Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
The attack on Fort Sumter didn't start the Civil War in 1861; the war began 10 years earlier, with the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin." At least, that's what Abraham Lincoln claimed, when he met Stowe in 1862 and reportedly greeted her as "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."
Two decades later, Mark Twain faulted another writer for the war's outbreak, when he attributed its cause to Sir Walter Scott's historical novels, whose popularity among Southern readers had instilled in them misguided notions of chivalry.
Exaggerated or downright laughable as these comments may seem to us today, they are in keeping with the way Lincoln and his contemporaries experienced the connections between literature and history. Lincoln quoted poetry at cabinet meetings, wrote letters and speeches that are landmarks of American eloquence and – fatally – attended the theater throughout the war.
Today, we distinguish between history and literature, viewing them as opposites when we insist on separating fact from fiction; for 19th-century Americans, the two were intricately bound. If we want to recover a sense of how Americans experienced the Civil War, we need to understand how American literature shaped Civil War history.
It is difficult for us as modern readers to appreciate the power of this literature because it does not conform to our expectations. Walt Whitman claimed: "the real war will never get into the books." For the past 150 years, we have believed him. But Whitman's comment has led to three false assumptions: one, that nobody wrote literature during the Civil War; two, that Civil War literature was invented 30 years later, by Stephen Crane's 1895 novel "The Red Badge of Courage"; and three, that books, rather than magazines or newspapers, are the proper place to look for Civil War literature.
In other words, we have never been taught how to read Civil War literature, and it is hard to even know where to begin. In schools and universities, the Civil War was central yet absent when the first courses in American Literature were designed in the 1940s.
As the scholar Richard Slotkin has noted, survey classes were organized chronologically, and the Civil War functioned as a dividing line between the first and second part. Fall classes generally focused on the great literature written during the so-called "American Renaissance" of the 1850s by Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville, while spring classes examined literary movements, like realism and modernism, that grew out of the Civil War. Even as the curriculum changed in the 1980s to include more women and minority writers, the war years remained absent.
This gap is not easy to fill: what counts as Civil War literature remains an open question. Must an author have had combat experience for his work to count as Civil War literature? None of the major canonical American authors were centrally engaged in the Civil War's military action, leading the critic Daniel Aaron to refer to it in 1973 as "The Unwritten War."
Yet the war loomed large in American authors' imagination. Whitman recorded his encounters with wounded soldiers in "Specimen Days." Drawing on newspaper and magazine accounts of the war action, Melville composed "Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War." This list grows significantly if we include Southern writers like William Gilmore Simms or James R. Randall, and grapple with the task of reading poetry meant to boost the Southern cause.
The picture becomes even more complicated when we consider women writers. Mary Chesnutt elevated diary writing to an art form when she recorded and eventually published her memories of the war. Louisa May Alcott fictionalized her nursing experiences in "Hospital Sketches." Emily Dickinson's most productive years fall into the early 1860s, and her seeming isolation in Amherst, Mass., belies, so the literary scholar Shira Wolosky argues, her poetry's deep engagement with the war. And while African-American writers often did not have the same access to writing that their white contemporaries enjoyed, newspapers like The New York Anglo-African provided important commentary on the political landscape alongside poetry and fiction.
As these examples indicate, the war years did indeed yield a vast outpouring of literature, as ordinary people and authors alike turned to writing as a way of coping with the war. Their works are becoming newly available to us in digital form, scholarly research and anthologies. But this popular writing is difficult for us to read: often, it does not reflect an individual voice and unique experience, and defies our expectations of "good" literature. But we cannot impose our tastes on the past without losing historical knowledge in the process. Nineteenth-century readers found comfort in repetition and in cookie-cutter forms of writing, much the way we might enjoy the endlessly recycled formulas of television drama. Because we measure writing from the past by modern standards, we have yet to discover Civil War literature.
That discovery will require us to set aside our expectations that Civil War literature should tell us in realistic terms about the devastations of the war. Taking into account the literature people read and wrote during the conflict does not just paint a fuller picture; it changes our understanding of how people experienced the "real" Civil War. The unrealistic nature of this literature is a failure by our standards; for 19th-century readers, it was a mark of its success. As the historian Drew Gilpin Faust shows in "This Republic of Suffering," literature provided solace; fiction offered meaning to otherwise incomprehensible facts. As the manner of death changed during the Civil War, and soldiers died far from their homes and loved ones, stories that tied the horrors of the war to the comforts of the hearth helped people cope with their losses.
Literature did not just offer consolation. As we see in a poem like James R. Randall's "Maryland, My Maryland," literature also actively shaped the way in which people experienced the war, and affected political events as they unfolded. Randall was a college tutor with limited previous writing experience. He wrote the poem – which today is the state song of Maryland – in one night in response to a specific event, when the 6th Massachusetts Regiment fired on civilians while marching through Baltimore. The poem did not just record what happened: it gave voice to the state's secessionists when it called on them to "Avenge the patriotic gore/ That flecked the streets of Baltimore." The poem fueled anti-Union sentiment, and forced Gov. Thomas Hicks to call the assembly for a vote on secession. Published in The New Orleans Delta newspaper on April 26, 1861, and reprinted in newspapers throughout the region, the poem became a powerful anthem of the Southern cause: Mary Chesnutt copied the poem into her diary in January 1862, and a cadet named William Galt of the Virginia Military Institute wrote the poem into a wartime notebook.
We tend to think of literature as printed text, and strictly distinguish among genres, but during the Civil War texts moved freely and with dizzying speed from newspaper accounts into published verses that were copied into private journals, made into song lyrics, turned into parodies and adapted for the stage. "My Maryland" was set to music and became known as "the Marseillaise of the Confederate cause"; Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., described it as the South's equivalent to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." It was sung to the melody of the Christmas song "O Tannenbaum," which was also the tune for the popular college song "Lauriger Horatius."
The emotional appeal of the literature was not just in the words, but also in the melodies that spoke to people's feelings about college friends and family holidays. Yet the poem could quickly reclaim its political meaning, and serve as a comment on military events. When Lee's troops marched into Frederick on Sept. 6, 1862, they sang "My Maryland" as a victory tune. By Oct. 11, 1862, "Harper's Weekly" was publishing accounts of the Battle of Antietam alongside a parody of Randall's poem. Declaring "Ah me! I've had enough of thee,/ Maryland, my Maryland!" the parody combined the humor of sweethearts breaking up with ominous references to the "vengeful ire" pounding the Northern war effort. We don't often think of the Civil War in relation to humor, and yet literature not only repeated images familiar to readers, it also played with them and mingled the silly with the serious.
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The ease with which literature was adapted and even parodied reflects its generic nature. "Maryland, My Maryland" gained much of its power from appeals to Maryland as a mother-figure with a "blush on thy cheek." It asked this personified figure to "gird thy beauteous limbs with steel" and reveal her "peerless chivalry." As Mark Twain recognized, such lines are taken as much from "Ivanhoe," Sir Walter Scott's vastly popular 1819 novel of Medieval England, as they are from newspaper accounts of the war. But the serious political consequences of conventional literary imagery become evident when we consider the following lines: in a stanza that begins "Dear Mother, burst the tyrant's chain, Maryland!," the poem also hauntingly includes the line "Sic Semper!" that John Wilkes Booth uttered when he shot Lincoln at Ford's Theater.
We usually don't think of literature as changing the course of history, and if we do, we look for a specific cause and effect. But often, literature runs like a conversation through the Civil War – rousing to action one moment, giving rise to parody the next, tying news events to established images and appealing to feelings as much as to reason. We won't be able to understand how people experienced the war if we look for it only in realistic descriptions and through later lenses of literary taste. "My Maryland" might not shed light on the events at Antietam, but it gives us a unique perspective on how contemporaries experienced the American Civil War.
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Sources: Joan Hedrick, "Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life"; Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi"; Drew Gilpin Faust, "This Republic of Suffering"; Richard Slotkin, "What Shall Men Remember? Recent Work on the Civil War"; Daniel Aaron, "The Unwritten War"; James McPherson, "The Negro's Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union"; James McPherson, "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era"; Alice Fahs, "The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South"; Shira Wolosky, "Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War"; Christanne Miller and Faith Barrett, "Words for the Hour"; Edmund Wilson, "Patriotic Gore"; Matthew Page Andrews, "Introduction," "The Poems of James Ryder Randall"; "Harper's Weekly."
Colleen Glenney Boggs is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. An expert in 19th-century American Literature, she is editing "Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War," under development at the Modern Language Association.
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