Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War

Belligerent Muse

CIVIL WAR AMERICA

Gary W. Gallagher, Peter S. Carmichael, Caroline E. Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editors

This landmark series interprets broadly the history and culture of the Civil War era through the long nineteenth century and beyond. Drawing on diverse approaches and methods, the series publishes historical works that explore all aspects of the war, biographies of leading commanders, and tactical and campaign studies, along with select editions of primary sources. Together, these books shed new light on an era that remains central to our understanding of American and world history.

Belligerent Muse

Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War

Stephen Cushman

Foreword by Gary W. Gallagher

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2014 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved. Designed by Sally Scruggs. Set in Miller by codeMantra. Manufactured in the United States of America. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cushman, Stephen, 1956–

Belligerent muse : five northern writers and how they shaped our understanding of the Civil War / Stephen Cushman ; foreword by Gary W. Gallagher.

        pages cm. — (Civil War America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4696-1877-7 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-1-4696-1878-4 (ebook)

1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Historiography.

2. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Influence. 3. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892—Influence. 4. Sherman, William T. (William Tecumseh), 1820–1891—Influence. 5. Bierce, Ambrose, 1842–1914?—Influence. 6. Chamberlain, Joshua Lawrence, 1828–1914—Influence. I. Title.

E468.5.C94 2014

973.7072—dc23

2014013884

Portions of this work have appeared previously, in somewhat different form, as Ambrose Bierce, Chickamauga, and Ways to Write History, in Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns, 1862–1863, ed. Evan Jones and Wiley Sword (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press), copyright © 2014 by Louisiana State University Press and reprinted with permission of Louisiana State University Press; Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address, in The Cambridge Companion to Abraham Lincoln, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Walt Whitman’s Real Wars, in Wars within a War: Controversy and Conflict over the American Civil War, ed. Joan Waugh and Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); and When Lincoln Met Emerson, Journal of the Civil War Era 3, no. 2 (June 2013).

18 17 16 15 14   5 4 3 2 1

For those who learn and those who teach

Contents

Foreword by Gary W. Gallagher

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

When Lincoln Met Emerson, and the Two Addresses

CHAPTER TWO

Walt Whitman’s Real Wars

CHAPTER THREE

Sherman the Writer

CHAPTER FOUR

Ambrose Bierce, Chickamauga, and Ways to Write History

CHAPTER FIVE

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain Repeats Appomattox

Last Words

Notes

Index

Foreword

I always have admired William Tecumseh Sherman’s Memoirs. Second only to his friend U. S. Grant among Union military heroes, Sherman lacked an effective filter between his brain and either his mouth or his pen—which renders him both fascinating and eminently quotable. I have quoted the Memoirs in various things I have written and frequently urged others to explore their pages. If asked a year ago whether I had a good command of the text, I would have answered in the affirmative. Then I read Stephen Cushman’s essay that appears here, an exercise that yielded great enjoyment but also left me chastened. The analysis breathed such new life into the Memoirs, and into Sherman himself, that I wondered how I could have missed so much.

All of the chapters in Belligerent Muse inspired similar reactions. Amid the welter of books on diverse aspects of the Civil War published over the past two decades or so, there is nothing quite like this work. Cushman places himself in the tradition of Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962), George M. Fredrickson’s The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965), and Daniel Aaron’s The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973), which is accurate in some ways but a bit deceptive in others. Most obviously, Cushman takes more seriously, and knows far more about, the military side of the conflict than any of those three authors. That is important for one who writes about William Tecumseh Sherman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain—as well as about Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman in the midst of overwhelming military events. Cushman combines in unusual fashion—perhaps unique, I would say—poetic and literary credentials of the first order and serious engagement with the historical literature of the war, though I suspect he would make only modest claims about his mastery of the latter.

Belligerent Muse ties the insights and contributions of military historians to literary sensibilities in ways no one other than Cushman, at least as far as I know, has attempted. It draws on the sometimes abstract and theoretical work of academic departments of English (without descending into the often incomprehensible jargon of that world) while also embracing the pragmatic and empirical work of professional military historians and the writings of amateur historians, many of them talented but best known to those who attend Civil War Round Table meetings and other nonacademic study groups and conferences. To a degree not present in other works I have encountered that deal with literary figures and the war, this study acknowledges the importance of understanding military organizations and events on the battlefield if one intends a productive analysis of writings that touch on martial dimensions of the war.

I will return briefly to Sherman to say that I find many parts of his Memoirs very evocative. None exceeds his description of how, as his veterans began the March to the Sea on November 16, 1864, he paused on a piece of high ground to take in the scene: Behind us lay Atlanta, smouldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city. The moment quickly passed: Then we turned our horses’ heads to the east; Atlanta was soon lost behind the screen of trees, and became a thing of the past. Around it clings many a thought of desperate battle, of hope and fear, that now seem like the memory of a dream; and I have never seen the place since. The day was extremely beautiful, clear sunlight, with bracing air, and an unusual feeling of exhilaration seemed to pervade all minds—a feeling of something to come, vague and undefined, still full of venture and intense interest.

Above all, Cushman reminds us that historical sources may also be literary works—sometimes very self-consciously both when they come from pens such as Sherman’s and deal with material so dramatic as commencing the campaign from Atlanta to Savannah. Belligerent Muse reveals the rich possibilities of work that transcends the narrow conception of specialties so common in the academic world. Historians and literary scholars alike, as well as lay readers drawn to the blood-soaked moment of truth for the American nation, will discover fresh and revealing material in the pages that follow. Joining Cushman as he traverses the war’s landscape in the company of the president of the United States, a poet and sometime hospital volunteer, a general in the regular army, and two volunteer military officers yields, to borrow directly from Sherman, an experience full of venture and intense interest.

GARY W. GALLAGHER

Acknowledgments

I have incurred many happy obligations during the writing of this book, some of them to anonymous readers who will feel, I trust, the real gratitude behind this blanket thanks. Those who assisted with archival work will find themselves thanked in various notes to the following chapters. Among the editorial benefactors I name here with special pleasure are William Blair, Evan Jones, Shirley Samuels, Wiley Sword, and Joan Waugh, who scrupulously oversaw the publications in which earlier versions of some of these chapters first appeared. Stephen Arata was an encouraging friend to each of the chapters in its earliest form. To Lindsay Turner I am very grateful for timely help with assembling and polishing the final version of the manuscript. Alice Fahs gave the entire manuscript the close and comprehensive attention of an ideal reader. My largest obligation is to Gary Gallagher, whose intellectual generosity is as capacious as his knowledge of the American Civil War.

Belligerent Muse

Introduction

War destroys. Destruction is its business. War descends from Old High German and means confusion or strife; one of its Old English cousins is worst. War is the worst, our worst, the worst confusion and strife humans know and have known for as long as there have been humans. On its way to doing its worst, war wrecks and ruins, wastes and ravages, devastates and desolates. It does its worst to bodies, minds, spirits, lives, families, communities, towns, cities, farms, factories, economies, social systems, ecosystems, regions, nations, continents.

But in the process of doing its worst, war can also make and create. We use the phrase war of words to refer to forms of confusion and strife that are purely verbal, but the phrase also points to one of the major products of war: words themselves. Wars produce words and, where literacy operates, writing. Anyone who types United States and Civil War into the guided search boxes of the Library of Congress online catalog (with quotation marks around each term) will probably receive a message reading, Your search retrieved more records than can be displayed. Only the first 10,000 will be shown. If we assume for the purposes of illustration that these are all individual pieces of writing, as opposed to duplicates, or photographs, or other materials (if they are not, enough replacements will be found in the second 10,000), and you read one a day, it would take more than twenty-seven years to get through them all.

After those twenty-seven years, however, you would only have scratched the surface of writing generated by the American Civil War. Imagine that one-third of the people numbered in the U.S. census of 1860, or roughly 10 million of them, wrote one hundred words apiece, a little more than the first paragraph of this book, during the four years of war. They would have produced a billion words. If each of those people wrote one hundred words—perhaps the equivalent of a very short letter or diary entry—every day for a thousand days, about two-thirds of those the war took up, the total would be a trillion words. Then add the writing of people who wrote much more than one hundred thousand words (roughly the equivalent of four hundred typed, double-spaced pages), perhaps government or military officials, newspaper reporters, writers for the illustrated weeklies; add the writing of people living outside the wartime United States, particularly in Europe, which paid close attention to, and had much to say about, our confusion and strife; and finally add the writing of people alive after the war—memoirists, biographers, historians, novelists—including all those still writing today.

War destroys, but it is also inspires, stimulates, and creates. It is, in this way, a muse, a belligerent muse, and a powerful one at that. We have estimates of the number of war deaths and war wounds and war losses of many kinds, but estimates of the number of words and pieces of writing the American Civil War brought forth and continues to bring forth, if they could be come by, would rapidly approach the vast and overwhelming scale of the astronomical. How do we begin to sort and map and classify all the writing the Civil War muse has given us? A first distinction might be to separate public writing from private writing, to imagine a spectrum running from words written for large readerships to words written for the individual writer only. Along this spectrum we would encounter words written originally for only the individual writer but then subsequently discovered by others and made available to a large readership. Many diaries fall into this category. Contemplating this spectrum for even a few moments, we can see quickly that at the private end it leads to attics and trunks and desks and drawers containing writing we do not yet know and are unlikely ever to know or possess entirely, no matter how many new finds are made public, either in print or on line.

A second way to sort or map or classify might be to focus on the identities of individual authors. What is a particular author’s race or class or gender? This kind of approach makes sense because it can yield various groupings and cross-sections that enable us to subdivide the overwhelming whole and begin to make it comprehensible, or apparently so. In an effort to enhance comprehensiveness, or the appearance of it, one might sample Civil War writings by selecting examples from a range of authorial identities, aiming to represent as many as possible.

Then there is another approach, one that does not preclude representative selection according to authorial identity but complements it. That approach, the one taken by this book, is concerned with developing a way of reading whatever examples might be selected from the vast and overwhelming body of material available. This approach blends an interest in the history of the American Civil War with an interest in the verbal patterns, shapes, conventions, and strategies of written narratives about it.

The argument of this book, implicit throughout and explicit here, is that although writings by various authors provide keys to a historical understanding of the American Civil War, that understanding should not treat those writings simply as transparent windows opening onto the past, particularly when they come from the pens and pencils of people self-conscious about their powers as writers, quite likely, but not exclusively, writing publicly for large readerships. The writings of such people are here represented by five of the most significant and best-known narrators of the Civil War: Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. In considering their writings as literary expressions as well as engagements with momentous events of the war, the following chapters undertake to show that those windows on the past will always be stained glass, sometimes only faintly tinted, sometimes richly colored.

That said, I do not belong to the class of readers who insist, with breathtaking skepticism, that there really is no such thing as an event apart from the stained-glass writing about it. Any wartime family receiving a telegram beginning, The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret, as my own mother’s did, cannot sustain such skepticism for long. True, complete transparency in any writing is an impossible ideal; one need only attempt the translation of the sparest, most literal report from one language into another to discover how quickly language colors references to wordless events and actions. To be born into a language is to be subject to its ways of shaping the world. One’s objectivity, when presented in that language, necessarily will be shaped accordingly.

But it is also true that if some readers overestimate the aesthetic determinants of writing that aspires to transparency, other readers underestimate them, and it is to this latter group of readers that this book is addressed. Aesthetic comes from a Greek verb meaning to perceive, so aesthetic determinants are, in part, the inescapable features and limitations of writers’ and readers’ perceptions. Originally aesthetic appreciation of an object implied detachment from the utilitarian or instrumental value of that object. In Walden (1854), for example, Henry David Thoreau was careful to distinguish between his (presumably higher) aesthetic appreciation of the farms around Concord, Massachusetts—because of the walks they afforded him or the vistas or the sunsets—and the simpler appreciations of the farmer on whose land he trespassed, a farmer presumably much more interested in crop rotation and market prices. But aesthetic appreciation can, and here will, invoke another kind of historical sensibility, one that parallels the sensibility of the Civil War specialist, whether one professionally trained at a university, one in the venerable nonacademic tradition of Bruce Catton and Douglas Southall Freeman, or one who reads privately for sheer interest alone.

The kind of historically informed aesthetic sensibility I have in mind treats historical documents from the Civil War not only as histories of events but as instances of the history of writing, as historical configurations of rhetorical strategies, rhythmic patterns, quotations, allusions, echoes, and revisions. In other words, this book is about how a piece of writing about the Civil War is an interweaving of two sets of histories: on the one hand, war history, and on the other, linguistic, rhetorical, and literary history. It is not simply a matter of reading a piece of writing in historical context, with historical designating the overlapping accumulations of political, social, economic, and military events; it is a matter of reading a piece of writing with as full an awareness of all its histories, including the history of its writing, as possible.

Three precursors have formed tributaries flowing into any discussion of Civil War writings: Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962), George M. Fredrickson’s The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965), and Daniel Aaron’s The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973). The works of this triumvirate—Wilson and Aaron approached Civil War writings from perspectives primarily literary, Fredrickson from one informed by a professional historian’s interest in racial perspectives and race relations—continue to exert their power, as Randall Fuller, in a recent contribution to the expanding field, From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (2011), likewise has testified. From the work of Wilson, Fredrickson, and Aaron a partial genealogy of this book begins to emerge.

The genealogy is only partial because it does not include the writings and insights of Civil War historians, both professional and amateur. Debts to the former will appear in notes to the chapters that follow; debts to the latter have accumulated during years of walking over battlefields with these so-called amateurs, many of whom carry with them extensively detailed knowledge—amateur, after all, means lover—and during afternoons and evenings spent talking to Civil War roundtables and nonacademic study groups, the many members of which have had much to teach. Whether professional or amateur, many people who have devoted hours and years to the study of the Civil War read from perspectives that are bracingly empirical and pragmatic, often supplying much-needed correctives to the overly abstract and theoretical approaches that can arise in the academic world. It is not that the abstract and theoretical are necessarily wrongheaded, no matter how tempting they are for nonacademics to caricature; it is that without the complementarities of the pragmatic and empirical, they can obscure the intractable specificities of the American Civil War without necessarily offering compensating illuminations.

The chapters of this book aim to demonstrate what can happen when discussions of historical detail, generally absent from treatments of Civil War writings as literature, complement discussions of verbal artistry, generally absent from works of history and historiography. The approach taken here, the approach of treating Civil War writings, especially writings that fall under the heading of military history, as both historical documents and aesthetic productions, is transferable to writings other than those by five white male northerners, who, despite their similarities in some respects, present a wide range in others: a president, a hospital visitor and poet, and three officers in the United States Army, two of them volunteers with very different backgrounds and one a West Point graduate from the regular army.

Of the five narrators considered here, Lincoln, Whitman, and Bierce have received extensive and sustained attention as writers. The two-part chapter on Lincoln begins in 1862 with a kind of prologue, a detailed look at a moment in the overlapping of literary history with the history of wartime politics, when Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the president at the White House. It then shifts to an examination of Lincoln’s two most famous speeches, attempting to balance new thoughts about their verbal artistry with attention to their military historical background.

Next the discussion moves to 1875 with a chapter on Whitman’s Memoranda During the War, published that year. Much has been and continues to be written about Whitman’s Civil War years, although the body of writing about him remains dwarfed by that about Lincoln. Among other aims, this chapter seeks to reveal what one can learn about Whitman and his narrative endeavor when his writing about the war—for example, the battle of Chancellorsville—confronts the details of the historical record.

The chapter on Sherman, the longest in the book and its center in more ways than one, also connects to 1875, the year of the publication of the first edition of Memoirs of William T. Sherman. Unlike the first two chapters, which hope to contribute to considerable bodies of existing work, the one on Sherman aims to begin to address a want of writing about Sherman as a writer. A significant exception in this regard is Wilson’s discussion of Sherman in Patriotic Gore, but anyone reading Wilson’s chapter will discover quickly that his violent antipathy toward Attila Sherman has twisted his approach in dramatic ways. The last ten pages of Wilson’s chapter, for example, focus entirely, and digressively, on the sad and debilitating effects of Sherman’s influence on his son, Father Thomas Sherman. This conclusion reveals much about the volatility of Sherman in Wilson’s imagination but little about Sherman as a writer. Here the discussion of Sherman’s Memoirs draws frequent comparisons with Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (1885–86), which has generated much more commentary.

The chapter on Ambrose Bierce continues with the 1880s, the same decade that brought forth the second edition of Sherman’s Memoirs, as well as Bierce’s turn to writing about his Civil War experiences. Bierce’s Civil War writings have attracted much attention, though less than Whitman’s, but, as with Whitman’s, they have not been held up to the exacting scrutiny of the military historical record, despite Bierce’s hectoring insistence on the importance of that record and, in particular, on his firm ideas of the right way to go about the business of constructing it. Finally, the chapter on Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, about whose Civil War writings little has been written by people other than biographers and military historians, takes a look at his repeated attempts, from 1865 to his death in 1915, to narrate the ending of his war at Appomattox Court House.

In the case of each of the five writers, the war muse produced exceptional results and made him a canonical figure. Two of the five, Sherman and Chamberlain, enjoyed the privileges of higher education, but the other three did not. Their effectiveness as writers that we still read in a century of rapidly changing writing practices and reading habits testifies, surely, to their individual capabilities; yet it also testifies to the nature of literacy at an extraordinary moment in our past. The Civil War erupted