The Civil War as Pandora's Box
A Book Review
The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865
Alice Fahs, 2001
“The real war will never get in the books.” Walt Whitman, 1882
Fahs argued that our division of texts into elite and “trash” is a way of “organizing cultural authority…that readers, writers, and publishers would not have recognized at the time” of the Civil War. I also found it interesting that there were not only “shared rhetorics” in Northern and Southern war writing, but common practices stemming from a shared “commercial literary culture.” In the popular sphere, the commercial nature of writing and printing was (perhaps) more influential than in high literature.
“Conventions of popular literature shaped many Americans’ expectations when war began,” Fahs said. I wonder, to what degree did the recent shared print experience of the Mexican-American War (1846-8) influence this? She described a trajectory of group allegiance leading ultimately to “nation-based individualism,” but it was hard to distinguish this from an ongoing reaction against the tug of the mainstream. As nationalism grew and some writers began to “celebrate the nation as a newly abstract entity,” others began to assert the individual’s position relative to this new center of gravity. The “felt tension between the needs of the nation and the needs of the individual,” and a “culture-wide sense that all stories were valuable” could both function as responses to the overwhelming of individualism and crushing of individual stories that took place in a military camp, a battlefield death, and a mass grave. “As the mass movements of armies increasingly defined the war and the outcome of battle was increasingly mass slaughter,” Fahs said, “sentimental literature often explicitly fought against the idea of the mass, instead singling out the individual soldier as an icon of heroism.” In this sense, we have a birth of the modern and a scene-setting for the mythology of the West.
Fahs commented early on, on the change produced by technology, but she didn’t take it far. In both the north and south, she said, “war became not just an obsessive, all-consuming subject but also a mode of perception and a way of life.” She observed that “Newspapers suddenly became an urgent necessity of life,” (a nod to William Gilmore?) satisfying “the public’s desire for news on an hourly, not just daily, basis.” Railroads and telegraph moved mail and information like never before. But this benefit accrued more to the North, which had more rails and wires. Oliver Wendell Holmes called the result “perpetual intercommunication,” suggesting that at least writers writers were well aware with the change.
Fahs reported that southern critics claimed, “Had a Southern novelist truly painted in as engaging a style” as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, popular opinion would have been swayed and America would have finally understood “the real workings of our Biblical system of labor, and its truly Christianizing and elevating effects on the slave.” It was unclear from her presentation, however, whether this was a widely-held view, or just the ravings of a few critics at the Southern Monthly, who may or may not have believed it themselves. Certainly, no novelist seems to have stepped forward to carry that torch, which probably says something about different the opinions of artists and politicians.
There were several more interesting points along the way. Southern papers were regularly indignant over the fact “old patrons of the Yankee weeklies and monthlies would buy them at any price.” At least in more elite literary circles, the political break between north and south did not seem to create the hoped-for (at least among editors) cultural divide. Fahs also mentioned that before the war, “the issue that especially exercised the letter writers was (Harpers Weekly’s) assertion that the war would ‘inevitably sooner of later become a war of emancipation’.” This claim apparently cost Harpers some of their ongoing southern readership – it would be interesting to know how much of the heat came from northerners who had been hoping it just wouldn’t go that far.
Fahs said, “the median age of soldiers was 23.5. Yet imagining soldiers as ‘boys’ suggests a distinct cultural unease with the idea of soldiers as full-grown men separated from the maternalist culture of home.” But maybe the atrocities both sides were able to perpetrate on the other was the real source of this “unease.” Whereas in both north and south, “early wartime poems imagined women renouncing men who would not be soldiers,” maybe neither side was so happy in the longer run, getting what they had asked for.
In the book’s fifth chapter (one of the issues with The Imagined Civil War was that it seemed a bit like a series of essays, each briefly exploring an area that in the future might support a wider treatment. This can be typical of groundbreaking books, though, so maybe that’s a good problem to have.), Fahs explored the changing descriptions of black men in “low” print media. She reported that some southern propagandists continued to predict a massive return of runaway slaves, who might return once they realized how good they’d had it on the plantations. Northerners were somewhat ambivalent to portraying black men as heroes, until the “aftermath of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth’s fight at Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863.” Even then, northern whites seemed most comfortable when heroic, armed black men died at the end of their stories. Whites persisted in “refusing to imagine the continuing lives of black men.” W.E.B. Du Bois commented on the irony of black men achieving status in the minds of whites only when they killed white men. Even Louisa May Alcott, who published a story of an inter-racial relationship in Moncure Conway’s radical Commonwealth in 1864, seems to have felt “a fundamental discomfort” with ideas like “black soldiers killing whites they had known.” Fahs did not compare this with portrayals, in the same types of media, of whites killing their neighbors and even relatives. So it was unclear whether the discomfort was primarily racial or a more general feature of coming to grips with the fratricidal nature of the war.
In a chapter on war humor, Fahs raised some interesting questions about the “critical distance” of satirists, who “emphasized the fear, incompetence, cupidity, avarice, and racism of those involved in the war effort.” Between the lines, she seemed to hint at a growing class division, as humorists “puncturing prevailing heroic ideas of war,” begin to question the logic that has “so long made all peoples the ready military sacrifices of some people” (quoting Robert Henry Newell writing as Orpheus C Kerr in the 1861 New-York Mercury). This type of sharp satire was apparently widespread. Fahs described Lincoln reading satire to his Cabinet and mentioned that Charles Farrar Brown (Artemus Ward) became editor of Vanity Fair in May 1861.
The final two chapters didn’t seem as gripping, or perhaps just didn’t correspond to my own interests as much as earlier chapters. But they raised one really significant point about the shift in story-telling about the war, toward spotlighting individual experiences. It seems as if the increasingly anonymous ways in which Civil War soldiers fought and died spurred a reaction in popular consciousness. The Civil War did not produce the (high) literary response of World War I, possibly because the rich and literate didn’t volunteer for service the way educated Englishmen like Ford Madox Ford went to the trenches fifty years later. So maybe Fahs’ exploration of “low” print culture opened a door for an exploration of the birth of American modernism in the Civil War. I hadn’t ever really noticed that Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage was published thirty years after the war, by a young man who had not even been born until 1871! There’s a lot more to explore here – Alice Fahs opened a Pandora’s Box that probably contains many more surprises.
