Walt Whitman's Reconstruction: Poetry and Publishing between Memory and History

3. Whitman and the Elusive Site of Memory

49 3. Whitman and the Elusive Site of Memory Will the America of the future—will this vast rich Union ever realize what itself cost, back there after all?—those hecatombs of battle-deaths—Those times of which, O far-off reader, this whole book is indeed finally but a reminiscent memorial from thence by me to you?—Walt Whitman, “Preface Note to 2d Annex,” 1891 The rise of American periodicals and the continued expansion of the publishing business that followed the Civil War coincided with a rush to commemorate and then, as years passed, to document definitively the events that took place. National monuments were built at a rapidly increasing pace, first largely in the North, and then even more commonly in the South and the Midwest.1 At the same time, the push foran accurate record of thewar, which began during the conflict itself with the use of correspondents, illustrators, and, of course, through the new medium of photography and the work of photographers like Alexander Gardner and Mathew Brady, continued to pick up steam, eventually becoming big business in the 1880s.2 The New York Tribune’s editor Whitelaw Reid had been part of this wave early in his career, first rising to prominence as a war reporter before becoming Horace Greeley’s assistant at the Tribune. By the end of the war, book publishers were already announcing the appearance of their histories, including some that had been planned well in advance of the war’s conclusion. Such foresight initially reflected early Northern optimism, as this 1866 announcement for Benson Lossing’s Pictorial History of the Civil War in the United States of America makes clear: The undersigned takes pleasure in announcing that he has made arrangements for publishing Mr. Lossing’s great work. When this arrangement was first made, the end of armed rebellion seemed to be near, and it was believed that the space of a single volume of a thousand imperial octavo pages would be ample wherein to give a complete record of the great event. Since chaPtEr thrEE 50 then, all of the most important battles have been fought, and some of the most momentous events in the civil history of the Rebellion have occurred.3 Lossing had become a popular historian following the publication in the 1850s of his pictorial account of the American Revolution, so his turning to the subject of the Civil War was one more sign that Americans were ready to include the war in the historical record of the nation . The driving need for contemporary journalistic accounts of the conflict would be quickly supplanted by the push for documentaries and memorials. These parallel movements of commemoration and historiography were to some degree motivated by an acute anxiety over the fading memory of events. A writer of a Connecticut regimental history noted in 1873, “So many years have elapsed since the war closed, that the remembrance of many facts and incidents that should have been preserved , has faded away,”4 and in 1876, a writer for Harper’s remarked, “The name of ‘Mason and Dixon’s Line’ is one that to the rising generation is fast losing its significance and power, though for the first half of the century it was in every one’s mouth . . . as the watch-word and battle-cry of slavery on the one hand and freedom on the other.”5 Constance Fenimore Woolson wrote in her 1876 story of the postwar South, “Rodman the Keeper,” “The closely ranged graves . . . seem already a part of the past, that near past which in our hurrying American life is even now so far away.”6 As the nation grappled with the postwar upheaval of Reconstruction and the competing desires to continue hostilities and to “bury the hatchet,”7 there was a concomitant concern that the true power of the war in the collective memory of the United States might be lost, even in the midst of the unprecedented drive to document it.8 The bloodless elecTroTyPe PlaTes of hisTory As a writer, journalist, and, most significantly, as one who had seen so much of the misery of the war while serving as a nurse in the Union hospitals in Washington, D.C., Whitman was never far removed from concerns regarding the preservation of the history of events. As he wrote in 1874, “Already, the events of 1863 and ’4, and the Whitman and the Elusive...