# Contents

## Introduction

I. Harriet Beecher Stowe

II. Calvin Stowe; Francis Grierson; *The Battle Hymn of the Republic*; The Union as Religious Mysticism

III. Abraham Lincoln

IV. Northern Soldiers: Ulysses S. Grant

V. Northern Soldiers: William T. Sherman

VI. Northerners in the South: Frederick L. Olmsted, John T. Trowbridge

VII. Northerners in the South: Charlotte Forten and Colonel Higginson

VIII. Three Confederate Ladies: Kate Stone, Sarah Morgan, Mary Chesnut

IX. Southern Soldiers: Richard Taylor, John S. Mosby, Robert E. Lee

X. Diversity of Opinion in the South: William J. Grayson, George Fitzhugh, Hilton R. Helper

XI. Alexander H. Stephens

XII. The Myth of the Old South; Sidney Lanier; The Poetry of the Civil War; *Sut Lovingood*

XIII. Novelists of the Post-War South: Albion W. Tourgée, George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page

XIV. Ambrose Bierce on the Owl Creek Bridge

XV. The Chastening of American Prose Style; John W. DeForest

XVI. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

Contents

Introduction

I. Harriet Beecher Stowe

III. Abraham Lincoln

VI. Northeners in the South: Frederick L. Olmsted, John T. Trowbridge

VII. Northeners in the South: Charlotte Forten and Colonel Higginson

IX. Southern Soldiers: Richard Taylor, John S. Mosby, Robert E. Lee, Herman Melville's *The Scout toward Aldie*

XI. Alexander H. Stephens

XII. The Myth of the Old South; Sidney Lanier; The Poetry of the Civil War; Sut Levingood

XIII. Southern Novelists: George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, Crank

XIV. Ambrose Bierce on the Owl Bridge

XV. American Prose Style in the Period of the Civil War; John W. DeForest

I do not mean to do anything with Mr. Ficklin except to
present his face and tell you that _he personally knows it to be_
_a lie._ He was a member of Congress at the only time I was in
Congress, and he (Ficklin) knows that whenever there was an attempt
to procure a vote of mine which would indorse the origin and
justice of the war, I refused to give such indorsement, and
voted against it; but I never voted against the supplies for the
army, and he knows as well as Judge Douglas, that whenever a
dollar was asked by way of compensation or otherwise, for the
benefit of the soldiers, _I gave all the votes that Ficklin or Douglas_
_did, and perhaps more._

3rd volume The collected works of Abraham Lincoln
September 18, 1858 p. 182

This is the passage you noted in the back as Mexican War

1.

I am going to give you the substance of a book I have been writing on the literature of the American Civil War. By the literature of the Civil War I don't mean simply any literature that deals with the Civil War. I confine myself to the writings of people who actually took part in the war or who had some direct connection with it.

The period of our Civil War was not a period in which belles lettres particularly flourished. The poetry and the fiction and the drama inspired by the war itself are mostly extremely inferior. What is probably the most distinguished piece of fiction inspired by the Civil War--Stephen Crane's *The Red Badge of Courage*--was written many years afterwards by somebody who had taken no part in the war. But there has never been an historical crisis in which the actors were more keenly aware of the roles they were playing before the world and in which they were more articulate. The diaries, the letters, the memoirs, military, political and social, the speeches and official papers and the journalistic reports are the main literature of the Civil War. It is remarkable that both Lincoln, the President, and Grant, the head of the Union forces, should have been able to express themselves so well. But the stimulus to tell one's story, to testify, to speak one's lines, was very strong at this time. The interest of this literature of the Civil War-- which draws one along from book to book, from document to document--is rather like that of Browning's *The Ring and the Book*. You want to find out how each of the actors in the drama is going to justify himself, how events looked from his point of view. I believe then the reason that there has never been any

2.

really great full-scale work of literature written about the Civil War is that the story was all written by the participants themselves. They left the professional literary man nothing further to do. Those writers like Ambrose Bierce, George Cable and John DeForest who had taken part in the war and who tried to use it for imaginative literature--with the exception of a few short stories--produced nothing that was really first-rate. They are important but mostly important as witnesses, as participants--soldiers and administrators--who have each a personal story to tell. The writers of the generation before the war--such as Whitman, Melville and Lowell--touched upon the war in various ways, and in the bellelettristic tradition wrote some of the best things inspired by it; but they belonged to a different world, they were not fully actors in the drama.

The student of the literature of the Civil War must soon come to realize that figures like Lincoln and Sherman and Grant are better writers than any of the poets, North or South, who did versified propaganda; that John Mosley, the Confederate raider, is a better story-teller when he is simply recounting his own exploits than that other Confederate soldier, John Esten Cooke, when he is transposing his experience into terms of fiction; that Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson's book, _My Year with a Colored Regiment_, is much better than his essays or his novel; and that Mary Chestnut's diary has more wit and imagination and insight than would have been possible in that period for a writer of fiction--since nobody in Mrs. Chestnut's position--she was the wife of a Confederate official, living at Richmond

3.

in the center of Confederate affairs--would have had the
heart of the leisure to write a novel.

For the historian of American literature, this creates a
peculiar situation. In the histories of American literature
this period of the Civil War has, so far as I know, been in-
variably treated in rather a perfunctory way. The only accur-
ate description of it that I ever remember to have read is
an essay called
by Henry Beer of

Yale. [Quotation] In Van Wyck Brooks's history of American
literature--a great work, which is quite out of the class of
anything else of the kind ever written--he manages to bypass
the Civil War. His scheme makes it possible for him to do
this, because he first--in his first two volumes--writes the
literary history of New England, beginning with the great
period that culminated in the fifties of the last century,
bringing it up to date, and then goes back to the early nine-
tenth century and deals, section by section, with the rest
of the country. In this way, the Civil War is never shown as
a crisis in which all sections of the country were involved,
a drama in which everyone was playing a role and in which every-
one was extremely articulate, but as something peripheral to
literature, in which men of letters sometimes found subjects.
Brooks of course has deliberately excluded from his history
the development in the United States of religious, political,
and philosophical ideas where they do not impinge on litera-
ture proper, and this leads to a neglect of the Civil War in
which religious and political ideas do play such a large part
in the literature. In any case, the literature of the war
is about the only thing that Brooks has left a chance for

4.

anyone else to deal with, and that is what I am going to try
to do here.

I have said that I am going to give you the substance of a
book. I know, however, from past experience that simply to
read aloud the chapters of a book is anything but exhilarating
for the audience. If they are read aloud at intervals, as I
shall have to be giving you these lectures, you will lose the
continuity, as you would not do if you were reading the book
for yourself. For another thing, if you are reading for your-
self, you will be taking in every paragraph. If your mind wand-
ers, you can read it again. But if somebody is reading it to
you and you happen to look out the window, you may miss an im-
portant point. In order to put over what he wants to say a
lecturer needs to do a certain amount of repetition. Since
one of my principal concerns in writing is to eliminate repet-
ition, to express things as concisely as possible, my effect-
iveness as a writer is bound to be somewhat at odds with my
effectiveness as a lecturer. And therefore, though I am going
to read you what I have written, I am also going to talk to
you directly and try to explain what I am doing, what I want to
convey, at every point. I shall explain not only my main ideas,
the direction in which I am taking you; but also my procedure
in writing a book. If at any point you shouldn't understand
what I am up to, don't hesitate to ask me about it. It would
be better not to interrupt me for this purpose but to ask me
at the end of the hour. Don't come up to the desk for this
purpose but ask me from your seats in the presence of the class.
I should say here that for all other interviews I'll be available

5.

for an hour after the lecture in Room ______ of this building--
Monday and Wednesday of this week and after that, every Monday.

I am now going to give you an outline of these lectures,
an outline that will cover the whole year, both terms. This
outline will be long and you won't remember it, but I'll be
explaining it further, step by step, as I go along. My way
of dealing with the subject is to present a series of figures:
men or women who in one way or another were actually involved
in the war or who directly influenced it or were influenced
by it. I begin with Harriet Beecher Stowe, who did so much to
arouse the North by the publication of *Uncle Tom's Cabin*, and
I end--next spring--with Justice Holmes, whose whole view of
the world and hence professional career were deeply influenced
by his experience in the war. My presentation of these figures
will trace a consecutive development but it will not be strictly
chronological. I shall explain in a moment what I mean. My
general pattern is that I begin before the war in the North,
then I take you through the war, and then come out on the other
side and show you what happened to participants in the war in
the period after the war. The final half of the course will
be concerned with the North. There will be a good deal about
the South--beginning with *Uncle Tom's Cabin*--but it will be
always seen through Northern eyes. I don't believe we shall
get into the South itself--that is, the mentality of the
Southerners--much before the end of the term. That is why I
am insisting that students who take this course must follow
it through the year. For they might otherwise get a one-sided

6.

impression. I hope that nobody who follows the course will imagine that I am being unfair to the South because I shall be occupied for so long at first with the point of view of the North. It will be only when I come to the South at the end of this term or the beginning of the next that I shall try to get to grips with the fundamental causes of the war, with the fundamental problems it raises.

The general pattern of my writing is that of variations on a theme; but my procedure is different from that of the composers of musical variations on a theme: I allow it to emerge from the variations. If I state it explicitly, it is likely to be briefly and towards the end of the book. I cannot, however, do that in these lectures: you might well miss the theme altogether. So I am going to state at the beginning in the baldest possible way the themes that I am developing in this sequence. I am going to try to show that both the North and the South were dominated, during the war, by their respective myths--in the case of the North, by a religious myth, the conviction that they were engaged in a righteous crusade, with the Lord God of Hosts behind them. This apocalyptic vision was a new phase of the Puritan fanaticism which in its original Calvinistic form was becoming obsolete in New England but which had had its re-crudescence in the Abolitionist movement and in the fervor which is so vigorously expressed in _The Battle Hymn of the Republic_. The myth that intoxicated the South and that carried them through the war was the conception of the Old South, chivalrous, romantic, feudal--a society in which everybody with the exception of the slaves was free and independent--

7.

free with a freedom that their fathers had won in the Revolu-
tion. Actually the society they idealized had more or less
ceased to exist long before the Civil War: the Old South of
the Southern myth was the South of the eighteenth century.
But this was the kind of thing that people had in their heads--
or at least a good many people--and what was going on in
people's heads at the time of the Civil War is what I am try-
ing to get at in these lectures. It is worthwhile to examine
these myths because we are still so very much under their in-
fluence. It has always been hard for Americans--in the North
as well as in the South--to take a realistic view of the Civil
War, and in the case of you who will be taking this course,
I don't know how much that you will learn from it will cause
you to read just your ideas. I don't know how many people
here will be surprised to learn, for example, that Robert E.
Lee had opposed secession and was in favor of liberating the
slaves whereas Sherman was fond of the Southerners and had no
objection to slavery except that it made them uncomfortable
through their fear of a slave insurrection. And the line that
I am going to take when I try to get behind the myths is, I
have found, an unpopular one with the sympathizers with either
side. The war--like a good many wars-- was a contest between
two societies. The North was an expanding power group whose
subjugation of the semi-independent South was the logical next
step after the taking of California in the Mexican War. The
South, which also sought to expand, was too old-fashioned in
its technical equipment, its economy and its social structure
to succeed in doing so. What happened, of course, was not

8.

that simple, and the purposes and the outcome of the war must
bring us to all sorts of questions that are by no means easy to
answer. But I want to give a hint at the beginning of what
I shall be driving at.

My argument--if you can call it an argument--will all be pres-
ented, as I say, in a series of literary portraits. I shall be
dealing, to be sure, with tendencies, but mainly by implication.
Societies and movements and wars are made up of individuals, and
my story is all in terms of individuals. Of the career and
personality of each I shall try to give a more or less well-
rounded picture, so my lectures will be full of details that
in a sense will not be relevant to my theses. The program will
be as follows:

9.

The character of these lectures makes it difficult to
examine the students in this course. I shall not be giving you
information that will cover some aspect of the subject and
about which I can ask you questions to find out whether you
are able to remember it. So of the people with whom I shall
be dealing are by no means so important historically, or even
from a literary point of view, as others whom I shall hardly
mention. I have selected them arbitrarily--that is, for their
interest for me, for the artistic use I can make of them. I
shall therefore not be examining you about what you will hear
in the lecture room. I don't want you to give my own ideas
back to me. And the reading list I am giving you does not
entirely correspond to the material presented in the lectures.
I am assigning for reading books which I think ought to be a
part of the education of every American. If a foreigner were
to ask me for a list of a dozen or so books to read in the
period of the Civil War, these are the books I should recommend.
But you won't be examined on them either. There will be no
examination of the regular kind. Instead I want everyone
who is taking this course to do one long paper a term. Later
on I'll try to give you a list of possible subjects--though if
you want to propose a subject for yourself, a subject that's
appropriate to the course, there's no reason why you shouldn't
write about it. There are these/these three kinds of things involved
in the course: the lectures, the reading and the papers. They
do not correspond exactly but ought to contribute to understanding the subject.

Contents

I. Harriet Beecher Stowe

II. Calvin Stowe; Francis Grierson; The Union as
Religious Mysticism

III. Abraham Lincoln

IV. Ulysses S. Grant; The Scout Toward Aldie

V. William T. Sherman

VI. The Reporters: Frederick L. Olmstead; John T.
Trowbridge

VII. The Diarists: Kate Stone; Sarah Morgan; Mary
Chesnut; Richard Taylor

VIII. The Diarists: Charlotte Forten and Colonel Higginson

IX. Richard Taylor; John Cassby

X. The Myth of the Chivalric South; Sidney Lanier;
Mid-Century Poetry; Sut Lévingood

XI. George W. Cable

XII. Ambrose Bierce

XIII. The Romans: John W. De Forest

XIV. The Romans: Justice Holmes

I.

I am going to give you the substance of a book I have been
writing on the literature of the American Civil War. By the
literature of the Civil War I don't mean simply any literature
that deals with the Civil War. I confine myself to the writ-
ings of people who actually took part in the war or who had
some direct connection with it.

The period of our Civil War was not a period in which belles
lettres particularly flourished. The poetry and the fiction
and the drama inspired by the war itself are mostly extremely
inferior. What is probably the most distinguished piece of
fiction inspired by the Civil War--Stephen Crane's *The Red Badge
of Courage*--was written many years afterwards by somebody who
had taken no part in the war. But there has never been an
historical crisis in which the actors were more keenly aware
of the roles they were playing before the world and in which
they were more articulate. The diaries, the letters, the memoirs,
military, political and social, the speeches and official papers
and the journalistic reports are the main literature of the
Civil War. It is remarkable that both Lincoln, the President,
and Grant, the head of the Union forces, should have been able
to express themselves so well. But the stimulus to tell one's
story, to testify, to speak one's lines, was very strong at
this time. The interest of this literature of the Civil War--
which draws one along from book to book, from document to docu-
ment--is rather like that of Browning's *The Ring and the Book*.
You want to find out how each of the actors in the drama is
going to justify himself, how events looked from his point of
view. I believe then the reason that there has never been any

2.

really great full-scale work of literature written about the Civil War is that the story was all written by the participants themselves. They left the professional literary man nothing further to do. Those writers like Ambrose Bierce, George Cable and John DeForest who had taken part in the war and who tried to use it for imaginative literature--with the exception of a few short stories--produced nothing that was really first-rate. They are important but mostly important as witnesses, as participants--soldiers and administrators--who have each a personal story to tell. The writers of the generation before the war--such as Whitman, Melville and Lowell--touched upon the war in various ways, and in the belletristic tradition wrote some of the best things inspired by it; but they belonged to a different world, they were not fully actors in the drama.

The student of the literature of the Civil War must soon come to realize that figures like Lincoln and Sherman and Grant are better writers than any of the poets, North or South, who did versified propaganda; that John Mosley, the Confederate raider, is a better story-teller when he is simply recounting his own exploits than that other Confederate soldier, John Jehan Cooke, when he is transferring his experience into terms of fiction; that Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson's book, _My Year with a Colored Regiment_, is much better than his essays or his novel; and that Mary Chestnut's diary has more wit and imagination and insight than would have been possible in that period for a writer of fiction--since nobody in Mrs. Chestnut's position--she was the wife of a Confederate official, living in Richmond

3.

For the historian of American literature, this creates a
peculiar situation. In the histories of American literature
this period of the Civil War has, so far as I know, been in-
variably treated in rather a perfunctory way. The only accur-
ate description of it that I ever remember to have read is
an essay called
"Quotation" In Van Wyck Brooks's history of American
literature--a great work, which is quite out of the class of
anything else of the kind ever written--he manages to bypass
the Civil War. His scheme makes it possible for him to do
this, because he first--in his first two volumes--writes the
literary history of New England, beginning with the great
period that culminated in the fifties of the last century,
bringing it up to date, and then goes back to the early nine-
teenth century and deals, section by section, with the rest
of the country. In this way, the Civil War is never shown as
a crisis in which all sections of the country were involved,
a drama in which everyone was playing a role and in which every-
one was extremely articulate, but as something peripheral to
literature, in which men of letters sometimes found subjects.
Brooks of course has deliberately excluded from his history
the development in the United States of religious, political,
and philosophical ideas where they do not impinge on litera-
ture proper, and this leads to a neglect of the Civil War in
which religious and political ideas do play such a large part
in the literature. In any case, the literature of the war
is about the only thing that Brooks has left a chance for

4.

5.

for an hour after the lecture in Room ___ of this building--
Monday and Wednesday of this week and after that, every Monday.

6.

impression. I hope that nobody who tfbalownaethcursarse will
imagine that I am being unfair to the South because I shall be
occupied for so long at first with the point of view of the
North. It will be only when I come to the South at the end
of thisterm or the beginning of the next that I shall try to
get to grips with the fundamental causes of the war, with the
fundamental problems it raises.

The general pattern of my writing is that of variations on
a theme; but my procedure is different from that of the compos-
ers of musical variations on a theme: I allow it to emerge from
the variations. If I state it explicitly, it is likely to be
briefly and towards the end of the book. I cannot, however,
do that in these lectures: you might well miss the theme alto-
gether. So I am going to state at the beginning in the baldest
possible way the themes that I am developing in this sequence.
I am going to try to show that both the North and the South
were dominated, during the war, by their respective myths--in
the case of the North, by a religious myth, the conviction that
they were engaged in a righteous crusade, with the Lord God of
Hosts behind them. This apocalyptic vision was a new phase of
the Puritan fanaticism which in its original Calvanistic form
was becoming obsolete in New England but which had had its re-
crudescence in the Abolitionist movement and in the fervor
which is so vigorously expressed in _The Battle Hymn of the_
_Republic_. The myth that intoxicated the South and that car-
ried them through the war was the conception of the Old South,
chivalrous, romantic, feudal--a society in which everybody
with the exception of the slaves was free and independent--

7.

But this was the kind of thing that people had in their heads--
or at least a good many people--and what was going on in
people's heads at the time of the Civil War is what I am try-
ing to get at in these lectures. It is worthwhile to examine
these myths because we are still so very much under their in-
fluence. It has always been hard for Americans--in the North
as well as in the South--to take a re listic view of the Civil
War, and in the case of you who will be taking this course,
I don't know how much that you will learn from it will cause
you to read - just your ideas. I don't know how many people
here will be surprised to learn , for example, that Robert E.
Lee had opposed secession and was in favor of liberating the
slaves whereas Sherman was fond of the Southerners and had no
objection to slavery except that it made them uncomfortable
through their fear of a slave insurrection. And the line that
I am going to take when I try to get behind the myths is, I
have found, an unpopular one with the sympathizers with either
side. The war--like a good many wars-- was a contest between
two societies. The North was an expanding power group whose
subjugation of the semi-independent South was the logical next
step after the taking of California in the Mexican War. The
South, which also sought to expand, was too old-fashioned in
its technical equipment, its economy and its social structure
to succeed in doing so. What happened, of course, was not

8.

that simple; and the purposes and the outcome of the war must
bring us to all sorts of questions that are by no means easy to
answer. But I want to give a hint at the beginning of what
I shall be driving at.

My argument--if you can call it an argument--will all be pres-
ented, as I say, in a series of literary portraits. I shall be
dealing, to be sure, with tendencies, but mainly by implication.
Societies and movements and wars are made up of individuals, and
my story is all in terms of individuals. Of the career and
pe sonality of each I shall try to give a more or less well-
rounded picture, so my lectures will be full of details that
in a sense will not be relevant to my theses. The program will
be as follows:

9.

The character of these lectures makes it difficult to
examine the students in this course. I shall not be giving you
information that will cover some aspect of the subject and
about which I can ask you questions to find out whether you
are able to remember it. So of the people with whom I shall
be dealing are by no means so important historically, or even
from a literary point of view, as others whom I shall hardly
mention. I have selected them arbitrarily--that is, for their
interest for me, for the artistic use I can make of them. I
shall therefore not be examining you about what you will hear
in the lecture room. I don't want you to give my own ideas
back to me. And the reading list I am giving you does not
entirely correspond to the material presented in the lectures.
I am assigning for reading books which I think ought to be a
part of the education of every American. If a foreigner were
to ask me for a list of a dozen or so books to read in the
period of the Civil War, these are the books I should recommend.
But you won't be examined on them either. There will be no
examination of the regular kind. Instead I want everyone
who is taking this course to do one long paper a term. Later
on I'll try to give you a list of possible subjects--though if
you want to propose a subject for yourself, a subject that's
appropriate to the course, there's no reason why you shouldn't
write about it. There are these three kinds of things involved
in the course: the lectures, the reading and the papers. They
do not correspond exactly but ought to contribute to understanding the subject.