Author Biographies
Alcott, Louisa May
(1832–1888). As the daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, the eccentric educational reformer and founder of the utopian community Fruitlands, Louisa May Alcott was probably destined to see the world in unconventional terms, and her fiction seems to bear out this assessment. Beginning in mid-December 1862, Alcott volunteered as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, but returned to Concord in January 1863 after contracting typhoid fever. Her nursing experience formed the basis for Alcott’s fictional alter ego Tribulation Periwinkle in Hospital Sketches (1863). She returned to the war in the story collection On Picket Duty (1864) and, indirectly, in the novel Little Women (1868). Alcott’s antislavery and feminist politics inform all of this fiction, but so does her essentially apolitical compassion for both civilians and soldiers caught up in the gears of war.
Beers, Ethel Lynn
(1827-1879). The salient facts of Beers’s life are quickly stated. Born Ethelinda Eliot in Goshen, New York, she took the last name of her husband William Beers when they married in 1846. Her best known work is “All Quiet Along the Potomac,” which first appeared as “The Picket Guard” in Harper’s on November 30, 1861. Beers wrote a novel, General Frankie: A Story for Little Folks (1863), and while she published poems in a variety of periodicals, she resisted having them collected, superstitiously fearing that she would die thereafter. Beers died on the day after publication of her collection All Quiet Along the Potomac and Other Poems (1879).
Bierce, Ambrose
(1842–1914?). In writing of the Civil War, Bierce knew whereof he wrote. A veteran, with the Ninth Indiana Volunteers, of some of the bloodiest battles of the conflict, including Shiloh, Stones River, and Missionary Ridge, Bierce developed a grimly sardonic perspective on war and what it does to people. In the story collections Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and Can Such Things Be? (1893), and in the writings later collected as Bits of Autobiography (1909), Bierce returned almost obsessively to the war that had so colored his outlook on the world. Fascinated by the perceptual and experiential aspects of combat, in his fiction Bierce tends to hold at bay the broader ideological, and even military, contexts in which his characters operate, concentrating on situations and feelings that can seem abstracted from real history. Bierce disappeared during a sojourn into the state of Chihuahua to observe the Mexican Revolution.
Blackmar, Armand Edward
(1826–1888). Sometimes called the “Voice of the South,” the composer and music dealer Blackmar was actually born in Vermont and then lived in Ohio before heading south and setting up shop in New Orleans with his brother, Henry Clay Blackmar. There, Gen. Benjamin Butler fined him $500 for publishing pro-Confederate songs and ordered the destruction of his stores of printed music. Blackmar then headed for Georgia to resume publishing.
Booth, John Wilkes
(1838–1865). We do not remember Booth for his writing, and it would be better not to have to remember him at all. But his writing sheds light on the assassination of Lincoln, and it seems to bear out the judgment that, rather than an act of insanity or deviltry, the killing was a rational “political murder,” as editors John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper have put it. Born in Baltimore as the son of Junius Brutus Booth, an accomplished tragic actor, Booth himself became a stage actor of some repute, and continued to perform during the Civil War. His identification with the South growing more intense, Booth orchestrated an abortive plot to abduct Lincoln in the fall of 1864, but the actual assassination, on April 14, 1865, took place after Lee’s surrender, and after Booth learned that Lincoln would be attending Laura Keene’s performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater. The details of the killing need not be rehearsed, but Booth’s frame of mind in his final months is of documentary interest.
Bradbury, William B. (Batchelder)
(1816-1868). Bradbury, a native of Maine and Boston, primarily composed hymnal music for choirs and schools, some of which is still sung in Christian churches today, but he also wrote a number of secular songs. Having already worked as an organist and educator, Bradbury received professional training in Germany in composition and vocal music, and in 1854 started the Bradbury Piano Company in New York with his brother Edward. His prominence in American musical history is suggested by the fact that two of his collections, The Golden Chain and Fresh Laurels, sold over a million copies.
Crane, Stephen
(1871–1900). Arguably the finest writer on the Civil War, or more precisely, on the individual soldier’s complex experience of military service, Crane was not even born until six years after it ended. But the war gave Crane material for his signature themes: the human being under extreme pressure, the relation between the individual and the mass, the mechanization of war and society, the contrast between human ideals and universal indifference. His most important Civil War fiction includes The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and the stories collected in The Little Regiment, and Other Episodes of the American Civil War (1896). Based on his work as a war correspondent for the New York World, Crane also wrote a novel about the Greco–Turkish war, Active Service (1899), and he later drew on his reporting on the Spanish-American war for William Randolph Hearst’s Journal for the collection Wounds in the Rain (1900). Crane’s understanding of the Civil War, and of the society which emerged from it, cannot be separated from his experience covering these later conflicts, and his influence on the twentieth-century literary imagination is difficult to overstate. Crane died of a pulmonary hemorrhage brought on by tuberculosis.
Davis, Rebecca Harding
(1831–1910). Raised in Washington, Pennsylvania, and Wheeling, Virginia, Davis gravitated toward literature at a young age, and practiced her hand at it, but it was not until she published “Life in the Iron Mills” in the Atlantic in 1861 that Davis put herself on the literary map. This story, an expose of industrial capitalism, bears the hallmarks of her style and ethos: a compassion for the downtrodden; an eye for detail; an interest in social and economic forces; a passionate narratorial voice; a Christian faith in the redeemability of humankind. These qualities characterize her first novel, Margaret Howth (1862), and her novel of the Civil War, Waiting for the Verdict (1867), and mark Davis as an important figure in the emergence of American realism and naturalism. Throughout her long literary career, she explored racial and class disparities, the problems inherent in romanticizing war and violence, and what she saw as the American government’s increasingly imperialist aims.
Dickinson, Emily
(1830-1886). Born into a well-to-do Amherst family, Dickinson early showed an independent streak of mind, and after a brief stint at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, she lived quietly and privately, devoting herself to writing, but not publishing, poetry of strangely penetrating force. Since her verses tend to have an oblique, enigmatic, and enclosed quality about them, they can strike readers as disconnected from the larger political, intellectual, and cultural controversies of the nineteenth century. But these broader issues – from evolutionary theory to women’s rights – had a powerful, fruitful impact on Dickinson’s imagination. The Civil War, during which Dickinson wrote much of her best poetry, certainly informed her understanding of violence, nationalism, and religious faith. As both raw material and refractory representational challenge, the war served as a touchstone for Dickinson’s incisive sketches of human fear, ambition, grief, and catharsis.
Douglass, Frederick
(1818–1895). His years as an anti-slavery orator and his two antebellum autobiographies made Douglass the primary African American spokesman of the nineteenth century. From this position, he pushed for Northern victory in the war, which he regarded as an opportunity finally to defeat the scourge of slavery. In numerous essays and addresses, Douglass insisted that the war and its aftermath be understood as a struggle for freedom and civil rights, and sought to call his audience to a greater awareness of the racial issues at the heart of the conflict. In addition to active political employment, he devoted his post-war writing, including a third autobiography, to trying to diminish the power of American race hatred, and he “dearly hoped,” writes David Blight, “that his own sense of self . . . would rest securely in new national traditions that he helped create” (Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 244).
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt
(1868–1963). Du Bois established himself as a scholar by earning a PhD in history from Harvard (the first conferred on an African American) and subsequently teaching at Wilberforce University and Atlanta University. Increasingly skeptical of academia’s ability to effect major social change, however, he moved to New York and turned to political journalism, essays, and novels as his principal expressive outlets. Du Bois had long occupied the more militant wing of the African American political spectrum, and in the 1930s and 1940s deepened his involvement with communism and with the international pan-African movement. Many of his works have passed from notice, but in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a rich and complex blend of sociology, art, and outrage, and a prerequisite to any adequate understanding of African American history and culture, Du Bois permanently changed the country’s intellectual landscape.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence
(1872–1906). His parents had been slaves in Kentucky before the war, and his father Joshua Dunbar served in the 55th Massachusetts—generating memories of violence and struggle that Dunbar absorbed as he developed his writing talents in Ohio’s public schools. Like Charles Chesnutt, Dunbar struggled to give voice to African American experience while observing the rules of the late nineteenth-century American publishing industry. The result is a body of poetry and fiction expressing varying degrees of anger and accommodation. In Oak and Ivy (1893), Majors and Minors (1895), and other collections that combine dialect poetry and formal verse, Dunbar can seem ambiguously to celebrate the power of black folk traditions while pandering to the era’s fascination with the antebellum plantation and its “picturesque” slaves. Other poems convey, in often subtle fashion, a stronger sense of cultural and political disfranchisement.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
(1803–1882). By the time civil war broke out, Emerson had become something of a dean of American, or at least Northern, cultural politics. After retiring from the Unitarian ministry in 1832, Emerson established himself, through his essays and lectures, as a preeminent social critic and one of the truly influential American philosophers. Increasingly committed to the antislavery cause during 1840s and 1850s, the personally gentle Emerson welcomed the war as an opportunity to scourge the country of the blight of slavery and to align its national destiny with the will of God and Nature. As much as anything else, the realities and exigencies of full-scale war worked to temper Emerson’s youthful exuberant idealism, although he never lost his lifelong belief in the power of character and the sanctity of the human spirit. Like many other abolitionists, however, Emerson’s strong advocacy of emancipation and civil rights did not always comport smoothly with his condescending representation of African Americans.
Emmett, Daniel Decatur
(1815–1904). The dubious American tradition of blackface minstrelsy owes much to the lyricist and composer Emmett, a founding member of the “Original Virginia Minstrels” in 1843 who continued to perform into the 1890s, with Al Field’s Minstrels. The American folksong tradition also owes him for such tuneful chestnuts as “Turkey in the Straw” and “Blue Tail Fly.” The peripatetic Emmett began and ended life in Mount Vernon, Ohio.
Finch, Francis Miles
(1827–1907). The law came first for Finch, but literature was not far behind. A long-serving judge on the New York State Court of Appeals, Finch also developed profound connections to Cornell University, serving as trustee, counsel, lecturer in law, and then dean of the Law School. Most of his poetry was published after his death in The Blue and the Gray, and Other Verses (1909).
Frederic, Harold
(1856–1898). For Frederic, who as an impressionable boy had witnessed with chagrin the Civil War’s impact on small-town life in upstate New York, the conflict seemed neither an ordained struggle nor a glorious opportunity to destroy slavery, but an unnecessary disaster visited upon ordinary Americans. In his fiction about the war, most prominently The Copperhead (1893), Marsena (1894), and In the Sixties (1897) Frederic brought his journalistic eye to bear (he was London correspondent for the New York Times) in rendering how the war affected the rural community of Dearborn County (his fictional counterpart to Oneida County).
Gilmore, Patrick Sarsfield
(1829–1892). After emigrating to Boston from Ireland in 1849, Gilmore began establishing himself as one of the titans of American band music, composing, performing, and organizing festivals. Along with his band, Gilmore served in the 24th Massachusetts Infantry, and was named Bandmaster of the Union Forces in the Department of the Gulf, under Benjamin Butler’s command in New Orleans. After the war, Gilmore organize several musical “peace jubilees” and served as bandmaster in the New York National Guard until his death.
Grant, Ulysses Simpson
(1822–1885). Forward-leaning in war, Grant was unassuming in prose, and both qualities made him surpassingly effective as both a warrior and a writer. His Memoirs, written while Grant was terminally ill and heavily in debt, represent the retrospective view of a man who had led the Union to victory and served as President for eight years, but had been humbled by personal and professional setbacks. Grant’s defining assets as a general were a clear grasp of the importance of logistics, a tactical and strategic flexibility, and an unflagging determination to succeed. These qualities underlay his successes in the Western theater, particularly the capture of Vicksburg, which propelled him to the top of the military hierarchy, from where he led the final long and grinding campaign against Lee in Virginia. Grant’s memoirs, tracing his rise from humble origins but stopping short of his pockmarked Presidency, are remarkably free of the self-vindication, competitiveness, or revisionism that marred the accounts of many other Civil War veterans. Combined with their clarity and straightforwardness, this modesty has led the Memoirs to be recognized as one of the masterpieces of American autobiography.
Harris, Joel Chandler
(1848?–1908). Harris bequeathed to American literature the legendary characters Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit. He also left us a fierce debate about how his picturesque, nostalgic portrayal of life on the old plantation works both to undermine the image and interests of African Americans and to celebrate the weak against the powerful. A life-long resident of Georgia, a newspaperman from a young age, and a shy boy who never knew his father, Harris drew on his youthful “friendship” with two elderly slaves in writing stories that stage unexpectedly complex questions of reconciliation and violence, labor and power, comedy and tragedy, race and language.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
(1804–1864). One of the great fictional interpreters of early American history, Hawthorne met his match in the Civil War. Having returned from Europe to Concord in 1860, in ill health, Hawthorne only saw the war at a distance, but after a sojourn to Washington, D.C. in March 1862, he produced the anomalous “Chiefly About War Matters.” Written in the tradition of the traveling observer of American ways and customs, the essay displays some of his characteristic writerly qualities: a suave mastery of the language, sharp irony, a disinclination to get political, the use of a narrator who tends to obscure the author’s own thoughts. Fascinated by the relationship between moral psychology and national history, yet suspicious of “causes” and seemingly detached from the war’s deeper meanings, Hawthorne may or may not have made an incisive analyst of the country’s decisive cataclysm.
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth
(1823–1911). Minister, poet, feminist, abolitionist, colonel, politician, author, and mentor of Emily Dickinson, Higginson lived a brimming life whose core values, he wrote in a late essay, were “the love of personal liberty, of religious freedom, and of the equality of the sexes.” Having aided John Brown in planning the Harper’s Ferry raid, and having raised a white Massachusetts regiment in 1862, Higginson jumped at the opportunity to organize and lead a black regiment in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Out of this transformative experience he wrote Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869), a volume whose strange amalgam of personal affection, unconscious paternalism, and racial egalitarianism makes it a revealing study of radical thought at mid-century.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr.
(1841–1935). As a lawyer, legal theorist, and Supreme Court Justice, Holmes had an abiding distrust of ideological abstractions. His approach to the law emphasized behavior rather than inner states of mind, the pragmatics of policy rather than legal philosophy. Louis Menand has traced this outlook to Holmes’s experience in the Civil War, which “made him lose his belief in beliefs” and taught him that “certitude leads to violence” (The Metaphysical Club, 4, 61). Holmes served in the 20th Massachusetts Volunteers for three years, and was wounded three times, twice severely at Ball’s Bluff and Antietam. In the mind of the jurist, the memory of the soldier never faded.
Horton, George Moses
(1798?–c.1883). Though a slave, the self-styled “colored bard of North Carolina” made a living for himself, and a name, by selling poems in and around the college town of Chapel Hill. In his two pre-war collections, The Hope of Liberty (1829) and The Poetical Works (1845), Horton found a measure of expressive freedom (within the limits of his time and place), but legal freedom would only come with Emancipation. At the end of the Civil War, Horton traveled through North Carolina with a Capt. William Banks of the Michigan cavalry, gathering material and composing lyrics for a third volume, Naked Genius (1865). Only in this last collection did Horton not have to walk the razor’s edge of trying to voice his discontent without alienating his white readers, benefactors, and masters.
Howe, Julia Ward
(1819–1910). The overmastering fame of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” has somewhat obscured Howe’s other activities and accomplishments, including her prolific writings in a variety of genres and her decades-long work in the abolitionist, women’s suffrage, and peace movements. Along with her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, she edited the Boston Commonwealth, an antislavery newspaper; directed the Perkins Institute for the Blind in New York; and was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Howe’s feminism coexisted with a belief in the sacredness of domestic life, and her religiosity coexisted with a sharp sense of humor, all of which are on display in her collections Passion Flowers (1854), Words for the Hour (1857) and Later Lyrics (1866).
Jackson, Helen Hunt
(1830–1885). In her ferocious literary and political advocacy of Native American rights, particularly in the history A Century of Dishonor (1881) and the novel Ramona (1884), Jackson turned to Harriet Beecher Stowe as a model of what a middle-aged white woman could accomplish in the cultural arena. A childhood friend of Emily Dickinson, and an adult friend of Thomas Higginson, Jackson began her literary career after the Civil War (during which her first husband, Maj. Edward B. Hunt, died in an accident on a Union submarine). But it was primarily through her later activism, including service as the first female Special Commissioner of Indian Affairs, that Jackson would make her mark on American history.
James, Henry
(1843–1916). The main fact about James’s relation to the Civil War was that his younger brothers enlisted while he did not, apparently disqualified from service by an “obscure hurt” (not necessarily physical) he claims having received in the spring of 1861. Unlike his brothers and many of his male peers, James turned inward, and toward the page, and began honing the writerly craft that would make him by century’s end the country’s most prolific, most influential, and most European novelist. In James’s early fiction, including the Civil War stories “Poor Richard” (1867) and “A Most Extraordinary Case” (1868), we can see emerging his signature themes: heroic renunciation, the “life unlived,” observation as experience, the delights of art and the imagination, the dangers of physicality.
Kittredge, Walter
(1834–1905). A native of Merrimack, New Hampshire, Kittredge was a self-taught musician who performed both solo and with the Hutchinson Family musical troupe. For health reasons the “Minstrel of Merrimack” never served in the military, but he composed over 500 songs.
London, Jack
(1876–1916). London’s childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area was as unconventional as his adult life. Born out of wedlock to Flora Wellman and (reputedly) William Chaney, a proselyte for astrology, Jack was largely raised by an ex-slave, Virginia Prentiss. Before her son was one year old, Flora married Civil War veteran John London and the family eventually settled in Oakland. As a young man, Jack rambled across the northwest United States and Canada, at one point joining a sealing cruise and later joining the gold rush to the Klondike. While tramping and picking up odd jobs, London also read profusely, from Darwin to Marx to Nietzsche – and thus was born his lifelong interest in evolution, poverty, and class struggle, issues that found their way into his work along with the characters and scenes he encountered on his travels. Popular and successful in his own time, London was a disciplined and prolific author, whose intellectual independence and taut brand of naturalism made for some very effective writing about war.
Lucas, Daniel Bedinger
(1836–1909). Like Francis Miles Finch, Lucas was both a lawyer and a poet; unlike Finch, he served in the war itself, fighting for the Confederacy until almost the end of the conflict. He composed “In the Land Where We Were Dreaming” after the execution of his friend John Yates Beall for espionage in February in 1865, and after the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. During the postwar decades, Lucas served in the West Virginia judiciary and in politics, and produced several volumes of poetry.
McCarthy, Harry
(1834-1888). McCarthy (sometimes spelled Macarthy) was quite the character. Originally from Ulster in Northern Ireland, McCarthy emigrated to Arkansas as a teenager and, during the 1850s and 1860s, took his show on the road, making a life for himself as a traveling singer and low-brow entertainer, performing throughout the South. His most successful song, “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” premiered at the very beginning of the war and commemorated the first Confederate flag, which depicted a single white star on a blue background. Although beloved by Southern audiences, McCarthy apparently saw the writing on the wall and moved to Philadelphia before the war was over.
Melville, Herman
(1819–1891). Melville made his reputation as the author of Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), buoyant novels of South Sea adventure, and gradually squandered that reputation as the author of Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), and other works whose stylistic and philosophical complexities confounded a reading public more accustomed to the literary sensibilities of Longfellow or Stowe. Melville’s politics were unionist and antislavery, but not partisan, and he followed the Civil War from Massachusetts, and then New York, with an eye toward its poetic possibilities. His volume Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York, 1866) sold poorly and impressed few critics, but has gained increasing respect for its poetic originality and its willingness to explore the psychological and social subtleties of the conflict. Rebelling against his era’s conventions of imagery and meter, Melville tried to convey the fractured experience of war in poems that, for the most part, are less concerned with lamentation, celebration, or moral judgment than with the impossibility of ethical and cultural certitude. They respond powerfully to specific scenes, states of mind, and philosophical ironies, but reflect Melville’s misgivings about the war’s meaning for American history.
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart
(1844-1911). Born Mary Gray Phelps in Andover, Massachusetts, Phelps wrote most of her fiction using the name of her mother, who died when she was 8. Along many other prolific writers of her era, it was Phelps’s fate to be remembered for only a few of the many works she actually produced. An early feminist and advocate for social reform, she was best known for her spiritualist novels, particularly The Gates Ajar (1868), which reimagined heaven as a real place where family members could reunite in the afterlife. Phelps starting writing The Gates Ajar during the Civil War, and while she drew on her own personal experience of losing both her mother and stepmother at young ages, she had clearly touched a deep cultural nerve, and the novel went on to become a major bestseller. Her short stories about the war, including “A Sacrifice Consumed,” “The Bend,” and “My Refugees” (all published in Harper’s in 1864), focus on women’s experience and the difficult struggle to maintain religious faith in the face of terrible violence.
Reese, Lizette Woodworth
(1856–1935). A native of Waverly, Maryland, outside Baltimore, Reese was a school-teacher who wrote poetry of lasting significance. Published in a variety of journals great and small, from Scribner’s to the Midland, and in a series of slender volumes including A Branch of May (1887), A Handful of Lavender (1891), A Quiet Road (1896), and Spicewood (1920), her poems celebrate nature, family life, and common things, without taking many words to do so, and without slavishly following poetic convention. In A Victorian Village (1929) Reese recalled her girlhood impressions of the Civil War, which divided her family as it did Maryland: “The romance and the sharper tragedy of war were everywhere about us. . . . Neighbor looked askance at neighbor. . . . Politics, which had been fearlessly public, became an entirely private affair, to be discussed behind drawn curtains and well-locked doors.”
Root, George Frederick
(1820–1895). After working as a composer and music teacher in New York, Europe, and his native state of Massachusetts, in 1859 Root became a partner in the successful Chicago firm of Root & Cady, publisher of sheet music for churches and schools. Root’s “The First Gun Is Fired” (copyright April 18, 1861) is the first known published Civil War song.
Sawyer, Charles Carroll
(1833–????). Sawyer was born in Connecticut, began writing poems at a young age, and moved to New York as a young man, where he was educated. Sawyer’s songs were popular both North and South, and three of them, including “When This Cruel War Is Over,” sold more than a million copies during the Civil War.
Sherman, William Tecumseh
(1820–1891). The early indications were not promising, despite his excellence at West Point. After a series of unsuccessful business ventures and financial problems, Sherman rejoined the Army, becoming colonel in 1861, but had a mixed record in his early battles in the western theater. Two crucial turning points were his command of Memphis, during which he began developing his concept of total war, and his effective service under Grant during the grueling Vicksburg campaign. Named commander of Western forces after Grant’s promotion to Lieutenant General, Sherman began pushing into Georgia against Joseph Johnston and then John Bell Hood. After subduing Atlanta, Sherman’s army cut a wide swath to Savannah, then up into South Carolina, destroying as much property as possible to in order to convince civilians of the futility of war. Having no particular animus toward Southerners, Sherman recommended lenient surrender terms and a non-vindictive Reconstruction policy. Sherman wrote his Memoirs while he served, rather unhappily, as commanding general of the United States Army, and they reflect the public personality of a man who had earned a profound understanding of both the details and the depths of war.
Smith, M. B.
(??-??). We know next to nothing about this soldier, one of the very few who actually published a musical composition; the editor of Southern War Songs (New York, 1890) identifies him only as a member of “Co. C., Second Regiment, Texas Volunteers.” This was a Confederate regiment that began duty on the Gulf Coast before being transferred to the Army of the Mississippi; it fought in the Battle of Shiloh and was commended for bravery. Vanquished at the siege of Vicksburg, the regiment returned to Texas as prisoners of war.
Stephens, Alexander Hamilton
(1812-1883). From his humble background to his frail health, the future Vice President of the Confederacy overcame much hardship to become a dominant presence in his nearly fifty-year career in Georgia state politics. Raised poor, orphaned by age fourteen, Stephens nonetheless graduated from Franklin College and went on to a successful law practice that led him into the Georgia state legislature and later into the U.S. House of Representatives. Stephens was a staunch supporter (and practitioner) of slavery, and he played a vital role in the passage of the Compromise of 1850, yet he opposed secession right up to the outbreak of the Civil War. After the war, Stephens was elected to the U.S. Senate, but his wartime role proved too controversial for many Northerners and he was refused the seat. On political hiatus, he took up writing but returned to politics as a senator in 1873. He was elected governor of Georgia in 1882, but his service was to be brief; he died four months into his term on March 4, 1883.
Taylor, Susie King
(1848–1912). Almost all of what we know about the life of Susie King Taylor—from her childhood as a slave and her escape at age 14, to her stint as a unofficial nurse and teacher for an early black regiment, the South Carolina Volunteers, and her work with the Woman’s Relief Corps—she herself records in her autobiography, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp (1902). That memoir is remarkable not only in that it provides a woman’s first-hand account of the business of war, but in that it creatively fuses two central genres of late nineteenth-century American literature, the slave narrative and the Civil War memoir. Doing so enabled her to focus on the war’s emancipationist meaning from the perspective of direct experience rather than mere political theory.
Watkins, Samuel Rush
(1839–1901). A regular guy from around Columbia, Tennessee, Watkins went on to become one of the finest, most distinctive Southern writers the Civil War produced. As a private in Company H (the “Maury Greys”) of the First Tennessee Infantry, Watkins served for the entire war, from the earliest skirmishes through Joseph Johnston’s surrender to William T. Sherman in April 1865. By the end of the war, both his company and regiment had suffered casualties in excess of 90 percent, but Watkins survived to return to Tennessee, earn a college degree, and start a family. What sets his memoir, Co. Aytch, apart from the pack of postwar retrospectives is its narrative voice: ironic, comic, outraged, modest, and perpetually fresh.
Whitman, Walt
(1819–1892). His 1855 Leaves of Grass marks a watershed moment in American literature, when the polite verse of an age had to make room for the brash, earthy, and omnivorous poetry of a young rough from Brooklyn. Yet in Whitman’s own words, the Civil War “completed” him. It gave him the raw material that, in Drum-Taps (1865), and in his prose works Memoranda During the War (1875–1876) and Specimen Days and Collect (1882), he worked and reworked, reaching for an understanding of the war’s commanding significance for human beings and for the country. That material, however, was bought dear. After traveling to Washington D.C. to find his younger brother George, who had been wounded at the battle of Fredericksburg, and seeing there the war’s wounded, Whitman began working as a volunteer nurse at army hospitals in Washington. In about three years of such work, according to biographer David Reynolds, Whitman tended to between 80,000 and 100,000 soldiers (Walt Whitman’s America). The physical trauma and emotional suffering he observed changed Whitman’s imagination, even as the war itself seemed to be cleansing the nation, disencumbering it of a terrible burden, and even as he appreciated something of the romance of battle. His writings on the war—sketches, snapshots, reflections, essays—show Whitman to be one of the conflict’s foremost interpreters.
Winner, Septimus
(1827–1902). Winner wrote some of the major musical hits of the nineteenth century, including “Ten Little Indians,” the “Hawthorne Ballads” (under the pseudonym Alice Hawthorne), and a number of Civil War songs. After penning a ditty in support of the recently fired George McClellan (“Give Us Back Our Old Commander”), Winner was ordered arrested by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, but was subsequently pardoned by Lincoln.
Work, Henry Clay
(1832–1884). Over the course of his life, the printer and song-writer Work published upwards of 70 pieces, most of which dated from the 1860s. Born into a family with strong antislavery views in Middletown, Connecticut, Work spent much of his life in New York and Chicago—working with the musical firm Root & Cady—before returning to Hartford, Connecticut.