Scars to Prove It: The Civil War Soldier and American Fiction

1. Various Veterans Had Told Him Tales: The Red Badge of Courage and an Inclusive Civil War Literature

9 For many readers, The Red Badge of Courage (1895) occupies a curious place in the history of Civil War literature. Although routinely celebrated as our greatest novel of the war, the book has surprisingly little to say about the conflict beyond the heat and crash of battle. No matter that Stephen Crane chose An Episode of the American Civil War as his subtitle. As scholars are fond of pointing out, the novel appears uninterested in secession, emancipation, and the other cultural and political phenomena that inspired the war. The book likewise ignores the military specifics available in countless other Civil War fictions. While almost certainly set at the battle of Chancellorsville, The Red Badge of Courage forgoes most place names, as well as the names of military leaders, famous engagements, and most units other than the fictional 304th New York, a regiment whose “preposterously high number” seems intended to slight those who would read for historical accuracy.1 Crane’s decision to empty his novel of historical details has not bothered those who interpret the work as an experiment in literary impressionism or naturalism, nor those who read it as a universal portrait of “every man who goes to war, no matter the cause.”2 But for readers interested in the evolution of Civil War literature, The Red Badge of Courage represents a challenge. Exactly why have so many Americans agreed with Ernest Hemingway’s famous remark that there was virtually “no real literature of our Civil War” until Crane published his “episode”?3 Moreover, why was Crane—himself not born until six years after the war—the first major writer to pen a Civil War novel? I believe the answers to these questions depend on the relationship of The Red Badge of Courage to the vast body Chapter One Various Veterans Had Told Him Tales The Red Badge of Courage and an Inclusive Civil War Literature 10 Scars to Prove It of veterans’ memoirs that preceded it into print. Critics have widely acknowledged the role that soldiers’ narratives played in inspiring and informing Crane’s novel.4 Wilbur F. Hinman’s fictionalized reminiscence, Corporal Si Klegg and His “Pard” (1887), has been suggested as one source from which Crane drew, as have a number of more traditional soldiers’ memoirs. Such works include Our Boys by Alonzo F. Hill (1864), Hardtack and Coffee by John D. Billings (1888), Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac by Frank Wilkeson (1887), and Recollections of a Private by Warren Lee Goss (1890).5 Few scholars, however, have appreciated the degree to which those memoirs, and the middle-aged veterans themselves, represented a formidable obstacle to any nonveteran wishing to write about the war during the 1880s and 1890s. By examining this cultural and literary context, we can better understand the striking achievement of Crane. Far from rejecting the world of old soldiers, the young author seized upon and exploited the very ideal that veterans had guarded jealously and hence made sacred: individual participation in America’s greatest conflict. As I argue, this strategy explains how The Red Badge of Courage, more than any other work of fiction, helped transform Civil War literature from an exclusive genre into an inclusive one. I. Today it is difficult for us to imagine the stature of the Civil War veteran during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Veterans of America’s later wars have at times enjoyed the thanks and adoration of their countrymen, but no soldiers in living memory experienced the kind of long-standing and heartfelt celebration that came to envelop veterans blue and gray. Even the recent efforts to honor veterans of World War II, although at times robust, cannot begin to compare with the veritable culture of commemoration that Americans built around the figure of the Civil War soldier. By 1890, the holidays of Decoration Day and Memorial Day had become grand affairs, during which Americans adorned the graves of soldiers, participated in parades, and turned out by the thousands to listen to patriotic orations. The celebration was pervasive. Writing in 1898, a contributor to the New York Times reported that there was “scarcely a hamlet in the United States” that did not display “a tiny flag or bit of bunting on Decoration Day.” She recounted having once come across a “wretched The Red Badge of Courage and an Inclusive Civil War Literature 11...