The American Civil War: A Literary and Historical Anthology, 2nd Edition

Documents

John Wilkes Booth, letters and diary entries (1864-1865)

D. B. (Daniel Bedinger) Lucas, “In the Land Where We Were Dreaming” (1865)

Francis Miles Finch, “The Blue and the Gray” (1867)

Frederick Douglass, “Address at the Graves of the Unknown Dead” (1871)

Joel Chandler Harris, from Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1880)

“A Story of the War” (1877)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “Memorial Day” (1884)

Stephen Crane, from The Little Regiment (1896)

“The Veteran”

Ambrose Bierce, from Antepenultimata (1912)

“A Bivouac of the Dead” (1903)

Lizette Woodworth Reese, from Spicewood (1920)

“A War Memory”

Author Biographies

Bierce, Ambrose

Booth, John Wilkes

Crane, Stephen

Douglass, Frederick

Finch, Francis Miles

Harris, Joel Chandler

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr.

Lucas, D.B.

Reese, Lizette Woodworth

Images

Discussion Questions

1. What do these readings reveal about the (un)reliability of history and memory as forms of access to a shared past? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the documentary record as opposed to the literary, oral, or emotional record?
2. All cultures develop an historical or public memory partly through myths: the stories they tell about real people and real events. In the case of the Civil War, what are some of these myths? Find specific places where they seem to be informing the writing of history.
3. What light does Elizabeth Keckley’s chapter on the second inauguration shed on the inaugural address itself?
4. How would you describe Herman Melville’s poetics of memorialization? In the three poems included in the anthology – “An Uninscribed Monument on One of the Battle-fields of the Wilderness,” “A Requiem on Soldiers Lost in Ocean Transports,” and “On a Natural Monument in a Field of Georgia” – what are the aesthetic strategies by which he develops a particular vision of the meaning of death?
5. What purpose does Crane seem to have, in “The Veteran,” in revisiting his character Henry Fleming from The Red Badge of Courage?
6. What attitude toward Southern experience is expressed in D. B. Lucas’s “In the Land Where We Were Dreaming”?
7. What light, if any, do John Wilkes Booth’s letters shed on the assassination of Lincoln? What kind of personality do they seem to reflect? What blend of ideological and emotional qualities do they express? Are they worth studying as literature?
8. Consider the argument of Albion Tourgée’s “The South as a Field for Fiction.” Where do we see his ideas borne out in later American literature? How much did he get right, and where was he off the mark?

Selected Bibliography

Blair, William Alan. Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.

—. Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.

—American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

Boritt, Gabor S. The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Brown, Thomas J. Remixing the Civil War: Meditations on the Sesquicentennial. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.

Carwardine, Richard, and Jay Sexton. The Global Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Censer, Jane Turner. The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003.

Clarke, Frances M. War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Cloyd, Benjamin G. Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Foner, Eric, and Joshua Brown. Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Gallagher, Gary W. Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood & Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Gannon, Barbara A. The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Goldfield, David R. America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011.

Griffin, Martin. Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865–1900.

Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009.

Hahn, Steven. A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.

Hunt, Robert E. The Good Men Who Won the War: Army of the Cumberland Veterans and Emancipation Memory. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010.

Janney, Caroline E. Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Jeffrey, Julie R. Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies & the Unfinished Work of Emancipation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Lee, Anthony W., and Elizabeth Young. On Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Leonard, Elizabeth D. Lincoln’s Avengers: Justice, Revenge, and Reunion After the Civil War. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.

Logue, Larry M., and Michael Barton. The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2007.

Logue, Larry M., and Peter D. Blanck. Race, Ethnicity, and the Treatment of Disability in Post-Civil War America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Marshall, Anne E. Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Marten, James A. Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

McConnell, Stuart. Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Mills, Cynthia and Pamela H. Simpson, eds. Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.

Neff, John R. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005.

Roland, Charles P., and John D. Smith. History Teaches Us to Hope: Reflections on the Civil War and Southern History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

Sachsman, David B., S. K. Rushing, and Roy Morris. Memory and Myth: The Civil War in Fiction and Film from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Cold Mountain. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007.

Shackel, Paul A. Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the Post-Bellum Landscape. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2003.

Silber, Nina. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Slap, Andrew L. Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War’s Aftermath. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010.

Smith, Timothy B. This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and the Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004.

Summers, Mark Wahlgren. A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Wachtell, Cynthia. War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861–1914. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010.

Waldrep, Christopher. Vicksburg’s Long Shadow: The Civil War Legacy of Race and Remembrance. Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

Warren, Craig A. Scars to Prove It: The Civil War Soldier and American Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009.

Waugh, Joan. U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Weeks, Jim. Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.