The number of words
written about the Civil War surpassed the actual dead on the battlefield well
before the war was over. And when the killing stopped, the
accounts of the fighting were only getting started. One hundred and forty years
later, they’re still crankin’ ’em out, sometimes, it seems, just as fast as the
musket balls must have flown at Chickamauga or Antietam. America, still being a
young nation, compensates by analyzing its wars, conflicts, and skirmishes in
every possible way – academically, morally, militarily, politically, culturally
– until it seems the only reason that wars are fought are to give people
something to talk about far into the future.
Among the many tragedies of war, this is certainly one of the greatest. The
number of Americans who don’t understand the firsthand horrors of war, the kind
where your face could be blown to pieces at the top of the next ridge or even
with your very next step, far surpasses the number of those who do. Those
without the experience of battle are prone to think wars are something to look
at in magazines, movies, or in textbooks, events on a timeline that don’t
happen anymore, or if they do, that take place halfway around the world. Too
often, the good intentions of scholars, authors, and the like obscure the vivid
realities, the mass graves, and the devastated countryside of a nation at
war.
It’s not complicated schemes or intricately detailed motives that
make people go to war; those come after the wars are started. Wars are started
by the same emotions most people have every day – love, greed, betrayal, fear,
hatred, the hope for something better – carried to their most extreme. The two
options in battle – fight or flight – are the same two responses every human
brain has to any threat, large or small. Somehow, this gets lost in the
translation nearly every time. The hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded
are a lot easier to handle in black ink than when each individual is considered
as a face, a family, and a story.
Images nearly always convey the horror and destruction of war more
effectively than words can. Be it photographic, poetic, or prosaic, imagery
appeals to emotion over intellect, and in so doing makes itself a natural
medium for war stories. Since the Civil War cut right to the heart – and still
does, in many ways – of so much of what America thought it stood for, it’s not
surprising that many of the most powerful and enduring accounts of the war are
images. Sherman’s sacking of Atlanta and subsequent march to the sea have been
the subject of many a tome, but few can sum up the utter sense of defeat and
submission borne by the South better than one picture of a lone man in the
center of the aftermath of a huge train explosion. For miles around the man,
there is nothing but wreckage: dozens of wheels where boxcars once perched,
tree stumps and railroad ties flung hither and yon, and four lonely pillars
where an entire mill once stood. The photograph was taken in September 1864,
about seven months before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Judging from the
photo, the war was over long before.
That photograph, and 96 others like it, are part of a collection titled
Landscapes of the Civil War: Newly Discovered Photographs From the
Medford Historical Society, edited by Constance Sullivan (Knopf, $40,
hard).Part of a collection of 5,400 prints discovered in the attic
of the Medford Historical Society in Massachusetts, the photographs cover a
wide swath of Civil War imagery, from battalions posing in front of their tents
to the bloody aftermath of the battle of Fredericksburg.
The photos are beautiful to look at, especially considering their age, but
each also serves as a chilling reminder of how totally America committed itself
to war and of the inevitable consequences of such a commitment. The picturesque
creeks in some photographs would soon run red with blood, many of the troops
shown marching in perfect formation would never again see their loved ones, and
it would take years before the devastated South (the post-siege pictures of
Richmond, Atlanta, and Charleston are especially sobering) would even begin to
recover. The stark black-and-white tones, softened just a bit by a faint hint
of sepia, only make these realities that much clearer.
Equally important to the Civil War’s legacy, both aesthetically and
historically, are the words of the poets who witnessed the war and its
aftermath. It’s somewhat disconcerting to think that such a terrible war
spawned some of the finest poetry this country ever saw; nevertheless, that’s
what happened. Much, though certainly not all, of this poetry is contained in
The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry: From Whitman to Walcott, edited by Richard Marius (Columbia University Press, $29.95 hard).
Voices both famous (Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”)
and not (a number of poems attributed to “Unknown”) adorn this hefty volume, as
do those of several black and women poets. Not content to include only poets
contemporary to the war, editor Richard Marius writes in his introduction, “In
this collection, we have included a cross-section of work, most by poets who
lived during the war but much, too, by those who came afterward and found in
the conflict inspiration to poetic reflection,” and indeed, the book contains
the works of later poets ranging from Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and
Langston Hughes to James Dickey and John Updike. If a poet has been important
to America since the Civil War, he (or she) is likely to be in this volume.
The content is as impressive as the contributors. Each acid-free page (this
book is meant to last a long time, as well it should) contains images as vivid
as those in the Medford Photo Archives. From the first line, “Peace! Peace! God
of our fathers grant us Peace!” The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry pulls no punches, taking the reader from Harper’s Ferry and the fields of
Gettysburg to Abe Lincoln’s funeral parade and his memorial in Washington,
D.C., with language as stirring as any American ever put into print. Quoting
from the book would double the size of this article. The poems are split into
seven chapters: “The Horrors of War,” Moral Fervor,” “Snapshots of War,”
“Pantheon,” “Lincoln,” “Aftermath,” and “Stillness,” and are punctuated with
famous Civil War photographs and popular songs such as “Dixie,” “Marching
Through Georgia,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” This one deserves a
place in the pantheon of Civil War books – not just poetry but period.
Winston Groom’s Shrouds of Glory (From Atlanta to Nashville: The Last Great Campaign of the Civil
War) (Atlantic Monthly Press, $23, hard) is a nice companion to the
Medford Collection, because the action is centered around many of the areas
featured in Landscapes. Groom, author of Forrest Gump, does
exactly what he says in the title, tracing the Western arm of the Confederate
army’s last stand under the leadership of Gen. John Bell Hood. It takes a while
to sort out all the characters (the photo plates that divide the book into
thirds help a lot), but it is a well-constructed military history that cares
enough to flesh out the characters of the generals, including Yankees William
T. Sherman and George H. Thomas, who decided it. It could have been a little
clearer, but is surprisingly suspenseful considering the Confederate army was
nearly crushed even before the campaign began.
With more and more being discovered and debated about the Civil War every day,
the volume of literature about the war will almost certainly increase as well.
But what needs to be learned from the war can’t always be gleaned from the same
old texts. The war’s images, both poetic and visual, tell us what we need to
know. War is hell, and if it takes poems of sons fallen on distant
battlefields and photographs of once-fruitful landscapes laid waste to keep us
repeating that horrible nightmare of 140 years ago, then may those images never
stop. n
This article appears in July 21 • 1995 and July 21 • 1995 (Cover).