Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

add charity to the lengthening list of Lee’s virtues, the New South promoters highlighted Lee’s repeated exhortations to young Virginian men to put the war behind them and to cultivate the arts of peace. All of these pieces of Lee’s character seemed to underscore the determination of the South to face the future as part of the reunited American nation.

Yet as much as Lee “avoided all discussion of political questions” in the years after Appomattox, he was privately unreconciled to black freedom and predicted that the United States was “sure to become aggressive abroad & despotic at home.” Lee also gave the Lost Cause an answer to its most besetting question, which was why, if the Southern armies really had contained what Pollard called the better men, God had let the South lose to the grasping, mercenary, and infidel Northerners. In Lee, the Lost Cause found a solution, for Lee’s courageous and humble bearing showed them that suffering might be a nobler calling than victory, and that the South could claim through Lee that it had surrendered not to superior political morality but only to superior numbers.29

These confusions of meaning and disappointment of intentions help to explain why the Civil War occupies so small a space in American high culture. The American Civil War never gave birth to a national epic, an American War and Peace, and with the exception of Stephen Crane’s psychological 1895 novella The Red Badge of Courage (based on the battle of Chancellorsville) and Ambrose Bierce’s frighteningly bitter short stories, America’s major prose writers in the postwar period passed the Civil War by on the other side. Although the published output of Civil War–related novels and stories is fairly considerable, their strength lies in their sheer quantity rather than their quality.

The closest one comes in American literature to a frank appreciation of the War occurs, not in the writings of the Northern victors, but in the galaxy of great twentieth-century Southern novelists, from William Faulkner to Walker Percy. These authors succeeded largely because they finally came to terms with the poisonous role that race has played in the construction of a Southern mentality. Race was the great ulcer of the Southern innards, wrote Walker Percy, the South’s unending shirt of flame,

and hasn’t it always been that way ever since the first tough God-believing, Christhaunted, cunning violent rapacious Visigoth-Western-Gentile first set foot here with the first black man, the one willing to risk everything, take all or lose all, the other willing just to wait and outlast because sooner or later the first would wake up and know that he had flunked, been proved a liar where he lived, and no man can live with that. And sooner or later the lordly Visigoth-Western-Gentile- Christian-Americans would have to falter, fall out, turn upon themselves like scorpions in a bottle.30

By contrast, the heavier artillerists of Northern literature fled from the war and from race: Clemens, Harte, Henry James, and Sarah Orne Jewett can all be read without much suspicion that they had lived through an immense national crisis, or any inkling at all that it had something to do with race.

American poets, meanwhile, seemed moved by the war only for the production of banality, such as John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Barbara Frietchie” in In War Time (1864), with its melodramatic confrontation of the old flag-waving widow and the somber “Stonewall” Jackson:

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,

But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,

Over the face of the leader came;

The nobler nature within him stirred

To life at that woman’s deed and word:

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head

Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.31

or Thomas Buchanan Read’s “Sheridan’s Ride”:

Up from the South at break of day,

Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay,

The affrighted air with a shudder bore,

Like a herald in haste, to the chieftain’s door,

The terrible grumble, and rumble, and roar,

Telling the battle was on once more,

And Sheridan twenty miles away.32

Walt Whitman, alone among the American poets of the Civil War era, managed to write wartime verse in Drum-Taps (1865) and Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865–66) capable of piercing the facade of romance and glory without indulging either a cheap pacifism or a maniacal vengeance. Not until the 1920s did Stephen Vincent Benét come the closest of any American poet to creating, in John Brown’s Body (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929), an Iliad for the Civil War. Similarly, Civil War–related art rarely rose above the technical level of newspaper illustration, and only a handful of genuinely extraordinary paintings from Winslow Homer, Xanthus R. Smith, Conrad Wise Chapman, and Gilbert Gaul are available to compete with the far vaster output of American artwork on the urban North and the cowboy West.33

The single greatest collection of cultural artifacts tossed up by the war is its popular music and lyrics, and many of the Civil War’s tunes—Daniel Emmett’s “Dixie,” Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” George Root’s “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” Patrick Gilmore’s “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and Henry Clay Work’s “Marching Through Georgia” and the rollicking “Kingdom Comin’”— are still so sturdy and recognizable that they instantly conjure up associations with the Civil War. But once the war’s own music is left behind, very little rises in its track. Charles Ives toyed with Civil War melodic fragments and worked “The Battle Cry of Freedom” into a particularly heart-rending moment in his Three Places in New England; Aaron Copland set the words of Lincoln against the heroic background of what has become one of the chestnuts of Fourth of July concerts, A Lincoln Portrait(1942). Beyond that, only a handful of occasional pieces—a stray symphony here (Roy Harris’s Gettysburg Symphony), a choral arrangement there (in that last resort of all high-school music directors, Peter J. Wilhousky’s setting of the Battle Hymn of the Republic)—even notice the Civil War. No Eroica, no Wozzeck, no War Requiem.

Ironically, the most recurrent artistic shape that the Civil War took was statuary, some of it—like