The Civil War Dead and American ModernityBattle Lines

These four contributions to the ongoing critical reconsiderations invited by the sesquicentennials of the Civil War and Reconstruction find different meanings in different genres and media. In The Civil War Dead and American Modernity, Ian Finseth takes an exceptionalist turn on Anthony Giddens’s sociological account of modernity. For Giddens, spatial-temporal dislocation and social disembedding characterize life in industrial capitalist societies. For Finseth, in the United States, these were the result of reckoning with the Civil War’s unprecedented carnage. As he puts it, “American modernity . . . reimagined, reanimated, and yet . . . abjected the dead in order to constitute itself as modernity” (6, italics in original). While this argument is circular, the frame enables some perceptive readings.Whereas Russ Castronovo’s analysis of US necropolitics in Necro Citizenship (2001) focuses on the category of citizenship, Finseth works at a higher level of abstraction, the national imaginary, as manifest in four “epistemic ‘predicaments’” of modernity that map onto four categories of media (21). Eyewitness observations recorded in diaries and letters searched for an authentic understanding of death but found this understanding inevitably mediated. The war’s multimedia visual archive both directed viewers’ attention to the dead and displaced that attention to nationalist aims. Professional histories from the nineteenth century—which Finseth rightly observes have been neglected by literary scholars—both reduced the dead to data and revered them as sacred relics. Realist fiction individualized the dead, making them amenable to narratives of heroic sacrifice or eternal afterlife but could also, as in Ambrose Bierce’s stories, “subtly . . . challeng[e] their culture’s normative, necropolitical ways of representing the dead” (195). In addition to fiction’s subtle challenges, Finseth notes some overt counternarratives in other genres. African American historians, for example, struggling to enlist the dead in a liberatory narrative, sometimes “personalize[d] history” in a way that flouted white professional norms (185).Whereas Finseth surveys a wide range of media, in Battle Lines Eliza Richards focuses closely on one to argue that war reportage changed the production of poetry. While critics have long labored against Edmund Wilson’s characterization of Civil War poetry as “versified journalism,” Richards shows that Wilson was almost right, although not in the way he intended. The conjunction of new communication and transportation technologies, especially in the North, with the war’s catastrophic events made the news into an unprecedented “cultural force,” prompting poets to make their work “immediately responsive” (1). Rather than merely rehearsing events, as Wilson assumed, poets wanted to imagine how readers responded to the news that often appeared in the same publications as their poems. Working with inherited tropes, forms, and rhetorics that made their work accessible, poets developed an “affective, impersonal, collective mode” of response that is at odds with our inherited modernist sense of the lyric voice (13). Each chapter is organized around the reportage of a single battle and a trope or literary form that the battle’s reportage seemed to invite. Three concern tropic associations: battles with snowstorms, death and dying with autumn, and guns with the power of speech. Two concern form: ballads and songs, odes and sonnets. Throughout, Richards emphasizes continuities more than differences between the canonical three (Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville) and other poets well known in their day but largely forgotten since, including Henry Howard Brownell, Elizabeth Akers Allen, Frances Harper, George Henry Boker, and Amanda Jones. (Harper has entered the canon, of course, but not as a Civil War poet. The Schomburg edition of her poetry does not include “The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth” (1863), which Richards discusses at length.)Perhaps the most complex case is the commemoration of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth and its famed assault on Fort Wagner. This commemoration took two poetic forms: songs (including Harper’s) for the African American soldiers and sonnets and odes on the white commander, Robert Gould Shaw. The former allowed for political commentary while the latter, which gained ascendency by the end of the century (the era of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s memorial on the Boston Common), tended toward iconic reduction and hierarchy. A few of the latter managed, however, to value the troops’ and Shaw’s heroism equally, including a remarkable poem by Brownell narrated from an enraged Confederate perspective.Wilson found literary value not in the war’s poetry, as Christopher Hager reminds us in I Remain Yours, but primarily in its personal writings. Wilson examined the memoirs and journals of elites such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Mary Boykin Chesnut. Hager is the first to find such value in the half-billion letters that ordinary Americans wrote “to hold their families together during a time of great trial” (3). While letters have been mined for data by historians, they offer more, as Hager demonstrates. Read “as acts of writing,” they offer nothing less than “an emotional history of the Civil War” (10). Hager focuses on those for whom letter writing was something new and often required “ad hoc literacy education” (12), as they learned to use a conventionalized form that they “knew to be bound by explicit and implicit rules they did not fully understand” (7). As class markers, these rules could provoke anxiety, especially since letters were often shared or read aloud. Some of the letters’ conventions were gendered. Historically, women had learned to write (if at all) in sentimental contexts and men (if at all) in business contexts. The war mixed these contexts, as women often became heads of farm households, while men in service used letters primarily to maintain connections with home and family. This required additional adaptation; a husband might learn sentimental writing from his wife’s example. Hager follows several epistolary conversations throughout the book, organizing the chapters in terms of a trajectory of literacy education: learning to write (sometimes after first using an amanuensis), learning the form’s conventions, inventing a voice, forming bonds, meeting challenges to those bonds (including unreliable delivery), and “achieving, finally, the kinds of intimacy that written letters sometimes can forge better than anything else” (13)—even if that intimacy was strained, as in one correspondence Hager traces between a mother and her son.These letters do not usually say much about the war’s politics, for “the less educated and well-off a soldier was, the less likely he was to write about” such matters (9). Lack of political content does not necessarily mean lack of political thought, however. Rather, as Hager observes, writers mostly wrote what they thought readers wanted to read. The primary purpose was forming and maintaining bonds, even if the bond was forever broken. A Texas widow, replying to the corporal who had informed her of her husband’s death, wanted to know “what he sed about dy ing & what he sed about me & his der bab” (174) and all the details of his death and burial, thus “tend[ing] to the narrative . . . as carefully as she would have to his body” (175).In The Literature of Reconstruction, Brook Thomas demonstrates that literary historians can provide as good an account as social historians of the daily struggles over economic resources and social relations that shaped the era, and that literary historians are better equipped to get at what C. Vann Woodward termed “the moral core of national history” (quoted on 2). Working from Carl Schmitt’s distinction between legality and legitimacy, Thomas argues that imaginative literature—much of it by writers with legal training such as Albion W. Tourgée, Sidney Lanier, Thomas Nelson Page, Thomas Dixon, and Charles W. Chesnutt—provided “different senses of legitimacy for a reunited nation” (3). Novels and poems (especially dialect poems such as Lanier’s) have this power because, as even the consummate realist William Dean Howells recognized, they can draw compelling political allegories from everyday experience. The romance-of-reunion plot was one such allegory, as Nina Silver has argued. Yet Thomas’s readings of John William De Forest’s The Bloody Chasm (1881) and Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Rodman the Keeper” (1877) demonstrate that this plot was more variable than the formula Silver presents. Because battles over legitimacy continue today—concerning not only race relations but also other Reconstruction issues such as national versus state jurisdiction, terrorism, and the power of corporations—this literature remains important.Thomas complicates the chronology of Reconstruction, extending it beyond the withdrawal of Federal troops in 1877. At the turn of the century, magazine editors still referred to Reconstruction in the present tense, while novelists such as Page and Dixon shaped their works to call for intervention. Thomas also expands Reconstruction’s spatial scope, looking westward from the North-South divide to reconsider Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. Topical chapters examine reconciliation, federalism, the Ku Klux Klan, the “paradox of paternalism” regarding African Americans’ rights, the development of railroads, and questions of inheritance as key problems that shaped literary plots. The chapter on railroads enlarges the usual scope of the discussion about Reconstruction. Having concluded the chapter on paternalism with Chesnutt’s suggestion that “freedmen . . . were held to a standard of self-reliance that did not apply to the white business community” (206), Thomas observes that “freedmen never got their forty acres and a mule, but railroads got huge stretches of governmental land—and more” partly on the rationale that expansion would enable the material reconstruction of the South and provide opportunities for freedmen’s labor (207). The following chapter, on railroads, centers on works by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, which Thomas argues are important because they resist the tendency of political criticism to make works conform to representative positions. (Similarly, in the chapter on paternalism, Thomas counters Walter Benn Michaels’s claim that Chesnutt embraced the logic of the market.) Contrary to populist readings of Ruiz de Burton, Thomas understands her as fundamentally Spencerian, a believer in a natural hierarchy of labor in the service of global capital. The latter point invites Thomas to put Reconstruction in transnational context via comparison with Tourgée before returning to the South for two chapters on the use of inheritance plots by white and African American writers. With the bleak ending of Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream (1905), Thomas marks the end of Reconstruction but not of these writers’ “competing visions of possible worlds” (327)

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