UNIT-4 AMERICAN PROSE AROUND THE CIVIL

WAR
Structure
Objectives
Thc Contest of American Prose around the Civil War
The debates on slavery and other issues of North-South confrontation
The Prose of the American Civil War-I.
The Prose of the American Civil War-I1
Let Us Sum Up
Questions
Suggested Readings

4.0 OBJECTIVES

The aim of this Unit will be to study American prose-writing of the period around the
Civil War stretching from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, which
witnessed a gradual dispersal of the post-Declaration-of-Independence solidarity as a .
nation, to the years of Reconstruction of post-war America. The prose-writings
studied in this Unit will include transcripts of debates which took place on the subject
of slavery as well as other issues of North-South confrontation. The Unit will include
also reviews of literature on the Civil War itsclf as well as on its immediate
aftermath.

4.1 THE CONTEXT OF AMERICAN PROSE AROUND

THE CIVIL WAR

The Fugitive Slave Act, enacted in 1850 by the federal government of the United
States, was part of an attempt by the federal government to repair relations between
the Northern and the Southern states which had been damaged due to several reasons.
The Act made it easy for slave-owners to re-capture ex-slaves or simply to pick up
blacks they claimed had run away.

In 1854, however, the slavery problem suddenly re-op~ned.The Kansas-Nebraska

Act of that year and the turnloil that followed in Kansas disrupted and divided the
nation as the war in Vietnam did more than a century later.

The trouble originated in the need to solve western problems. With California
growing rapidly and settlers moving into Oregon and Washington, a railroad was
needed to link thesc areas to the rest of the nation. Some possible routes were
survcyed for this purpose.

There was another question to be solved as well. Between the territories of Oregon
and Washingtontowards the north-west on the one hand and the territories of Texas,
Missouri and Arkansas towards the south-east on the other hand, there lay a vast,
unorganised region occupied only by Indians. There was much pressure to declare
this region open for settlement. Much of the clamor came from the booming state of
Missouri whcre population rose from 385,000 in 1840 to 685,000 in 1850 and would
top the million mark by 1860. (Its slave population also grew rapidly, from 87.000 in
1850 to 115,000 in 1860.) Missouri's prosperity depended on the productivity of its
many hemp and tobacco plantations, based on the labor of thousands ofslaves. This
led many people to look eagerly to rich lands beyond ;he Missouri h v e r . Speculators American Prose
appealed to the federal government to throw open the "Indian country." Around the Civil
War
A group of Democrats who called themselves "Young America," led i y Stephen A.
Douglass of Illinois, were fascinated by the prospect of opening up the West to
settlement. In January 1854 Douglass moved to secure two objectives; get national
support for a central railroad route across the continent, and open the region beyond
the Missouri for settlement. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, he
proposed a bill that would establish a territorial government for the whole of the
Indian country westward of Missouri and make it possible for slavery to move into
the region on the basis of popular sovereignty. In particular, the bill would create two
territories, Kansas and Nebraska, one implicitly for slavery and the other implicitly
against slavery; deny Congress any role in deciding the status of slavery in these
territories; and in any case facilitate the passage of slave-holders with their slave
ihrough these territories.

The Northern states exploded in rage at what they regarded as a Southern conspiracy.
The south was a~cusedof attempting to spread its hegemony over Northerners.
Debate over the bill raged in Congress for four months. "The unanimous sentiment
of the North," asserted the New York Tribune, "is indignant resistance. The whole
population is full of it. . . .:' ~ o r t h e r nchurches united as never before to arouse
public opinion. "For the last time God has called upon the North," cried out the
Congregational minister Henry Ward Beecher. "Let the conscience of the North
settle this question, not her fears. God calls us to a religious duty."

But the Southerners carried the day with the help of their sympathisers from the
North. Despite all protests, the Senate enacted the Kansas-Nebraska bill on March 3,
1854, after an all-night debate, by a vote of thirty-seven to fourteen. Two and a half
months later, the House of Representatives did the same, by the bare margin of three
votes.

The people of Missouri were determined to make the newly created Territory of
Kansas, contiguous to its own borders, into a slave state. Otherwise they would be
hemmed in on three sides by free states. Slaves would constantly run away,
especially in western Missouri, where freedom would be just across the Missouri
kver.

Southerners were especially outraged at the activities of the New England E m i g m t

Aid Company. With great public fanfare it gathered fiinds to send organised groups
of Northern settlers to Kansas. Though in actuality it sent, altogether, only some
2000 settlers, of whom perhaps a third returned to their homes, its work was
exaggerated in gigantic proportions in the Missourian mind. Everyone on the pro-
slavery side referred constantly to the company as the embodiment of Yankee
meddling and moralising. When in July 1854 the first party of Yankee settlers aided
by the company amved in Lawrence, they were iminediately visited by armed
Missourians who demanded that they leave the territory at once.

The fact was, however, that Yankee settlers still continued to po~irinto the Territory
of Kansas. They were not aggressive anti-slavery activists but ordinary farmers who
wanted land without black people teeming around on it. Meanwhile few slave-
owners came to the territory. Why go into an arca where the hture of slavery was in
doubt, while Arkansas and Texas where eagerly welcoming slave-owning
immigrants? The basis for the hopes of Southerners-the rapid arrival in Kansas of a
massive slave-owning population never materialised.

With the issue of slavery in Kansas about to be decided by popular sovereignty,

Southerners grew rather desperate. The issue, in their minds, was simply too crucial.
They gave up on the democratic system and turned to instigation and intimidation on
a mass scale to get what they wanted. When the first territorial election in Kansas
approached in the fall of 1854-the choosing of a territorial delegate to Congress,
 Senator David Atchison, one of Stephen A. Douglass' close friends, campaigned up
American Prose
and down the Missouri frontier, urging Missourians to cross over into Kansas and
cast ballots. In the words of a later congressional investigation, a "systematic
invasion7' then occurred. More than hzlf the 2800 ballots cast in the election were
fraudulent, and a pro-slavery delegate was elected.

With these events the Kansas issue took on a new character. 4 mass-scale-organised
attack had been initiated against the nation's basic principle-majority rule. One
nt
segment of the population was seen as seeking to impose its will on a larger section
of Americans and seize the government of an entire territory. It appeared to the
predominantly industrial interests in the North that the predominantly plantation
interests in the South were going to destroy the most hndamental thing of all-the
rule of law, and then establish its own sovereignty over the entirety of the nation.
How could any issue be more crucial? The argument over slavery had. to use the
words of Robert Kelley, "broken out into an arena without boundaries; anything
might happen and the first casualty would be government itself." This was why the
nation became so obsessed with the Kansas issue. It was a crisis in which
hndamental pri..ciples, of which slavery was only an insignificant one. were at stake.

4.2 THE DEBATES ON SLAVERY AND OTHER ISSUES

OF NORTH-SOUTH CONFRONTATION

Any consideration of American literature around the Civil War would be incomplete
without an examination of the debates on slavery and other issues of North-South
confrontation.

The basic debate, as stated earlier, was the debate involving hndamental principles of
the United States constitution and its issue-to-issue application. The most
fundamental of the principles-the rule of law, founded upon majority opinion-was
at the crux of the North-South confrontation over which of their respective cultural
and economic systcnis would prevail during westward expansion.

As the confrontation escalated, another issue-that of secession from or belonging to

the union of states-came up. Faced with consistent criticisms by the Northern
whites, Southern whites were by this time tom by indecisions. They were in fact
deeply loyal to the Union. They had, after all, led in its forming; had provided most
of its presidents; had dominated its federal government for most of its existence; were
proud of its leading role in all its wars; and were self-consciously "American."

But with the rise of the Republican party by the mid-1850s, the mood of the
Southerners charged. The Republican party sought to fill in the void left by the .
decline of the Whig party, which had gradually lost the support of New Englanders
and several other traditional American constituencies in being unable to stem the tide
of "de-Americanisation" threatening to engulf the country from Catholic immigrw.ts
from Ireland and Germany on the one hand and Southern belligerence on the other
hand.

The name "Republican" for the new party seemed to spring up naturally. The
Democrats, the alternative party, it was said had fallen into the hands of slavocrats.
and had lost all ties with republicanism. Indeed, Republicans said that it was now
their party that was the true inheritor of the legacy of Thomas Jefferson; that it was
they who believed genuinely in the principles of the United States constitution.
Following upon the Kansas controversy, when Southerners tried to extend the domain
of slavery into the new state, Northerners reacted almost en mass by leaving all their
erstwhile leanings and joining the Republican party, which they regarded as the only
true party for Jeffersonian republicanism.
 American Prose
How to explain the meteoric ascent of the Republican party? Iia members were very Around the Civil
seldom abolitionists, though they were very often opposed to the instinction of War
slavery. Their opposition to slavery emanated from an urge to keep black people out
of territories altogether. So they were by no means anti-racist, or even less racist than
members of the Democratic party, for instance.

The key to the success of the Republicans then was not their progressive ideals, but
the popular perception among millions of Americans that only the Republicans could
save the American Republic. Southerners responded to this popular perception as an
imposition of Northerners on them and their lifestyle.

The South lived by a code of honor, which demanded that honorable men were not
meddled with. Over two centuries of Southern life, honor and slavery had become so
intertwined that many simply could not conceive one could exist without the other.
Out of honor came an in~periousinsistence upon absolute authority over others, in
this case over black people. As historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown has written: "White
man's honor and black man's slavery became in the public mind of the South
practically indistinguishable." Out of this proud prickliness could come the quick
flares of violent anger so widely noted as a trait among Southern white men, for a
readiness to die in defense of honor was the highest virtue. Thousands of
Southerners, both male and female, saw the problem they faced vis-a-vis the
Northerners and the war that followed as a simple test of their honor. They must
either assert themselves against the Yankee or secede from the Union. The Northern
perspective oil this challenge was ironically voiced by Abraham Lincoln, a Southern
president. "My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union," the
President asserted to Horace Greeley, the influential abolitionist editor of the New
York Tribune, in August 1862:

It is not either to save or destroy slavery. Jf I could save the Union

without freeing the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by
freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do this.

Slavery, then, was in many respects, the originary issue cjf debate in the North-South
confrontation. Lincoln, who hated slavery and yet refused to concede the equality of
blacks with whites, represented the central paradox in the Northern attitude to
slavery. What the North wanted was to put slavery back to where the North believed
the fathers of the nation had put slavery: legally protected, but kept where it was,
marked out clearly as a peculiar institution to be detested by everyone, and thus
placed in the course of ultimate extinction. If confined to the Southern states, slavery
would eventually die, perhaps in a hundred years, and the North was willing to put up
with it that long.

If the Northern attitude to slavery was articulated best by Abraham Lincoln, a

Southerner, it was Stephen Douglass, a Northern senator, who most perfectly
expressed the Southern view of slavery. Douglass openly proclaimed that black
people were inherently inferior to whites. White people had a right to enslave blacks,
and state and federal authorities had no right to meddle with this right. Douglass'
opinions summed up, more or less, what the South felt about slavery.

Slavery indeed emerged as the focal issue of North-South confrontation in the

senatorial election of 1858 in which Douglass, the Democratic candidate faced
Lincoln, the Republican candidate. In a series of debates during the run-up to this
election, Lincoln and Douglass argued out the case against and for slavery
respectively, either seeking to interpret the 1etters.of the Declaration of Independence
and the United States Constitution in his own spirit to present his position on the
matter.
American Prose Stephen Douglass won the senatorial election that followed the debates. But he did
so only because the electoral districts of the state of Illinois were so adjusted that
more weight was given to Democratic than to Republican votes, so that the
legislature, which elected senators, was already biased. Lincoln got a heavy vote in
the northern districts of the state (strongly Yankee) and actually secured a popular
majority. His demonstrated power in the voting booth caused politicians in North as
well as South to pnck up their ears. Illinois had the third largest population in the
Union: its electoral vote was crucial; the state could go either way; and a strong vote
getter in the next presidential contest was essential to both sides.

On November 6 , 1860, Abraham Lincoln fulfilled his promise by getting clected as

President of the United-States in a four-cornered contest. But no sooner was the
election result announced that several southern states formed themselves into a
confederacy and declared their intention to secede from the Union.

The American Civil War was all set to start.

4.3 THE PROSE OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR-I

Photograph taken in about 1865 70 of Oakholm, first

Hartford home of Harrier Beecher Stowe.
 American Prose li
Around the'civil
War

Harriet Beecher Stowe,

photographed in 1882

"So this is the little lady who made this war!" Lincoln said to Haniet Beecher Stowe,
author of two prodigiously popular novels that could be fairly said to have altered the
course of the nation and created international feeling on the slavery issue. Stowe was
one of the many women writers who largely dominated American popular literature,
shaping general direction and particular intention. The daughter of a famed Northern
Congregationalist preacher, Lyman Beecher, the wife of another minister, the sister
of six more, she felt all the mora! force of the abolition issue. She had never lived in
the South and did not know slave life at first hand, though when she lived in
Cincinnati, she had contact with many hgitive slaves fleeing North. She turned her
sentimental mode of writing to the moral subject of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin,
which first appeared as a serial in an antislavery weekly from 1815 to 1852, increased
in length as interest grew, and then came out as a book in 1852. It had extraordinary
impact; it sold more than 300,000 copies in the United States and a million and a half
worldwide, making it one of the greatest international best-sellers ever, the best-
known American novel-a book, said Emerson. that"'encirc1ed the globe." When in
1868, John William De Forest described the nation's search for "the Great American
Novel," he made it a prime contender. George Eliot, Tolstoy, Henry James, all
honored it, though less for its stylized art than for its moral philosophy. Stage .
,

versions increased its impact, often turning it towards minstrel humor-to which, in
fact, its more comical black characters owed something. Motifs from the book-
Eliza crossing the ice-or characters like Topsy ("I'spect I just grow'd") became
general folklore. Songs, poems, epigraphs, stories, and plates illustrating the book
appeared everywhere. Stowe followed it with the fictionalised account of a slave
rebellion, Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1854), an equally interesting, if less
well-known, novel. He also published, The Key to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1853) to
show that she had drawn extensively on abolitionist materials and slave "narratives"
for the "truth of her story.

But like all books that change the world, the influence of Uncle Tom 's Cabin was
3lso problematic. Uncle Tom 's Cabin unquestionably established black life-a white
iersion of it-as a subject for an American fiction that had essentially neglected it. It
~rovokedinnumerable counter-versions from slave-owners-no fewer than fourteen
)re-slavery versions of contented slave life appeared in fiction in the next three years
done. For black writers, however, it had more complex and longer-lasting impact, as
b idioms and motifs, represeritatiorls of black speech and black character, above all
rereotypes of black life, shzped future fiction and popular culture. Over the
American Rose generations black writers have therefore felt compelled to work through it even to
work against it. The independent representation of the black in fiction would have to
wait. till the turn of the century and beyond.

Much the same could be said about the depiction of the Civil War itself. This was the
largest crisis the nation had faced. It marked the fracturing of its unity, the moment
of greatest change in its history. Yet none of the major writers of its generation came
close to it, in either participation or picturization. Walt Whitman was not a soldier
but a hospital attendant. Mark Twain kept away from the theatre of war. Henn
James was kept from fighting by his "mysterious wound." William Dean Howells
was a consul in Italy. Emily Dickinson was, as always, a recluse. When Edmund
Wilson wrote Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Liternture of the American Civil W~7r
( 1962), he was struck by the relative absence of such literature. Wars, he concluded.
are no time for belles-lettres. What they produce is another kind of literary
expression as in polemic, speeches, sermons, reportage, soldiers' songs and popular
battle hymns and verses like "John Brown's Body," Julia Ward Howe's "Battle
Hymn of the Republic" and Daniel Decatur Emmette's "Dixoe," which tallied the
combatants in the conflict. But, fortunately or unfortunately, as many of such pieces
of war writing have been lost to posterity as they have survived. In any case. there is
not much of distinction in the pieces that have survived.

Some of the best prose written about the war was produced immediately following
upon the war in the form of realist prose fiction. These included novels such as John
William De Forest's Miss Ravenel S Conversion.jrom Secession to Loyalty (1 867),
Albion Tourgee's A Fool '.I. Errand (1 879) and works by Thomas Nelson Page and
George Washington Cable. De Forest, with his strong battle scenes, was the first
realist to record the conflict. Ambrose Bierce's sensitive war stories came a good
deal later, while arguably the greatest novel about the immediacy of the battle-field
did not appear for thirty years, from a writer born six years after the conflict ended
who said he reconstructed the event from the football-field-Stephen Crane's The
Red Badge of Courage ( 1895). The major impact of the war on Southern fiction had
to wait even longer; some interesting novels appeared during the Reconstruction, but
the great treatments came as late as the twentieth century, with Ellen Glasgow and
William Faulkner, who found in the conflict of North and South a modem yet eternal
theme.

here, "just as one sees in the

windows at home the sign "Ici on
parle frnncais " We always
invaded these places at once - and
in\~ariab[yreceived the
infonnation,framed in faultless
French, that the clerk who did the
English for the establishment had
itrst gone to dinner and woulcl he
back in an hozrr - n~ouldMon.sieur
buy somethbig? Ire wondered tv11,v
those parties happened to take
their dinners at strch erratic and
extraordinary hours, for we never
called when an exenrplaty
Christian would he in the least
like(v to be abroad on strch an
errand. The truth was, it nJa.sn
base.fmzrd - a .snare to trnp the
unwan, - chaflto. cntch,fledglings
\clith. Thev had no English-

Mark Twain - Mark Twain

in The Innocents .l broad
 American Prose
Around the Civil
War

Mark Twain with his wife Olivia and their children,

U~OIII
left to riglit) Clara. Jean, and Susy,
and the family dog, Hash.
--

4.4 THE PROSE OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR-I1

When Walt Whltman said about literary reconstruction of the American Civil War
that ''the real war will never get into the books." hc was partly right and partly wrong.
The notable changes in American prose around the Civil War canle not in what was
written about but in ways of writing. Few wars have been as fully recorded by direct
participants in reminiscence and chronicle, as the upheaval forced language toward a
new realism to undermine old mytl~s,ideas and faiths. An old rhetoric died to be
replaced by a new candour, the note of Lincoln's great orations. The war destroyed
two social orders: Southern petty feudalism and Northern small capitalism. What
replaced them was a mode.^, corporate-business-oriented, imperialist nation-state.
When reconstruction began, the dominant voices stressed the need for reconciliation
and recuperation, for a return to the gospel of national expansion and enrichment.
Walt Whitman, who came closest to writing the American epic, recorded the horror
of suffering and death in his war poetry, but his essential theme, especially in his
prose, was to be reconciliation.
But now, ah now, to learn from the crisis of anguish,
Advancing, grappling with direct fate and recoiling not,
And now to conceive and show to the world what your children
enmasse really are . . .
"During the secession war I was with the armies, and saw the rank and file, North and
South, and studied them for four years," he wrote in 1881, "I have never had the least
doubt about the country in its essential future since." In Miss Ravenel's Conversion
from Secession to Loynlty, John William De Forest follows the course indicated by
his title; the book moves from realistic reporting of war time incidents toward "a
grand, re-united, triumphant Republic." Albion Tourgee's A Fool's Errand is a
bitterly critical record of war and its ravages by a war veteran. Both Thomas Nelson
Page and George Washington Cable began by writing about war but then event~lally
turned to romance. Indeed, with the advent of modernity into America, the memory
of the old, pre-modern, era evoked a nostalgia which many writers cherished. "Make
[your Southern heroine] fall in love with a Federal oEcer and your story will be
printed at on*," advised novelist Thomas Nelson Page.
American Prose
Ln a time for healing, the idea of national progress was a panacea. Westward
expansion diverted attention from the conflict of North and South to the ever-
enlarging new lands that were prompting vast population movement. Before the war.
Walt Whitman's open-ended verse had celebrated the transcendental self. After the
war, it celebrated the transcontinental self, ever-exploding and passing to newer and
newer territories, to India and beyond. This aggressive self was also an acquisitive
self, which sought to appropriate for itself every instrument of power and prosperity.
Gradually, these two selves began to divide by projecting two different visions of the
United States-one, a United States of extending boundaries, and the other, a United
States of boundless excess. In 1869, when a golden spike was driven at Promotory
Point, Utah, to mark the completion of the railroad connecting the two coasts, it
seemed a celebration of expanding space. But it was simultaneously a celebration of
the commercial and technological engines driving America forward that would draw
that space into a vast modemising process which made America, by the century's
end, the world's leading industrial nation.

4.5 LET US SUM UP

In this Unit, we have focused upon significant prose written around the Civil War
period of American history. These include the published and unpublished debates
between North and South on different issues such as constitutional principles,
secession fiom or belonging to the union of states on the part of individual states, and
slavery, the 'original sin.'
Also discussed in this Unit are some of the key texts ('white' texts) emanating out of
the slavery issue and the Civil War-Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin,
John William De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversionj?qm Secession to Loyalty,
Albion Tourgee's A Fool ',Y Errand and Stephen Crane's The Red B e e of Courage.
The above-mentioned texts are all works of prose-fiction, as against non-fictional
prose, which though produced in substantial terms in the shape of polemic. speeches,
sermons and reportage, u7asnot alyays of as impressive a literary quality as that of
fictional prose.
The Unit ends with an analysis ofthe altered style which, much more than the altered
subject-matter was the most salient feature of the prose of the American Civil War.

4.6 QUESTIONS

1. - Sum up some of the debates between the Northern states and the Southern
states on issues, which in due course instigated the American Civil War.
2. 'The American Civil War did not inspire many great works of literature in
the currency of its occurrence." Would you agree with this statement. Give
reasons for your views.
"The notable changes in American prose around the Civil War came not in
what was written about but in ways of writing." Comment.

4.7 SUGGESTED READINGS

Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury, From Pztritnnisrn to Post-Modernism: A

History o f American Literatzlre, 1991.
Ednlund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War,
1962.
Danizl Aaron, The Unwritten W~7r:American Writers and the Civil War, 1973.
. .