining the nation. It is not, to be sure, a sufficient condition on its own, but it comes very close to being a necessary one. In October 1862, M. Louise Rogers, a correspondent of the Southern Illustrated News, announced to her readers that “history affords no account of the national happiness, peace and prosperity of any country which did not have a pure, elevated and high-toned home literature; and no philosopher ever wrote a line containing more truth than he who said, ‘Show me a nation’s ballads, and I will make its laws.’”1 Six months later, in April 1863, the editor of the Southern Field and Fireside noted with some vehemence that the development of a Southern literature of note was “no confederate visions 94 trivial subject. Literature is the only power which can give immortality to a people.”2 Eight months later still, in January 1864, Frank H. Alfriend, the new editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, writing to introduce himself to his readers, went into considerably more detail on the subject. In his characteristically purple prose, Alfriend drew a connection between independence and mature nationhood on the one hand, and a distinctive national literature on the other: “Where is the nation,” he asked, “which in any age, in any department or arena of action, has ever attained a position of eminence or even respectability among its compeers, that is not under the heaviest obligation of gratitude to its Historians, its Poets, and its Novelists?” Using this rubric, he compared the “intellectual vigor and sagacious diplomacy of the more cultivated Gaul and Briton” with the “brute strength” and crudity of Russia. International reputation, and even world power, in Alfriend’s eyes, seemed to rest upon intellectual achievement as much as anything else. So, for Alfriend, it was obvious that, save the Confederacy’s “physical ability” to successfully prosecute its war for independence, “the all important interests of Southern Literature . . . overshadows all others in importance, requires immediately the active intervention of all of its friends, if we would prevent its utter prostration .”3 For Alfriend, the construction of a literary Confederate Americanism was the most important task facing the nation save the military defense of its independence. Even while these commentators were discussing the relationship of nation and literature at the meta level, a number of white Southern writers —now writing as Confederates—were engaged in producing literature that dealt with the themes of the ongoing conflict. This literature, written during the war and commenting on the war, represents an integrally creative part of Confederate nationalism. The same themes evident in other arenas of such production are replicated and reinforced in the writings of the Confederate literati during the Civil War. Taking this variant of wartime Confederate literature as our text, we can identify a clear set of juxtapositions of the white Southern self and its others. Five pairs in particular stand out: liberty and abolitionism, freemen and hirelings, purebloodedness and ethnicity, civilization and barbarity, and the white voice and black silence.4 On the one hand, the Confederate literary self—which fits with the trope of the Worthy Southron—is imagined as a champion of liberty, in this case meaning a champion of the rights of individual “thoughts that breathe and words that burn” 95 and community self-determination, the right to live one’s life as one wishes, disregarding controls imposed external to the community, and presumably, although this is generally left unstated, whiteness, maleness, and the right to own, use, and dispense property in slaves. The Worthy Southron is not an ethnic...