In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

81 3 Young Winslow Radcliff After a few days of holiday we commenced anew the peaceful labors of the life of a citizen, and cares of business and family have gradually dimmed the memory of the scenes we have endeavored to record, until they seem like impossible dreams, save, perhaps, to those whose broken frames or impaired health connect the present with the past. —History of the Thirty-Fifth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers, 1862–1865 When I consider the small but misery-laden body of information available about my Yankee ancestor who fought in the Civil War, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s powerful story “Young Goodman Brown” comes to mind. Young Goodman Brown came forth, at sunset, into the street of Salem village, but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. Her name is Faith. Just three months wed, the young man looks back with regret, resolving never to leave her again after just this one night away. Plunging into the dark forest, he meets first a man of fifty, carrying a staff which bore the likeness of a great black snake, who urges him on, claiming close acquaintance with Brown’s family : I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem. And it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own heart, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip’s war. This is Satan, and he guides the newlywed into the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward, with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil. This inverted pilgrim’s progress is marked by a cacophony of voices that direct Goodman Brown to a clearing where all of the most admired members of the Salem community gather to celebrate the baptism into evil of the young man and his Faith. Now are ye undeceived! proclaims the dark presiding figure. Evil is the nature of mankind . Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome, again, my children, to the communion of your race! Hawthorne suggests that all this may only have been a wild dream of a witch-meeting. And yet, the result is the same either way. The following morning, Young Goodman Brown returns to his village, irretrievably embittered and deranged. 82 Young Winslow Radcliff In his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, President Lincoln sought to place within God’s plan for the United States both the curse of “American Slavery” and the will to remove that curse, even if the war were to continue “until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” He prayed that the reunited states could achieve a world in which the heavy burden of the aftermath of civil war was acknowledged and shared out: “With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” Like Hawthorne’s young good man, thousands upon thousands of callow volunteers went out from their quiet villages to serve on both sides of the conflict. “Never such innocence, / Never before or since, / As changed itself to past / Without a word,” as Philip Larkin says of World War I. For many, the time and space between naiveté and knowledge were hardly greater than Goodman Brown’s single night in the forest. Nor was their return to families and communities then on the uncomprehending other side of a gulf of nightmare any less difficult. Sadly, the binding and care, the lasting peace of Lincoln’s prayer, were to elude many returning veterans, among them my great-great-grandfather Winslow Radcliff, for whom a dark vision like Hawthorne’s was to win the day. Born in New Hampshire in 1823, Winslow had made his way south to Massachusetts, where he wooed and won Sophia Ann Draper. When they married on July 3, 1848, Sophia was twenty and Winslow was twenty-five and working at the...

Share