Joseph Cook's "Conversational Opinions of the Leaders of Secession"

Notwithstanding the Atlantic's principal function as a vehicle for disseminating "the American idea," its passionately pro-North, anti-slavery, and Republican position more explicitly circulated "the Union idea" during the Civil War. According to M. A. deWolfe Howe, at the outbreak of war in 1861 the Atlantic's primary function was to supply "enlightenment and guidance of the public mind through that national crisis."¹ While Howe's assessment employs the same rhetoric the Atlantic itself might have used, his emphasis on the periodical's expanding political vision is significant. James T. Fields, the Atlantic's war-time editor (1861–1871), began filling the pages of his magazine with less poetry and more politics, widening the Atlantic's topical and aesthetic range to include war prose from both established and obscure writers. Commercially speaking, the Atlantic was in competition with Harper's New Monthly Magazine, whose vast readership and prolific war coverage threatened to eclipse the Atlantic's grand purpose.² Fields sought to maintain the "seriousness" of the publication while protecting its assets by publishing everything from sentimental abolitionist tales to highbrow "Emersonian" prose to useful notices on choosing firearms.

In November 1862, the Atlantic printed an unusual piece by a young man named Joseph Cook. Cook had been a student at Yale in 1860 when he spent his holiday vacation in Washington D. C., hoping to interview Robert Toombs, R. M. T. Hunter, and Jefferson Davis—three key secessionist senators of Georgia, Virginia, and Mississippi, respectively. He went to their very doorsteps to ascertain "the real causes and origin of the Rebellion."³ What resulted from those 1860 interviews is "Conversational Opinions of the Leaders of Secession," printed without attribution and subtitled "A Monograph." Cook's "monograph" blends interview, narrative, and oratory in what ultimately reads as an exposé on high treason in pre-war Washington and a call for political cohesion among the Northern readership. Though his essay fits somewhat uncomfortably in the generic categories of the literary periodical (it is a veritable medley of styles) and was never reprinted in the Atlantic or elsewhere, it is ideologically consistent with the magazine's Union perspective and its growing political authority.

In fact, Cook's essay appears in an issue laden with war-related pieces, some more tangentially than others. The fourth piece in the issue, "The Development and Overthrow of the Russian Serf-System," by Professor A. D. White, celebrates the demise of an abusive system in a non-democratic country while presenting a thinly disguised commentary on the irony of an American democracy that supports the institution of slavery. Later in the issue, a short story appears entitled "Blind Tom" by "the author of 'Margret Howth'" (Rebecca Harding Davis). "Blind Tom" tells the story of a slave who is mentally challenged but becomes a piano virtuoso and stuns audiences across the South with his abilities and his "child-like" spirit. Echoing the theme of freeing those "caged" by slavery, Epes Sargent's poem "The Cabalistic Words" urges President Lincoln to speak "those saving words of power/[…] BE FREE!"⁴ Two pieces are dedicated specifically to President Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation issued on September 22, 1862. C. C. Hazewell's "The Hour and the Man" praises Lincoln's proclamation as the most significant American document since the Declaration of Independence, particularly if its principles stand the test of time. Immediately following "The Hour and the Man" is perhaps the most noteworthy among the war-related pieces in this issue, Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The President's Proclamation," the very last piece before the customary section of "Literary Notices." Even as he celebrates Lincoln's present triumph and looks forward to the mending of his country, Emerson also reiterates Cook's backward glance at the roots of Southern rebellion. He writes, "The war existed long before the cannonade of Sumter, and could not be postponed. […] war was in the minds and bones of the combatants, it was written on the iron leaf, and you might as easily dodge gravitation."⁵ Though both Emerson and Cook represent the...