Literature of the Civil War

(and Beyond)

The Civil War

The Literature of

Ruins of Cary Street, Richmond. Photo Credit: U.S. Army Military History Institute, MOLLUS-MASS Collection.

• Inability of the American literary imagination to derive a major poem, novel, or play from the central crisis in the national existence.
• Especially in the South: less concerned to reconstruct the actual time of the struggle than to recount the consequent loss of the antebellum southern culture and, in the response to this loss, the creation of a postbellum culture of survival.
• Emily Dickinson's poems (1858-1865), Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps (1865), Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866)

• "The" novel of/about the Civil War; BUT: not "the Civil War novel"

• Crane had not military experience > newspapers and documentary reports, especially photographs and the drawings of witnesses
• Depiction of a Civil War battle through the eyes—and thoughts—of one soldier = a new approach to the war story.
• A stream of impressions and images that communicate the chaos and movement of war and the lack of certainty day to day > birth of a modern sensibility

Stephen Crane,The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

• A new kind of courage: conservative regarded the novel as unpatriotic and cowardly. More about the process of character development, a young person "evolving" > non-traditional approach to the war story > Henry Fleming is, in turn, cowardly, selfish, loyal, and courageous.
• A new kind of realism: not reproducing historical truth, but putting the reader in the place of one soldier during one battle.

Stephen Crane,The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

"The Red Badge of Courage… is the narrative of two processes: the process by which a raw youth develops into a tried and trustworthy soldier, and the process by which a regiment that has never been under fire develops into a finished and formidable fighting machine." —Sydney Brooks, unsigned review, Saturday Review, January 11, 1896

These renowned battle descriptions of the big men are made to seem all wrong. The Red Badge impels the feeling that the actual truth about a battle has never been guessed before. In construction the book is as original as in its unique grasp of a new grouping of old materials. All the historic and prescribed machinery of the romance is thrust aside. Harold Frederic, review, New York Times, Jan. 26, 1896.

Passages fromThe Red Badge of Courage

"He lay upon his back staring at the sky. He was dressed in an awkward suit of yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his shoes had been worn to the thinness of writing paper, and from a great rent in one the dead foot projected piteously. And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends."

"The little narrow roadway now lay lifeless. There were over-turned wagons like sun-dried boulders. The bed of the former torrent was choked with the bodies of horses and splintered parts of war machines."

• As literature: one of the most extensive and influential traditions in African American literature and culture. Slave narratives and their fictional descendants (neo-slave narratives) have been fundamental in national debates about slavery, freedom, equality, civil rights, and US identity for decades—and somehow they still are.

• Narratives by fugitive slaves before the Civil War and by former slaves in the postbellum era (fundamental for 18- and 19-century US history and literature)

• As historical sources: first-hand experience in documenting slave life primarily in the US South. Increasingly in the 1840s and 1850s: also the struggles of black people in the North (see also: fugitives from the South and the reality of racism in the so-called "free states"). After the Civil War: former slaves continued to record their experiences under slavery.

Slave Narratives

• Slave, ex-slave (and neo-slave) narratives: essential for discourses on national identity and race issues in the US, both intra-textually and extra-textually (see: the problem with Uncle Tom's Cabin).
• Some important slave and ex-slave narratives:
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
• The Narrative of William W. Brown, An American Slave (1847)
• The confessions of Nat Turner (1831) [published by attorney Thomas Ruffin Gray after Turner's execution]
• Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
• Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901)

Slave Narratives

Black autobiographies:

• Richard Wright's Black Boy (1945)
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

Neo-slave narratives:

• Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966)
• Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971)
• Sherley Ann Williams's Dessa Rose (1986)
• Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987)
• Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990)

Elizabeth Catlett, In Sojourner Truth I fought for the rights of women as well as Negroes, 1947

• Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883):
• one of the few African American women to participate in both the abolition of slavery and women's rights movements;
• born a slave (thus unschooled). BUT: an impressive speaker, preacher, activist, and abolitionist;
• Truth and other black women played vital roles in the Civil War, and their activity was fundamental to the Union army's success.
• Speech "Ain't I a Woman?" delivered at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention, questioning the treatment reserved to black women in US society. No official version of the speech.

Women and slavery: "Ain't I a Woman?"

• The Underground Railroad (early- to mid-19th century): a clandestine system through which about 100,000 slaves escaped from their captivity in southern states.
• Harriet Tubman (c. 1822–1913), abolitionist, social activist, as well as a spy and armed scout for the Union Army:
• Her grandmother, Modesty, was brought to America on a slave ship. Of Tubman’s eight siblings, three sisters were sold.

• In one childhood incident her head was injured, and she suffered neurological problems for the rest of her life, but she also attributed her injury to contributing to her great courage and sense of purpose.
• 1844: married John Tubman, a free man, and she changed her first name to Harriet, after her mother. When her owner died, she and two of her brothers fled to free territory. After seeing a fugitive slave ad, the brothers returned, taking her with them (reluctantly). Eventually, she sought freedom again. She chose to continue helping slaves cross into free territory as her personal mission.

Women, slavery, and slave narratives

Elizabeth Catlett, Untitled (Harriet Tubman), 1953

Women, slavery, and slave narratives