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Introduction
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| 1 Introduction James Marten Implicit in the competing visions of America that animated the Civil War era were competing visions of childhood reflected through prisms of race, class, and region. Although northerners and southerners hurtling toward open warfare may not have consciously known that their actions would influence not only the political and economic future of the country, but also their children’s and grandchildren’s lives, they instinctively used domestic and childhood metaphors to describe their quarrel. The political conflict resulted in a “house divided,” northern commentators during the war frequently referred to the “fratricide” of the rebelling states, and soldiers were called “boys” and sang songs like “Just before the Battle, Mother.” Children and families provide the emotional centers of the two most famous novels written about the Civil War era. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe made the kindly title character’s cabin the physical and moral foci of a narrative that eventually sprawls across the Ohio River and down the Mississippi. By its end, although the sad little dwelling is no longer Tom’s home, it remains a powerful metaphor in the book’s description of slavery’s inevitable ruination of families. The book’s extraordinary popularity —300,000 copies were sold within a year of its publication—suggests that Americans at least instinctively shared Stowe’s fear that slavery and sectionalism threatened not only her fictional families but also real-life families. The novel’s assumptions about family and childhood transcend the image of the cabin. The presence and, of course, absence of families provide powerful reminders of Stowe’s deeply held belief that the peculiar institution of slavery and the sacred institution of the family were tragically intertwined. Many of the sentimental set pieces—Tom’s departure from Aunt Chloe, Mrs. Bird’s brave insistence that her husband help Eliza and Harry escape, Eva’s famous deathbed scene, to mention just a few—take place in the bosom of family. Everywhere children observe, inspire, offer unconditional love, and require absolute faithfulness. Two of the featured characters—Eliza and St. Clare—are both presented as loving parents, treasuring smart, innocent 2 | James Marten Harry and beautiful, kind Eva, respectively. Yet Eliza succeeds as a parent, braving terrible dangers to carry her son away from slavery, while St. Clare fails to save his own daughter, who succumbs to disease in much the same way that white and black families will, the novel implies, inevitably be weakened and corrupted by slavery. The peculiar love that knits families together also unites Stowe’s sprawling plot. Indeed, much of the pathos of Tom’s death comes from his utter isolation from home and family. If Uncle Tom’s Cabin provides one fictional bookend to the Civil War, focusing on the deepest well of contention between the North and South, Little Women provides the other. Rather than addressing the issues that started the war, Louisa May Alcott focuses on the ways in which the war could affect even those families living far from the battlefront. Lonely and strapped for cash, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, and Marmee March endure long days between letters from their army chaplain father and husband; each letter’s arrival draws them into the tight family circle where Mrs. March reads it aloud. Aside from the enforced absence of Reverend March and his eventual return home because of illness, the war is, in a sense, only background. Indeed, the second half of the book begins three years after Mr. March finally returns home a few months before the war ends. But the emphasis on the love and support that characterize a true family, and on the ways in which a family can sustain individuals during times of crisis, even war, has rung true to modern Americans enduring crises and wars and provides an important link between the two books.1 Much as these fictional Americans can help us understand the emotional burdens imposed by the sectional conflict, so, too, can the lives of real Civil War children and youth and their parents help us understand the ways in which the issues raised and at least partly resolved by the sectional conflict, Civil War, and Reconstruction had a practical impact on Americans, white and black, North and South. As statesmen debated states’ rights and government responsibility in terms of protective tariffs and the extension of slavery , a dimly parallel discourse began to take shape on the role of the state in the lives of children. As...