THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SOUTHERN WAR POETRY
“The emotional literature of a people,” wrote one of the greatest of
the Southern poets, William Gilmore Simms,[1] “is as necessary to the
philosophic historian as the mere detail of events in the progress of a
nation.... The mere facts in a history do not always or often indicate
the true _animus_ of the action. But in poetry and song the emotional
nature is apt to declare itself without reserve ... speaking out with
a passion which disdains subterfuge, and through media of imagination
and fancy, which are not only without reserve, but which are too
coercive in their own nature, too arbitrary in their own influence, to
acknowledge any restraint upon that expression which glows or weeps
with emotions that gush freshly and freely from the heart.”
Edmund Clarence Stedman[2] put the matter a little differently.
Asking what may constitute the significance of any body of rhythmical
literature, restricted to its own territory, he answered the question
thus: “Undoubtedly and first of all, the essential quality of its
material as poetry; next to this, its quality as an expression and
interpretation of the time itself. In many an era, the second factor
may afford a surer means of estimate than the first, inasmuch as the
purely literary result may be nothing rarer than the world already has
possessed, nor greatly differing from it: nevertheless it may be the
voice of a time, of a generation, of a people ... all of extraordinary
import to the world’s future.”
“Our own poetry,” he continues elsewhere,[3] “excels as a recognizable
voice in utterance of the emotions of a people. The storm and stress
of youth have been upon us, and the nation has not lacked its lyric
cry.... One who underrates the significance of our literature, prose
or verse, as both the expression and the stimulant of national feeling,
as of import in the past and to the future of America, is deficient in
that critical insight which can judge even of its own day unwarped by
personal taste or deference to public impression. He shuts his eyes to
the fact that at times, notably throughout the years resulting in the
Civil War, this literature has been a ‘force.’”
That the poetry written in the Confederate States during the days of
the Civil War was a “force” in potency second only to the army in the
field, is a fact that has been too long unnoticed by commentators on
the literature of our country. In the rare cases when its influence was
recognized, its quality has been mistaken, its character misunderstood,
its quantity and volume under-estimated. Due perhaps in part to the
intensity of feeling engendered between victors and vanquished in
the Lost Cause, the darkness of the days following the close of the
war effectively hid from view and kept from national circulation the
verses and songs which the war had produced in the South. This was the
primary cause which prevented them from attaining the universal and
critical appreciation of their value that was the right of so large
and important a movement in the history of American letters. The ruin
of the South financially and economically, prevented her from calling
attention to her own achievement: while the widespread destruction and
dispersal of property, as well as the necessarily ephemeral nature of
many of her publications, offers not the least satisfactory explanation
for the comparative restriction of Southern Civil War verse to the land
whence it sprang.
If, however, to the modern critic these poems and songs are
comparatively unknown, by the Southerner of Civil War days their value
was understood and appreciated to the full. Within a year after war
broke out, early in the days of ’62, at least two definite attempts to
assemble the fast multiplying verses and songs were being made, the
first[4] by Professor Chase and John R. Thompson of Richmond, editor of
the _Southern Field and Fireside_; the second by “Bohemian,” Mr. W. G.
Shepperson, who was a correspondent for the Richmond _Despatch_. The
latter effort resulted, in the spring of ’62, in a volume of “War Songs
of the South,” containing some one hundred and eight poems, and with
the following significant words in the Preface:
“Written contemporaneously with the achievements which they celebrate,
[these poems] possess all the vitality and force of the testimony
of eye-witnesses to a glorious combat, or even of actors in it. The
spontaneous outburst of popular feeling, they give the lie to the
assertion of our enemy that this revolution is the work of politicians
and party leaders alone.
“Through the Poets’ Corner in the newspaper, they have sped their
flight from and to the heart and mind of the people. They showed which
way the wind was blowing when the war arose ‘a little cloud like a
man’s hand,’ and black as the heavens may now appear, they bravely sing
above the storm, soaring so high that their wings are brightened by the
sun behind the clouds.
“They cannot fail to challenge the attention of the philosophic
historian by their origin, and their influence.... In every age,
martial songs have wrought wonders in struggles for national
independence.
“And surely these newspaper waifs have played no unimportant part in
the actual drama which surrounds us....
“A single volume of ordinary size cannot contain a tithe of the songs
which have already appeared, and are daily appearing. This, however,
offers enough to show that during the present eventful period, what
was said of the early Spaniard is true of the Southron: ‘He has been
unconsciously surrounding history with the light of imagination,
linking great names with great deeds, concentrating those universal
recollections in which everyone feels he has a part, and silently
building up the fabric of national poetry on the basis of national
enthusiasm.’”
Fifty years later another Southerner, William Malone Baskerville,[5]
wrote this: “A young Marylander, a stripling just from college, was
dreaming dreams from which he was awakened by the guns of Sumter. One
sleepless night in April, 1861, he wrote the poem, ‘My Maryland,’ which
may not inaptly be called the first note of the new Southern literature
... ‘new in strength, new in depth, new in the largest elements of
beauty and truth.’ He that had ears to hear might have heard in the
booming of those guns not only the signal for a gigantic contest, but
also the proclamation of the passing away of the old order, and along
with it the waxflowery, amateurish and sentimental race of Southern
writers.” The passing of this school, of course, meant the passing
of what usually has been recognized as the typical literary mode of
the South. It meant, however, much more than this: for the changing
order was made possible only by the passing of the particular type of
civilization that had fostered it, and this, in its turn indicated a
complete and thorough renaissance not only of life and letters, but
also of Southern soul and spirit.
The type of civilization that endured in the South, to the days of the
Civil War, was one of the most picturesque periods of society that can
be imagined, but not one that induced or encouraged serious literature.
In the North, on the other hand, where there were to be found many
large cities as centres of population, and the great national colleges,
literature had developed with the people. The earliest settlers of
New England had been of a religious, thoughtful, and philosophical
disposition, and their manners and mode of life had served to
strengthen these tendencies in their descendants. Even the climate
of the country had a marked influence in emphasizing New England’s
bent towards literature. Rigorous winters and inclement temperatures
led to long enforced periods of indoor life, conducive to study and
reflection. The effort and stress required to wring a living from
the stubborn soil made them an active and a vigorous people. At the
same time the comparatively small size of their territory, the number
of their towns and cities and the ease of travel over the hard and
rocky roads brought them much in contact with each other, and insured
communication of thought. Theirs was a civilization founded on civil
ties. Farms were small, cultivated usually by the family of the owners,
with a few “hired help,” and centered about the smaller villages and
townships, which in their turn were satellites of the towns. The
towns, again, clustered around the cities, which were thus as hubs in
the wheels of society. The rising individual graduated from the town
to the city, where were gathered the leading spirits and forces of
the day. From the cities back to the smaller communities returned the
great newspapers and magazines, whose spiritual and mental authority
went unchallenged, and which served the more to amalgamate into a
living thoughtful whole the inhabitants of the farthest corner of the
countryside. For everyone life was hard and plain; and there followed
the accepted corollary of high and resolute thought.
In the South, the thought unquestionably was as grave and lofty. It
was, however, neither in the hands of the people, as a whole, nor so
thoroughly co-ordinated into an entity. This lack of centralization
and unity arose from the very order of society, and was at once its
destruction, its charm, and its misfortune. In the first place, as
regards its territory in comparison with the North, there were few
large cities, and these were far apart. From Richmond to Charleston
and New Orleans as the crow flies is nearly three times the distance
from Boston to Philadelphia. In the days of postillions, and in the
later days of steamboats and railroads, a warm damp climate made travel
tedious and tiresome. Neither did the large cities occupy the positions
of importance of their Northern rivals. Because of the fertile soil,
fair climate and multiplicity of laborers the financial and political
power of the country was to be found quite as often among the owners
of the great plantations, as in the counting rooms or law offices of
the metropolis. For various reasons, there were no great and powerful
publishing houses, or influential magazines in general circulation,
the newspaper taking these places. Another factor there was also,
that was especially disintegrating for society at large. Before the
war, education in the South was not universal. For about half the
population, the women were educated at home, or in the case of the
well-to-do, at seminaries and boarding schools. The men, as in the old
Colonial days, had their private tutors, and were then sent to the
Universities at home or abroad, and to travel. But for the mass of
the poorer people, there was little to be had beyond the rudiments of
training: and for many years the University of Virginia was the only
educational institution below the line, which was the academic equal of
the Northern colleges. Education here, as everywhere in the South, was
along purely classic lines, which trained the people to find authority
in the past, and which tended to create a lack of sympathy with
problems other than those immediately concerning the public polity.
Hence it was that the intellectual relationships of the North were
exchanged in the South for social ties; which proved in times of stress
more powerful and unifying than those beyond the Line, and which made
possible, later on, the sympathetic consolidation and confederacy of
the States at the first minute of invasion. In that instant, they were
“a band of brothers,” in a common fellowship and interest: and thus it
was that the very conditions militating against their literature and
literary progress before the War, became in 1861, at once their allies
in the field, and on Parnassus.
It is undeniable that the literary history of the antebellum South
could brook no comparison with that of the North. An agricultural
people such as the Southerners were, are apt to live their lyrics
and romances, rather than write them. Her greatest novelists, Simms
and Kennedy and John Esten Cooke, had given her quiet old-fashioned
historical or pseudo-historical tales after the pattern of Sir Walter
Scott. Today these seem curiously dull and prosy, and more so when
placed in comparison with the extraordinarily ornate and grotesque
Gothic romances of her women writers. That style of fiction of which
Mrs. Hentz, Mrs. Southworth and Miss Evans were the representative
authors may only be described as unreal and utterly false in tone
and color. It is sensational to a degree, but its popularity was in
proportion to its lack of artistic conception. Further than this, what
was true of her prose, was true of her verse. Just as the fiction of
the South was an echo of earlier modes, so her chief lyrists wrote in
the manner of the cavaliers. On the whole, the Southern character had
seemed better adapted to the practice of politics and the management
of plantations, than to government in the province of literature.
Southerners wrote easily and gracefully, but without the sincerity and
beauty that arise from perfect sympathy between the craftsman and his
craft.
It was when a great emotion had thrilled the heart of the South, and
her spirit kindled to a single mighty flame in the prosecution of a
cause on which she could unite all her energies, that the artificiality
of her literature dropped away, and was replaced by strength of
color, truth of outline and power of expression. Before the terror of
civil war, the horror of invasion, and the indignity of submission to
what she deemed a false interpretation of the Constitution and the
principles of Liberty for which her fathers had fought, the literature
of the South lost its superficiality, its romantic characteristics.
From the earliest days of the war, prose in the form of history,
philosophical essays and controversial debate, became the recognized
and powerful weapon wielded by her greatest minds: while poetry, in
the hands alike of poet and peasant, became the great national organ
for emotional expression.
Fully to appreciate the themes and refrains that filled her war verse,
it is necessary to understand for just what principles, and with what
a temper, the South began the fight. Whatever had been the immediate
excuse for war, for the Southerner the conflict very quickly resolved
itself into a struggle for liberty. The principle of States’ Rights
had always been cherished in the South since the days of the Articles
of Confederation, in 1781, which declared at the very onset that
while adopting this plan that was designed to make of the various
integers a government that might be per se recognizable,--“each state
retained its sovereignty, freedom and independence.” “Submission to
any encroachment, the least as well as the greatest, on the rights of
a state means slavery,” wrote Dr. Basil Gildersleeve.[6] “The extreme
Southern States considered this right menaced by the issue of the
presidential election.” The South had always clung to the earlier
conception of national union of separate and independent units. That
the North regarded her as a rebel against the Constitution of her
fathers but goaded her the more bitterly, who felt that above all
things she battled in the right, for the freedom of which Washington
himself had dreamed, and which her own ancestors had been the greater
part of the instrument in winning and perfecting. It was therefore to
the South a holy contest. “Right or wrong, we were fully persuaded in
our own minds, and there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness
in our cause,” continued Dr. Gildersleeve.[7] “Nothing could be holier
than the cause, nothing more imperative than the duty of upholding it.
There were those in the South who when they saw the issue of the War,
gave up their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause.”
With Lincoln’s decision to provision Fort Sumter, on April 1, 1861,
and his call for troops, two weeks later, the question of States’
Rights was amplified by the addition of two other sentiments which
three together formed the lofty inspiration that, in the South lifted
the struggle above the commonplaces of civil strife. At once it
was dignified into a war in defence of home, of native land, and of
liberty. It was therefore with a certain nobility of purpose that the
Confederate Army went forth to battle. The North had enlisted on a
punitive expedition: the South had engaged in a crusade for her ideals.
This was the magic touch that transmuted the comparative dross of her
literature to pure gold. “When there flashed upon poetic souls not the
political issues that were at stake, but the great human situation
of the struggle, they gave voice to the pent up feelings of the new
nation.”
The poetic genius of the Southerners had always been lyric in
character, partly as the result of environment, partly that of racial
temper, partly as an inheritance from the old Cavaliers who had been
their ancestors. Nor had the lyrists of the South been of slender
numbers. Professor Manly’s “Southern Literature” credits the land
with over two hundred poets whom he considered worthy of mention.
More than fifty of these belong to Virginia alone, and Dr. Painter
wrote[8] of their work that “examination ... reveals among a good deal
that is commonplace and imitative, many a little gem that ought to be
preserved.” Their method was usually Byronic and amorous. They had,
it is true, made little or no use of local color or legend, and had
given over the narrative and the dramatic for the lyric. Their work,
however, was always melodious and of easy numbers. This was their
particular characteristic. The second, and indeed the more interesting,
was the lack of the professional touch. Before the War, there had been
few vocational poets, as there had been few professed _literateurs_.
Poetry was the possession of the many, not of a small group of favored
ones, and these wrote purely for the pleasure of the art, with so
little care for fame or reputation that many of their verses still
remain uncollected. When, therefore, the emotion of the conflict was
borne upon the South, there were poets to fight her battles--just as
there were soldiers in the field,--who were using an accustomed mode,
though with unaccustomed sincerity and felicity. Indeed, the number of
war poets is one of the amazing phenomena of the time: and as in the
North, literature was mainly in their hands. Beyond the line there were
Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Emerson, Holmes, Boker, Whitman and Mrs.
Stowe. In the South, Hayne, Timrod, Ticknor, Simms, John R. Thompson,
George Bagby, Dr. Holcombe, Mrs. Preston, Mrs. Charles, and Father Ryan
filled roles as lofty, and as surely inspired. There was, however,
this difference in their work. The poets of the North lived and wrote
in comparative security and remoteness from the field. Their verses
were characterized by a virtuous indignation against the rebellion, by
appeals for men, anger at constant delay and unnecessary defeat, and
deliberate exhortations in the name of the Union.
In the South, on the other hand, conditions were quite different. The
whole land was a battle field, which every man, woman and child was
bound by his principles to defend with his very life, and from which
they had pledged themselves to drive the invading hordes. Each soul
was personally involved in the conflict, and the poets, instead of
looking on the struggle from afar, and distantly applauding it, looked
out from the very centres of confusion, calling to their people words
of help and cheer and courage. Theirs was not a plea to engage in the
conflict. Theirs was the shout of “Come to the battle! Help us or we
perish, and with us the sacred fires of true and personal Freedom.” It
was the “terrible experience of a mighty conflict,[9] in which the soul
of the people was ... brought out through struggles, passion, partings,
heroism, love, death, ... all effective in the production of genuine
feeling and the development of real character. While the battles were
being fought in the homes of the Southerners, their poets sent forth
now a stirring martial lyric, now a humorous song or poem recounting
the trials and hardships of camp, hospital and prison life ... these
becoming ever more and more intermingled with dirges for Jackson, for
Albert Sidney Johnston, for Stuart, for Ashby, and finally for the
Conquered Banner. In all these there was no trace of artificiality, no
sign of the mawkish sentimentality of the old waxflowery, amateurish
and sentimental race of Southern writers.... They were surcharged
with deep, genuine, sincere feeling. They were instinct with life. In
this respect the war poetry laid the foundation of the new Southern
literature ... ‘new in strength, new in depth, new in the largest
elements of beauty and truth.’”
It was a terrible price to pay for a renaissance of art, wrung as
it was from the heart of a wounded people. It appeared still more a
vain and useless sacrifice because at first the Southern war poetry
gave rise to no literary genre. Indirectly, however, in its return to
reality, to simplicity of emotion and truth of passion, this war verse
was of inestimable value to the rising school of Southern fiction and
prose. Nevertheless, the renaissance could not come at once. It was
only when the pain and ruin of war had somewhat passed, and the South
had begun to recover from the waste which the conflict had wrought on
the land, when the bitterness of the struggle had softened with the
changing years and generations, and after the new attitude towards life
had had time to crystalize into permanency, that one of her younger
poets could write of her, with truth:[10]
Lo! from the war cloud, dull and dense,
Loyal and chaste and brave and strong
Comes forth the South with frankincense,
And vital freshness in her song.
The weight is fallen from her wings,
To find a purer air she springs
Out of the night, into the morn.