Minie balls, moth-eaten Uniforms, tintypes of stiffly posed young soldiers: such fragments are what many of us think of as Civil War artifacts. But Kathleen Diffiey, associate professor of English, using the techniques of cultural studies, unearths findings of a different order: literary artifacts in the form of more than 300 Civil War stories published in American literary magazines between 1861 and 1876. The magazines, she says, are the "one right place" to help us understand what "Americans imagined while cannons were still hot and losses piling up."

Diffley's anthology, To Live and Die: Civil War Stories in the Popular Wartime Press, will include approximately 25 selections that originally were published in periodicals both well-known and obscure. In fact, Diffley says the anthology will constitute an "inadvertent novel"--a story of the war as it was lived by Americans of the day, of life in the young and troubled country.

As a cultural studies scholar, Diffley poses questions that are different from those of other literary scholars.

"Instead of asking 'Is it any good?'--in other words, whether the language has the capacity to stir, to alarm, to invent--I ask less familiar questions of these stories;" she says. "What is it good for? What does it tell us about the cultural pulse of that time?"

Although a recent resurgence of interest in Civil War literature has resulted in the publication or reprinting of several literature collections, Diffley says To Live and Die "is a creative attempt to give wartime crisis some meaning, an attempt that was repeatedly made in literary magazines more than a century ago and that readers today have only begun to discover."

While a Columbia University graduate student in the early 1980s, Diffley became intrigued by the gap in 19th-century literary studies of the Civil War period. Conventional wisdom said the war and its aftermath were "largely unwritten:" in the words of Harvard's Daniel Aaron: no one masterpiece existed to serve as literary representative of that period. College survey courses often went directly from transcendentalism to Twain, skipping over the literature of what is arguably the most important single event in U.S. history.

In 1979, as the territory of literary-critical studies expanded to include works outside the traditional canon, literary scholar Leslie Fiedler at SUNY-Buffalo identified a series of works, from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin through Alex Haley's Roots, as constituting an "inadvertent epic" of the Civil War, one that stretched across time.

In periodical stories, Diffley has found a body of material that could illuminate the popular imagination during the war era itself, but these narratives presented challenges. Because they have not been unified by one author or editor into a traditionally meaningful narrative, the stories are indeed like remains found at an archaeological site, remains whose significance is not immediately apparent.

Diffley asserts that popular magazines with lower circulations are vital in giving us an on-the-ground view of life among populations and in locales that do not figure in better-established publications. Understandably, most scholarship on Civil War magazines has focused on the best-known northern publications: the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, and its newsmagazine cousin Harper's Weekly.

Stories in To Live and Die will come from a far wider range of regions and points of view.

Magazines represented include shorter-lived but influential publications such as the Galaxy in New York, Lippincott's in Philadelphia, and the New Eclectic Monthly in Richmond, Va.

Diffley also takes us farther west into new trade and communications centers such as San Francisco and Chicago with the Overland Monthly and the Lakeside Monthly, respectively, and into African American culture through stories from Frederick Douglass' New National Era in Washington, D.C. Also in the collection are Baltimore's Southern Magazine and the Southern Monthly from Memphis, representatives of a white southern culture faced with remaking its own identity.

At first, Diffley chose stories for the book by making "modest individual choices about representing regions fairly," she says. She began to discern thematic patterns in the stories themselves, especially that the war permeated daily life in ways we seem to have forgotten.

"The distance between battlefields and cottages has tended to grow when historians have looked back to the Civil War," Diffley says. In reality, the war took place right outside many people's back doors.

Further, although we have adopted as folklore the idea of the divided Civil War household-fractured family loyalties, brothers locking gazes on opposite sides of a rifle--contemporary stories describe in fictional terms the more common reality--invaded households.

Generally, Diffley says, in the years immediately following the war, "Violence and sanctuary seemed much more entangled." Traditional battlefield struggles define some stories here, but others tell of spies working within households, and of paymasters whose safe passage to the front depended on the kindness of women living on military borders. All sorts of people were affected by the war, Diffley says, not just those who fought--or whose family members fought--in the fields of Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Tale - Telling Recounted

The collection both documents changing perceptions during the war and opens a window on Reconstruction-era attempts to imagine a postwar nation. The first story in the collection, "The Cabin at Pharaoh's Ford" by Henry King, tells of a lynch mob attack on a parson whose cellar and attached passageway are a Kansas link in the Underground Railroad. The story is of interest both for the time in which the events take place--during the state's constitutional crisis, before the southern secession--and for the time King's narrative was printed: 1874, in the Reconstruction era two years before the nation's centennial. It represents, with 20/20 hindsight, Bloody Kansas's role as a sort of western micro-universe anticipating the larger conflict to come.

This focus on the future by examining the past accords well with author King's own history: he was a Civil War veteran, newspaper editor, "outspoken Republican," and Kansas booster who said of his state: "There was no past tense in the grammar of our calculations and our enterprises. It was tomorrow and not today that filled our dreams and absorbed our energies."

Fittingly, he incorporates into the story the parson's emotionally disturbed daughter and her hallucinatory vision of a future in which "spectral fingers" play a "monster harp of gold" accompanied by a "chorus of many voices." Such an image, Diffley points out, vividly depicts as the 1876 centennial neared "the addled double vision of a westering postwar nation" where some prevailed and some did not.

Other forms of narrative instability, or departures from straightforward tale-telling conventions of the time, echo the cultural instability of the warring, newly reunited nation. In stories published just before the centennial celebrations. Diffley says, "perspective could slip abruptly from one character to another when pesky interruptions in the story's narrative 'now' bespoke the need to rectify different voices so that stories could progress and the Union by analogy could get reconstructed."

This instability also prefigures, in Diffley's view, the sharp edges of later literary realism. She maintains that the "tug toward unexpected detail" in Civil War stories points, as author and literary critic Henry James put it, toward more showing and less telling, what would characterize the fiction of Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and James himself.

The issue of emancipation is enmeshed in the Civil War stories from the 1860s and 1870s, when liberty and justice for all were tested. Thus, Diffley character izes To Live and Die as having fitful preoccupation with race. While hospitals filled, draft riots broke out, girls volunteered, and losses mounted. The stories tell of war up close and personal, and they depict a nation's desperate struggle to connect the messy daily realities of war with exalted causes on both sides.

The War in 3-D

Just as neglecting these stories has affected popular ideas about what the Civil War was like. bringing them to light also has revealed how thoroughly technology is intertwined with culture.

For example, the invention of the stereopticon helped change the public's perception by offering a three-dimensional view of the war.

"In the aftermath of Appomattox, what many Americans actually had in hand as they tried to define a more perfect union were pictures, most unnervingly the stereo views. . . of the Antietam dead," Diffley points out.

Thanks to newly founded magazines, people also saw battlefield images through wood engravngs that newsmagazines like Harper's Weekly and Leslie's Illustrated circulated to hundreds of thousands. In these, the public's usual impression of the battlefield came instead from the artistic choices made by special artists promoting the armies with which they traveled. In their drawings, the southern forces appear in the sketchy background, which, Diffley points out, emphasizes the "sketchy inadequacy of the southern cause" while the greater glory of northern forces shows up in bold foreground detail.

But through the three-dimensional photographs displayed by Mathew Brady, the public saw grisly depictions of mangled and decaying corpses--a cultural shock to a population still largely provincial. In October of 1862, the New York Times described the Antietam photographs as having "a terrible distinctness" and spoke of their "dull, dead, remorseless weight." Brady's photographers, with their littered killing fields, tended to upset readers and confuse their comfortable points of view.

Such photographs never translated well into the shallower medium of wood engraving, which was too expensive to be used everywhere. Most magazines of the Civil War and Reconstruction era did not have the wherewithal to illustrate their fiction. Thus, the illustrations in To Live and Die are culled from Harper's Weekly, one of the most prolific publishers of Civil War engravings.

A large part of Diffley's editorial contribution is deciding which illustrations to include and how they should be placed to deepen the reader's experience without directly commenting on plots. What is emerging, Diffley says, is "a veritable pictorial history, one that reasserts how magazine readers once saw the Civil War."

The text itself--the stories-have up until now been available only to those who could do "dirty" research, which entails sorting through old issues or microfilm, often in remote locations, or attempting to track down copies of more obscure periodicals when archival collections have gaps. Undergraduate students and others interested in American history seldom have time or means for such undertakings. So when reviewers of her 1992 book, Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform called for an anthology of mid-19th century periodical fiction for general and classroom use. Diffiey responded by compiling To Live and Die.

Anthology to Be Used in Classroom

The anthology will be published alongside the three more scholarly books in Diffley's planned series, Making War Civil of which Where My Heart Is Turning Ever is the first volume. Two other books are under way. The Fateful Lightning focuses on Civil War stories in the mid-century literary marketplace, where changing copyright laws and distribution systems affected our nation's literary consumption at the same time that new visual technologies like the wet collodian process led to what Diffley calls "photographic shock." The third volume, Look Away will investigate the relationship between the content of popular magazines and their changing readership, which shifted from a sometimes feminine prewar market to a more masculine postwar market once the soldiers came home.

Diffley hopes the collection someday will introduce students to that most homely of literary media, popular magazines, and how their sudden emergence during the 1850s had profound consequences for how the Civil War would be read.

 

By Danielle Alexander, Illumine Vol 2 No 1 July 1999, pp 3-7