Edmund Wilson - Patriotic Gore

STUDIES IN THE LITERATURE
OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

BY

EDMUND WILSON

Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins

JOHN BROWN

The despots heel is on thy shore,

Maryland!

His torch is at thy temple door,

Maryland!

Avenge the patriotic gore

That flecked the streets of Baltimore,

And be the battle-queen of yore,

Maryland! My Maryland!

SONG OF THE CONFEDERATE SOUTH

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

I HAVE ACKNOWLEDGED in the course of the text most of my biographical sources. There are as yet no full-length biographies of Francis Grierson and John De Forest. For information about the former I am indebted to Mr. Shamus OSheel and Mr. Theodore Rousseau; about the latter to Mr. Gordon Haight of Yale, who has given me the benefit of his knowledge of the subject and supplied me with such printed materials as exist. Mr. Arlin Turner, the author of the admirable biography of George W. Cable, to which I am chiefly indebted for my detailed account of Cables career, has been helpful in sending me material on Cable and on George Harris. I am grateful to Mr. Mark DeWolfe Howe, the editor and biographer of Justice Holmes, for reading and criticizing my chapter on Holmes and for putting at my disposal unpublished letters by him. I have also profited from my conversations with Mr. William Taylor of Harvard as well as from his brilliant book Cavalier and Yankee; and from my talks with my friend Mr. Chauncy Hackett, who, in the years during which I was writing this book, was able to give me tips and personal reminiscences that I found particularly valuable as coming from an old Washingtonian with a highly developed social and political sense of both the North and the South. To Mr. Cecil Roth of Oxford I am indebted for pointing out to me the probable sources of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I am grateful to Mr. William A. Jackson of the Houghton Library at Harvard for permission to include passages from unpublished letters by De Forest; and to Mr. Lyman Beecher Stowe and the Womens Archives at Harvard for permission to use unpublished letters by Calvin and Harriet Stowe. I should add that besides the works mentioned in the text on Harriet Beecher Stowe, I have drawn on a more recent study by Charles H. Foster of the University of Minnesota: The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism, To my five students in a seminar at Harvard I am grateful for information derived from their own research in connection with papers which they wrote for me: Mr. Harvey G. Damaser, who traced the progress of the deification of Lincoln in the poetry published after the war; Mr. Barrie S. Hayne, who examined the works written in refutation of Uncle Toms Cabin; Mr. Mark Irvin Whitman, who studied the scattered journalism as well as the books of George Fitzhugh; Miss Helen J. Sootin, who contributed some interesting discoveries to my section on American prose style; and Mr. Keith McKay Walker, who assessed the reliability of Harriet Beecher Stowes book on Byron. I owe a special debt for checking documents, running down references and making editorial suggestions, to my secretaries Mr. Lowell Edmunds and Mrs. Philippe Radley. I am also especially grateful to Harvard and Yale Universities for allowing me the use of their libraries. The substance of some of these chapters first appeared in a different form in articles in the New Yorker magazine.

In quotations I have usually followed the spelling and punctuation of the writers, bad or old-fashioned though these sometimes are.

T HE PERIOD of the American Civil War was not one in which belles lettres flourished, but it did produce a remarkable literature which mostly consists of speeches and pamphlets, private letters and diaries, personal memoirs and journalistic reports. Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 186165 in which so many people were so articulate? The elaborate orations of Charles Sumner, modelled on Demosthenes and Cicero; Lincolns unique addresses, at once directives and elegies; John Browns letters from prison and his final speech to the court; Grants hard and pellucid memoirs and John Mosbys almost picaresque ones, together with the chronicles and apologetics of innumerable other officers of both the armies; the brilliant journal of Mary Chesnut, so much more imaginative and revealing than most of the fiction inspired by the war; the autobiographies of the Adams brothers, that cool but attentive commentary by members of the fourth generation of an historically self-conscious family such documents dramatize the war as the poet or the writer of fiction has never been able to do. The drama has already been staged by characters who have written their own parts; and the peculiar fascination of this literature which leads one to go on and on reading if is rather like that of Brownings The Ring and the Book, in which the same story is told from the points of view of nine different persons. We read in Mrs. Chesnuts diary of General Hoods unhappy passion for the beautiful girl Buck Preston; then we meet him in Shermans memoirs protesting, at the taking of Atlanta, against the Northern invaders harsh measures and engaging in polemics with him; then we discover that Hood has written his own memoirs. Charlotte Forten, the Negro school teacher from Philadelphia and the Boston Brahmin Thomas Wentworth Higginson turn out both to have left detailed records of the days that they spent together on the South Carolina Sea Islands. How very different Lincoln looks when he is seen by William Herndon, his law partner, by the Americanized Frenchman the Marquis de Chambrun, by Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, and by young Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes! How very different Grant appears to Henry and to Charles Francis Adams! And, as seems to have been natural in the nineteenth century so much more than it is in our own, everybody speaks in character in such a way that one can often almost hear their voices. It is as amusing to find McClellan writing home from the front to his wife, after a visit from Henry W. Halleck, who had displaced him as General-in-Chief, Hes a bien mauvais sujet he is not a gentleman, as to remember General Forrests reply, when asked how he had scored his success at Murfreesboro, that he had taken a short cut and got there fustes with the mostes.