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Overview
In The Unwritten War, Daniel Aaron examines the literary output of American writers—major and minor—who treated the Civil War in their works. He seeks to understand why this devastating and defining military conflict has failed to produce more literature of a notably high and lasting order, why there is still no "masterpiece" of Civil War fiction.
In his portraits and analyses of 19th- and some 20th-century writers, Aaron distinguishes between those who dealt with the war only marginally—Henry Adams, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain-and those few who sounded the war's tragic import—Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner. He explores the extent to which the war changed the direction of American literature and how deeply it entered the consciousness of American writers. Aaron also considers how writers, especially those from the South, discerned the war's moral and historical implications.
The Unwritten War was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1973. The New Republic declared, [This book's] major contribution will no doubt be to American literary history. In this respect it resembles Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore and is certain to become an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to explore the letters, diaries, journals, essays, novels, short stories, poems-but apparently no plays-which constitute Civil War literature. The mass of material is presented in a systematic, luminous, and useful way.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817390310 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 10/21/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 424 |
| File size: | 640 KB |
About the Author
Daniel Aaron is Professor Emeritus of American Literature at Harvard University and founding president of the Library of America series of classic writings by American authors. He has written many books on American history and literature, including Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives and American Notes.
Read an Excerpt
The Unwritten War
American Writers and the Civil War
By Daniel Aaron
UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 1973 Daniel AaronAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9031-0
CHAPTER 1
Writers and Politics
The fact is that a crisis has been reached in the history of slavery which any one could have foreseen; the slave states are over-stocked, and space is needed to render the negro of any value as property. The Constitution must be bedeviled in order to do this. ... The soi-disant patriots of that region are pulling down all these evils on their own heads. We are on the eve of great events. Every week knocks a link out of the chain of the Union — At the next Presidential election it will snap. Tinkering will do no good any longer. A principle must prevail, and that principle will be freedom.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, 1850
The slave interest is a spoiled child; the Federal Government is its foolishly indulgent nurse. Every thing it has asked for has been eagerly given it; more eagerly still if it cries after it; more eagerly still if it threatens to cut off its nurse's ears. The more we give it the louder its cries, and the more furious its threats; and now we have Northern men writing long letters to persuade their readers that it will actually cut off its nurse's ears if we exercise the right of suffrage, and elect a President of our own choice, instead of giving it one of its own favorites.
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, 1859
Taking Sides
State or regional affiliations alone did not determine a writer's political and social loyalties in the 1850s. Examples could be cited of Northerners with Southern sympathies and Southerners who considered their own section a benighted Sahara, but there was something that might be described as a regional outlook.
In New England, one strong contingent raged at what they took to be the government's immoral capitulation to the "Lords of the Lash," whereas another, including a number of the eminent literary gentry, despised abolitionism and its reckless proponents. Yet, because of their common culture, they shared certain values and assumptions despite their differences.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the priest of transcendentalism, was by definition antislavery and sympathetic to any doctrine that dissolved artificial distinctions. At the same time, a latent conservatism anchored him to the realities he could so easily dispose of in his rhapsodic moments. By 1850, however, events had turned him into a committed abolitionist; slavery and slaveholders released in him ancestral wrath.
Henry David Thoreau, carrying the individualism of his master, Emerson, to the extreme and distilling a purer strain of anarchism from the transcendental solution, had no taste for compromise. Of course he was an abolitionist but scornful of sentimental reformers and as hard on Northern condoners of slavery or the velleities of inactive humanitarians as he was on the slaveholders themselves.
James Russell Lowell, although ardently abolitionist in his youth and regarded, especially in the South, as an extremist, was already beginning to cool in the fifties. By 1860, he had moved closer to the position taken by Charles Eliot Norton, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., George Ticknor, Francis Parkman, and other conservative Brahmin and State Street–oriented Bostonians whose dislike of slavery in no way weakened their will to tolerate it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes was not much interested in social problems removed from the immediacies of his beloved Boston, the hub of the world. He was conservative on the slavery question and temperamentally opposed to "ultraism" of any sort.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow announced his antislavery views as early as 1842 (Poems on Slavery), but gentle and forbearing, he refused to indict the slaveholder for the sin and shrank from active political agitation. His lifelong friend, the hot abolitionist Charles Sumner, kept him in touch with public affairs.
John Greenleaf Whittier was the earliest and most undeviatingly committed antislavery literary figure in New England. A sometimes splenetic Quaker, half volcano, half iceberg, his abolitionism clashed with his pacifism. In the 1850s, he was less of a zealot than Garrison.
Nathaniel Hawthorne lived abroad throughout most of the 1850s and did not feel the political quakes of the decade. Although a Democrat and impatient with abolition and abolitionists, he was no apologist for slavery and held no brief for the South.
The principal writers of the Middle States, with some exceptions, tended to be less doctrinaire in their political views than the New England radicals, and closer to the Boston conservatives. The Yankeephobic South did not raise their hackles, and they were not given to antislavery crusades.
James Fenimore Cooper's death in 1851 removed from the scene one of the last of the Knickerbocker conservatives. Cooper was a strong Unionist and a stickler for constitutional niceties. He frowned on demagoguery and fanaticism from any quarter. Although he considered the possibility of civil war a remote one, he placed responsibility on Northern antislavery agitators should the split occur.
Washington Irving lived on until 1859, but this gentle and politics-hating man (much admired in the South) belonged like Cooper to an earlier era. At the time of his death he was a beloved but anachronistic institution.
William Cullen Bryant was linked by age and association to Cooper and Irving. This tough, argumentative, and politically minded journalist-poet and New England transplant remained an influential figure before, during, and after the War. Although a Unionist and strongly antislavery, he spoke for the free-soil wing of the movement and kept his poetry and politics in separate compartments.
Herman Melville shared his friend Hawthorne's contempt for windy reformers and a measure of his conservatism. Melville's sense of evil as "the chronic malady of the universe" deepened as the War approached, but he was less parochial than Hawthorne and more concerned about the contradictions and paradoxes of American democracy.
Walt Whitman was the most nationalistic of all the Middle States group, the most enraptured by the vision of Union. Not an abolitionist, like Bryant he was a committed free-soiler.
Moving from New York to Pennsylvania and farther South, many writers suggest themselves, but few of much literary importance. By the 1850s, even the most Union-loving Southerners were under pressure to refute Northern aspersions against their section. Some, like William Gilmore Simms and a number of the minor fry of poets, fiction writers, and essayists, had already become partisans for the Southland and defended, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the "peculiar institution." Others, like John Pendleton Kennedy of Maryland (whose Irvingesque celebration of the plantation, Swallow Barn, looked back nostalgically to a gentler South), remained faithful to the dream of Union.
The sectional war of words intensified as the decade lengthened, with radicals in both North and South making it hard for the moderates to keep to the middle way. Abolitionists of the Garrison–Phillips–Theodore Parker stamp objectified the great sin of the South in the slaveholder and pictured the Cotton Kingdom as one vast brothel ruled by brutal whip-swinging bashaws. New York and Pennsylvania writers looked more benevolently upon the South than the New Englanders did, perhaps because closer contact with Southerners made them readier to see slavery as a national or historical calamity — not a Southern crime. But even those like Bryant or Whitman who paid brief visits to the South or had Southern acquaintances possessed only the flimsiest knowledge of Southern life and institutions. Southern writers displayed no greater understanding of the North notwithstanding their Northern publishers and friends. What they saw or read confirmed their distrust. Professional ties between Northern and Southern writers snapped easily in the months before secession.
The irrevocable break caught the Northern men of letters unprepared. For all their dislike of slavery, the majority would have blanched at the thought of its being extinguished by American blood. Charles Eliot Norton of Boston, later a key figure in the federal ideological battalion during the War, spoke for a number of the conservative intelligentsia when he conceded in 1853 that slavery "has often associated with itself many of the finest exercises of human virtues; it has given opportunity for the display of many of the noblest and most precious qualities of character; it has interwoven itself with the interests, the affections, and the religion of men." Not only proslavery apologists took this line. Harriet Beecher Stowe said as much in Uncle Tom's Cabin, published a year before. Yet the widely held opinion that distinguished slavery, the "historical evil," from the personally blameless slaveholder and reproached both abolitionist and "Fire-Eater" soon became untenable.
Compromise, momentarily successful in 1850, failed to settle bitter sectional controversies and left ideologues on both sides dissatisfied. Webster and Clay merely swept the telltale dirt under the national carpet. Moderates might hail Frederick Law Olmsted's massive report on the seaboard slave states in 1857 as an undoctrinaire picture of the slave system, but the time had long passed when Americans could weigh the pros and cons of slavery. A sizable minority denounced it (along with the coercive government that abetted it) as unjust and iniquitous. The majority of Northern people, writers and intellectuals among them, went along with the moderate-gradualist-ameliorative stand on slavery so long as it stayed within its prescribed boundaries. By 1859 not even the most cautious standpatters among them were sure it would or could.
The Fallen Angel and the Risen Saint
Two events in the 1850s deeply engaged a number of American writers. One was Daniel Webster's defense of the Fugitive Slave Act on March 7, 1850, the other the trial and execution of John Brown nine years later.
The first, of special import for the antislavery literati in and out of New England, dramatized (in the eyes of the radicals, at least, and even some moderates) the moral fall of the great legalist and compromiser, the eloquent defender of the Constitution. A Yankee Milton might have treated it as the prologue of an epic tragedy, replete with a lofty hero, fervid soliloquies, and climactic scenes. The episode took place at a time when the nation resounded with oratory, and the protagonist, a colossus of the forum, was the grandest orator of all. The plot of the transcendentalist drama, "The Seventh of March, or the Fall of a Titan," might be summarized as follows:
A New Hampshire man of yeoman stock (an "oak tree," a "man-o-war," a "loaded cannon," a "steam engine in breeches") comes to Boston and quickly establishes himself as a lawyer and statesman. In Congress he defends the principles as well as the interests of New England. His Plymouth Speech, his thrilling reply to the South Carolinian Hayne, and his appearances before the Supreme Court enchant the nation. He has faults, but they are the masculine and venial failings of a vascular man. Gradually his constant association with power and place begins to work upon him. The marvelously endowed man who might have gained eternal fame as leader of the antislavery cause falls from grace through ambition. The temporizer is rejected by both North and South.
Contemporary versions of this story can be found in the selected prose of Whitman, the political sermons of Theodore Parker, the lectures and journals of Thoreau, in Whittier's polemical poem "Ichabod," and in the asides of Alcott, Longfellow, Lowell, Horace Mann, Bryant, and others. But the most anguished comment on the Websterian tragedy and the most dramatic account of Webster's rise and fall is Emerson's.
The Webster first mentioned in young Emerson's journals of the 1820s was a national phenomenon like Niagara Falls, a composite of Napoleon, Prometheus, and Thor.
His voice is sepulchral — there is not the least variety or the least harmony of tone — it commands, it fills, it echoes, but is harsh and discordant. — He possesses an admirable readiness, a fine memory and a faculty of perfect abstraction, and unparalleled impudence and a tremendous power of concentration — he brings all that he has ever heard, read or seen to bear on the case in question. He growls along the bar to see who will run, and if nobody runs he will fight.
Emerson plainly adored the bruiser for the right, God-inspired "to say gigantic things," but it was "the majesty of his moral nature," not his rude strength, that drew Emerson to him, the beauty and dignity of his principles. As a good transcendentalist, Emerson identified intellectual power with goodness. He was ready to place Webster in the company of Milton and Burke.
But by the late 1830s and early 1840s, Emerson's adulation waned. He still admired his hero's "great cinderous eyes" and the "rich and well-modulated thunder of his voice," still condoned his venalities as the Greeks excused those of Themistocles, but he began to sense in Webster a disposition to truckle. Might this latent weakness prove to be the cankerworm that could rot the glorious oak?
Webster's defense of the Fugitive Slave Law on March 7, 1850, confirmed Emerson's apprehensions; Webster's greatness, he reluctantly concluded, lay behind him. The "Titanic Earth-Son" was not guided by principle. He had deserted Milton, Burke, and Luther for Castlereagh, Polignac, and Metternich and merely blustered when he talked of Union. "The worst mischiefs that could follow from Secession," he charged, "and new combination of the smallest fragments of the wreck were slight and medicable to the calamity your Union has brought." So Emerson's pride, Webster, became his mortification. "The fame of Webster ends in the nasty law."
He knew the great man and his friends dismissed such recriminations as the "trashy sentimentalism" of "transcendentalists and abstractionists and people of no weight." Such men usually resorted to "the cheap cant of lawyers" in defending immorality; but the poet's duty was to preserve reverence in the hearts of the people:
It must always happen that the guiding counsels of ages and ages should come not from statesmen or political leaders, always men of seared consciences, "half villains," who, it has been said, are the more dangerous than whole ones (Mr. Webster would be very sorry if this country should take his present counsel for any but this particular emergency), but from contemplative men aloof by tastes and necessity from these doubtful activities, and really aware of the truth long before the contemporary statesmen, because more impressionable.
This proud assertion of the artist's primacy against the Websterian council of expediency defined the conflict between what Emerson called "the laws of the world" (Fate, Memory, "the must") and "the laws of the heart" (Right, Duty, Hope, "the may").
To Emerson, the very notion of a broker-politician reconciling Right and Wrong was a profanation. To Webster and his friends, who took disunion sentiment seriously and struggled to shore up a collapsing Union, the Emersonians threatened the Founders' dream by their egotistic fantasies. Webster may have palliated the horror of slavery, but in 1850 when the average antislavery Northerner (poets, clergymen, and senators included) misread the Southern temper, Webster and the Southern Unionists did not exaggerate the secession threat. Webster's logic made no sense to an abolitionist who believed the Union was already rotten with the slavery cancer and thought it prudent, as well as moral, to lop off the most diseased portion and establish a slaveless republic. In the fifties, a handful of New England intellectuals willingly accepted this possibility and discounted presaged calamities.
That is why the response of some writers in and out of New England to John Brown's raid was one of exhilaration even when mixed with disapproval, and why they relished his martyrdom and saw him both as a portent and a messenger of good tidings. To the dedicated antislavery man, any compromise with a filthy institution was an immoral expediency at best. John Brown, as primordial and as epic-making a figure as the godlike Daniel and ripe for legend even while alive, symbolized the moral man's reply to slavery.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Unwritten War by Daniel Aaron. Copyright © 1973 Daniel Aaron. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,PART ONE: "They Break the Links of Union",
1. Writers and Politics,
2. The "Wholesome Calamity",
PART TWO: A Philosophical View of the Whole Affair,
3. Hawthorne: Lonely Dissenter,
4. Whitman: The "Parturition Years",
5. Melville: The Conflict of Convictions,
PART THREE: The "Malingerers",
6. Henry Adams,
7. Henry James,
8. William Dean Howells,
9. Mark Twain,
PART FOUR: Drawing-Room Warriors and Combatants,
10. Gentlemen of Peace and War,
11. John W. De Forest,
12. Ambrose Bierce,
13. Albion W. Tourgée,
PART FIVE: The War at Second Hand,
14. Stephen Crane and Harold Frederic,
PART SIX: The South: Onlookers and Participants,
15. Writers in the Confederacy,
16. The Unwritten Novel,
17. Sidney Lanier,
18. George Washington Cable,
PART SEVEN: Reconstructing the Southern Past,
19. The Neo-Confederates,
20. William Faulkner,
Conclusion "Such Was the War",
Supplement 1. The War Prefigured,
Supplement 2. Lincoln and the Writers,
Supplement 3. A Further Note on the "Collegians",
Supplement 4. Emily Dickinson's "Private Campaign",
Notes (with a Key to Abbreviations Frequently Cited),
Acknowledgments,
Index,