The Southern war poetry of the Civil War

by Esther Parker Ellinger

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