For most of its existence, the United States has been among the most literate societies in the world. The generation that fought the Civil War was no exception. As such, individuals who had a message to convey to the American populace in the antebellum era turned to books, articles, and pamphlets.
By the 1850s mass-produced publications aimed at a popular audience—including magazines, books, novels, newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets—reflected the nation’s growing appetite for reading and literature. While such publications were considered lowbrow, they enjoyed circulations numbering in the tens of thousands.
In the North, antislavery writers penned countless works criticizing the “peculiar institution.” Noteworthy among them were Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and the fictional Uncle To'm’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the best-selling novel of its time. This seminal work was initially serialized in the National Era between 1851 and 1852 before finally emerging in book format. Its impact was electrifying in Northern circles, and it also appeared as a hugely successful stage adaptation. Ironically, Beecher Stowe had never visited the South herself, and she was criticized for her inaccuracies relative to Southern society. In 1853 she published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin to support many of her assertions.
Southern writers responded with books of their own defending slavery, most prominently George Fit-ZHUGH’s books, Sociology for the South and Cannibals All! These works, and countless others, played an important role in plunging the nation into civil war. Abraham Lincoln acknowledged as much when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe during the war, greeting her by saying, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”
During the war itself the nation’s attention was occupied with the prosecution of the conflict. Nonetheless, new literary works were still produced and read, especially in the North, where the publishing industry throve. There the dime novels that were published by Erasmus and Irwin Beadle of New York sold millions of copies to soldiers in the field. (These paperbacks were called “dime novels” because they generally sold for 10 cents.) While mediocre from a literary standpoint, they became a common and welcome fixture to help relieve the boredom of everyday camp life. Their success spawned a series of novelettes published by Sinclair Tousey in 1863, which focused on war stories for soldiers. The following year T. R. Dawley launched Dawley’s Camp and Fireside Library series. The ongoing struggle had thus found a convenient and willing market among the very contestants forced to wage it. Once the war was over, the American public was even more enthusiastic about reading. The Civil War had a tremendous impact on postwar American culture and shaped the literature created in the 35 years between Appomattox and the turn of the century.
Autobiographical accounts of the war were the most popular and ubiquitous form of literature in the years immediately after the war. Virtually every important general and political leader who survived long enough to do so penned a book or article about their experiences during the war. Between 1884 and 1887, Century magazine commissioned a series of personal accounts by Civil War generals entitled “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.” The articles were widely read throughout the North and South, and in particular the popularity of Ulysses S. Grant’s contribution to the series convinced him to write his lengthy Personal Memoirs (1885-86) just before his death. Grant’s Memoirs was a best-seller, as popular in the North as Jee-eerson Davis’s two-volume Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881) was in the South.
The articles and books written by the leaders of the Civil War, especially the Southern leaders, reflected an important debate over the Southern war effort. The exConfederates justified their actions to the victorious North, and in so doing, they pleaded their case for acceptance back into mainstream American life. These writers, particularly General Jubal A. Early, downplayed the role of slavery in the conflict and emphasized the virtue of Southern soldiers in general and of Robert E. Lee in particular. On a more vindictive note, senior generals such as Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, Joseph E. Johnston, and James Longstreet picked up their pen not so much to glorify the Confederacy as to attack those deemed responsible for its downfall. They blamed one another and Davis, while minimizing their own contributions to defeat. Eventually, this vision of the Civil War came to be called the lost cause, and it has exercised a great deal of influence over how Americans viewed the war up to the present day.
The books and articles written by the leaders of the war were both popular and influential. However, they were by no means the only autobiographical accounts published in the postwar years. Many common soldiers published histories of their regiments or personal recollections of the war. Some of these received a wide readership and are still considered classics, among them Sam Watkins’s Co. Aytch (1882), John Billings’s Hardtack and Coffee (1888), and William Fletcher’s Rebel Private: Front and Rear (1907). Women contributed to the body of Civil War nonfiction, some writing memoirs, others publishing the diaries they wrote during the war or during a particular battle. Prominent among them are Emma Edmonds’s Nurse and Spy in the Union Army (1865) and Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison (1865) by Belle Boyd. The Southern standpoint was well represented by the publication of the diary of Charleston, South Carolina, resident Mary B. Chesnut in 1905. In it she conveyed acutely detailed, lively, and opinionated observations about life in that city’s inner circles as the war progressed. It was reissued in 1949 as A Diary from Dixie and again in 1981 as Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by historian C. Vann Woodward. He posited that the “diary” was actually written between 1881 and 1884 from notes assembled during the Civil War, but this does not detract from its powerful depictions of a society at war and its increasingly debilitating impact on the city’s elite. In addition, there were also a number of memoirs of slavery written by African Americans in the postwar era. Rather than emphasize the evils of slavery, they stressed the necessity of self-reliance and independence. The best known of these accounts is Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901).
Novels about the Civil War were also popular. The most notable Civil War fiction of the period was written by John William De Forest, whose work presents warfare in a very realistic fashion that would have been unthinkable in the antebellum era. De Forest’s most popular book was Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. Published in 1867, the novel combines a romantic story of sectional reconciliation with vivid descriptions of the brutality of combat. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne saw a direct correlation between the war and the realist movement, arguing that the Civil War “introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed.” Perhaps the best example of the “new realism” that Hawthorne described is The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by Stephen Crane. The novel is gripping in its terse and dramatic descriptions of human beings under fire. Crane’s literary command of combat conditions is even more surprising considering he was neither a veteran nor a man who had experienced armed conflict. The Red Badge of Courage is regarded as an American literary masterpiece and one of the best Civil War novels ever written. The work of De Forest had a profound influence on other writers who came after him, including Ambrose Bierce, Edward Bellamy, and William Dean Howells.
Other literary movements of the postbellum era had their roots in the Civil War as well. The most notable was regionalism. Paradoxically, a war fought to reunite the nation gave Americans a heightened, highly romanticized sense of their regional differences. Western fiction became an established genre. Western authors, most prominently Bret Harte, excited readers’ imaginations with images of a “Wild West” filled with endless adventure and excitement. At the same time, the South experienced a literary renaissance led by Mark Twain, arguably the most famous author in American history. Twain’s career began with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) and continued through such classics as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Twain developed a distinctive style that reflected a number of influences, among them slave narratives, folk tales, and political satire.
By 1900 the overwhelming influence of the Civil War on American popular culture subsided as the generation that had lived through the war faded away. Nonetheless, the war had assumed a permanent place in American memory, and it continues to be a popular subject among American authors. Mississippi writer William Faulkner illustrated the long reach of Reconstruction and its consequences in his character-driven novels The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Absalom! Absalom! (1936). Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), Shelby Foote’s Shiloh (1952), Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974), and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997) are among the modern works on the Civil War to tally sales in the millions of copies. And, in terms of sheer volume of yearly output, military and political histories of the Civil War are exceeded only by those concerning World War II. Clearly, the war continues to resonate with Americans.
See also Gone With the Wind.
Further reading: Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Emory Elliott, ed., The Columbia History of the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Alice Fahs, Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).
—Christopher Bates
World History
