Redemptive Suffering

Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman famously pronounced war to be “hell,” “cruelty,” and “violence,” and an abundance of scholarly and popular writing since has confirmed this seemingly incontrovertible truth. Frances M. Clarke’s War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North challenges this truism in its striking new interpretation of the staggering loss of life and limb during the Civil War. Rejecting the paradigm of the war as historical discontinuity, Clarke demonstrates the persistence of idealized narratives of suffering and asks why sentimental stories of patriotic sacrifice endured in the face of unimaginable numbers of casualties. Middle-class Northerners’ narratives of redemptive suffering remained remarkably consistent throughout the war, a trend that runs counter to intellectual histories that have charted the ways in which “the Civil War generation’s confrontation with suffering caused a profound ‘crisis of belief’ that forever altered American culture” (p. 4).

War Stories also departs from recent work, most notably Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering (2008), that foregrounds the horrific destruction of human bodies, animals, and the Southern landscape.¹ In Clarke’s account, suffering did not weaken soldiers’ and families’ faith in the war effort or the republic, but rather “transformed what could easily have become a destabilizing reality into an affirmation of Unionism, religious faith, civic cohesion, self-controlled manhood, and American exceptionalism” (p. 7). This interpretation of a politically unifying image of wounded Northern veterans runs counter to scholarship that underscores their controversial and disturbing presence in a postwar society that struggled to reintegrate them into civilian life as well as into new national narratives of reconciliation.² Clarke’s argument emerges from a serious consideration of the mainstream middle-class war stories that post-Vietnam historians have written off as superficial, cloying, and propagandistic—not the “real war” that Whitman promised would never get into the books. Clarke asks us to treat these Civil War stories as rich repositories of meaning, suspend our skepticism of happy warriors, and question the prevailing assumption that soldiers’ battlefield experiences inevitably yield disillusionment.

Nineteenth-century Americans understood suffering and sympathy on multiple registers, as Clarke illustrates with a wide-ranging introductory discussion of contexts including medicine, abolitionism and reform, philosophy, liberal Protestantism and evangelicalism, and Victorian literature, all of which spoke of the “therapeutic and moral value of pain” (p. 11) that white middle-class Northerners were well accustomed to contemplating before the Civil War. A paradox of suffering—that some pain had inspirational value while other forms needed to be eliminated—reveals a nineteenth-century conceptualization of suffering more complex than historians have generally assumed. But Clarke is not uncritical in her appreciation of the emotional valence of suffering, and she highlights the “didactic” and “propagandistic” qualities of the idealized narratives produced by white Republicans in the North. “There is always a politics to sympathy,” Clarke notes, and she underscores the racial and class politics of war stories that allowed their writers to celebrate Northern honor and benevolence “while simultaneously turning away from the disproportionate suffering of the oppressed” (p. 27).

Wartime suffering was intimate as well as public, as Clarke’s second chapter reveals in its focus on a single family’s emotional and narrative labors to construct meaning from their son’s death. The chapter’s centerpiece is the commemorative tribute of well-known physician Henry Bowditch to his son Nathaniel, a second lieutenant in the First Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment. As Henry Bowditch carefully sewed and pasted eight volumes of condolence letters, journal entries, and patriotic poems onto thousands of ornate pages over the course of a decade, he no less carefully constructed an image of his deceased son as a heroic martyr who embodied “middle-class Victorian respectability” (p. 30). Clarke’s examination of Bowditch’s archival labors reveals that Nathaniel went off to war fully conscious of the expectations of his parents and their fellow Boston elites that he would embody the ideals of the noble sufferer in combat...