CIVIL WAR MEMOIRS

Remembering the American Civil War is something of a national pastime. From films, documentaries, and reenactments of battles to merchandise, monuments, and historical sites that memorialize the "Great Conflict," no event in U.S. history has received more attention than the Civil War. One reason why the war retains its hold on so many imaginations is that the meaning of the conflict remains a subject for debate. Was the war a crusade to abolish slavery or a fight about states' rights? What were the decisions and factors leading to victory and defeat? Most pressing for many Americans living in the decades after the war were questions about the possibilities of closure. Or in the words of Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address (1864), how could recently reunited Americans "bind up the nation's wounds" (p. 289)?

Between 1870 and 1920 one response was to read and write about the war. Some texts, like Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895), describe the lives of soldiers in battle. Others, like John William De Forest's The Bloody Chasm (1881), Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), and Thomas Dixon's The Clansman (1905), explore the challenges of reconciliation in the aftermath of the war. Though Edmund Wilson and Daniel Aaron have argued that few literary masterpieces came out of the Civil War, much fiction, poetry, and drama took up the war as a literary topic. The conflict even gave rise to its own subgenre, the Civil War memoir.

THE MEMOIR

Combining autobiography and history, the memoir was one of the most popular forms of Civil War literature. Generally presented as nonfiction and relating experiences in a first-person voice, the form reached its peak in the 1880s, when hundreds of Civil War memoirs appeared before an insatiable public. Some memoirs, typically those of war heroes, came out immediately as books. Others were published as newspaper or magazine articles, some of which were later collected. In 1877 the Philadelphia Weekly Times ran a series of memoirs that became Annals of the War (1879). In Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1887–1888)—a four-volume set expanded to five in 2002—Century Magazine gathered the many memoirs it began publishing in 1884. The popularity of such Civil War narratives lived on through the twentieth century, attesting to the enduring interest that Americans took in the national conflict. Indeed, first-hand accounts of the Civil War continue to be published, even if they are often reconstructed by editors from correspondence, diaries, and journals.

Civil War memoirs drew variously on existing literary traditions. Like Puritan conversion narratives, they often trace a series of setbacks and triumphs ordained by a guiding Providence. Like Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (1771–1790) and Horatio Alger's post–Civil War novels, memoirs often tell stories of lessons learned and challenges overcome through a combination of character, faith, application, and luck. Civil War memoirs also attracted readers long enamored with military histories and myths—from Greek and Roman narratives to the legends of King Arthur to accounts of modern military heroes such as George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. Some memoirs drew on sentimental tropes of self-sacrifice and emotional suffering, and like the romances of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, many report feats of courage and skill against long odds. Finally, some memoirs can be read as examples of literary realism and naturalism insofar as individuals seem to be buffeted by unrelenting institutional and cosmological forces as the brutal physical realities of the war threaten to overwhelm humanitarian ideals.

Taken as a whole, Civil War memoirs form a recognizable but diverse body of work. Many narratives were written from memory decades after the war. Other writers relied on letters, journals, maps, and newspaper accounts. Some focused on facts and material details, while others offered more impressionistic responses. The motives for writing were also wide-ranging—vindication from criticism, monetary gain, the desire to set the record "straight," the urge to define one's role in history, howsoever exalted or modest. Though most Civil War memoirs were written by people directly involved in the fighting, recollections came from various perspectives—famous generals and common soldiers, combatants and civilians, blacks and whites, men and women, Southerners and Northerners. What is most interesting about many memoirs is their writers' efforts to make sense of the war, to bring political, religious, and psychological order to a chaotic and often traumatic event in which a country broke apart and violently came back together. Also central to the genre is the challenge of reconstructing the past and negotiating what Michael Kammen calls "the problematic relationships between myth and memory, tradition and history" (p. 17).

THE GENERALS

The best-selling Civil War memoirs were those of prominent generals, who tended to focus on organizational difficulties, military tactics, and battle descriptions, often to justify their decisions and bring retrospective order to the war. Memoirs from Union generals include George B. McClellan's McClellan's OwnStory (1887), P. H. Sheridan's Personal Memoirs (1888), and John Pope's 1886 articles (collected in The Military Memoirs of John Pope, 1998). The most famous of such accounts is Ulysses S. Grant's (1822–1885) Personal Memoirs (1885). Grant's book sold over 300,000 copies by subscription alone—not only because Grant was a war hero largely credited with the Union's victory, and not only because he served two terms as president of the United States (1868–1876) but also because his memoirs were written under extraordinary circumstances. In 1884 Grant went bankrupt after being defrauded by a business partner. To add to his woes he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the throat. Grant had resisted writing his history, but he now had little choice. Racing against his impending death and watched by a sympathetic public, Grant wrote (and dictated) a lengthy memoir remarkable for the clarity of its prose and the expansive scope of its vision. Grant primarily sticks to the facts, but he offers opinions on major figures such as Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee. He discusses the causes of the war (slavery and Southern "Demagogues" [p. 117]), the lesson of the conflict ("the necessity of avoiding wars in the future" [p. 635]), and the wisest course for postwar America (guarantee political rights for blacks and work toward national harmony). Grant's memoirs, like his military labors, proved to be a hard-won success. He died three weeks after completing his book, but with the help of his publisher, Mark Twain, he made enough money to pay off his creditors and ensure the comfort of his family.

If Grant's book tends toward reconciliation and closure, William Tecumseh Sherman's (1820–1891) Memoirs (1875, revised 1886) never quite give up the fight. At the end of the war Sherman was the second most prominent Union general, yet he remained a villain in the South, mainly because of his March to the Sea, a destructive campaign designed to destroy the Confederacy's infrastructure and morale. Sherman's Memoirs sold ten thousand copies within its first month. It also, despite its author's claims, was more contentious than conciliatory. Sherman blames the war and its casualties on the South and defends his March to the Sea. He "waves the bloody shirt" by recalling Confederate atrocities at Fort Pillow and Andersonville prison. Sherman even angered some Northern readers, who felt that he claimed too much credit for himself by slighting fellow generals, including Grant. In his revised Memoirs of 1886, which stretch over one thousand pages, Sherman answers many of his critics, providing copious memoranda, correspondence, and charts while reprinting objections from his opponents and offering precious few retractions. In its passionate attention to detail and refusal to let go of past animosities, Sherman's Memoirs show how the war continued to be fought in books long after Appomattox, as numerous parties with divergent interests struggled to shape America's memory of the conflict.

The following excerpt is from William Tecumsch Sherman's Civil War memoirs:

In this free country every man is at perfect liberty to publish his own thoughts and impressions, and any witness who may differ from me should publish his own version of facts in the truthful narration of which he is interested. I am publishing my own memoirs, not theirs, and we all know that no three honest witnesses of a simple brawl can agree on all the details. How much more likely will be the difference in a great battle covering a vast space of broken ground, when each division, brigade, regiment, and even company, naturally and honestly believes that it was the focus of the whole affair! Each of them won the battle. None ever lost.

Sherman, Memoirs, p. 5.

The two most celebrated Confederate generals never wrote their memoirs. Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson was killed during the war. Lee chose not to write his recollections, adding to his reputation as a private, self-sacrificing man. James Long-street recorded his war experiences in From Manassas to Appomattox (1896), as did Colonel John S. Mosby in Mosby's War Reminiscences and Stuart's Cavalry Campaigns (1887), while G. T. Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston wrote articles for Century Magazine. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881), though the work may be more accurately called a history than a memoir. One Southern general widely read is Edward Porter Alexander (1835–1910), whose Military Memoirs of a Confederate (1907) is augmented by more personal recollections in Fighting for the Confederacy (written between 1897 and 1907, published in 1989). In many ways Fighting for the Confederacy participates in the myth of the Lost Cause, a view that lauds the heroic, doomed efforts of the South against a powerful but blundering invader. Alexander names states' rights, not slavery, as the cause of secession. He blames the Union for instigating the war and laments the lost opportunities for Confederate victory. Contented slaves appear in the narrative, as do tragic accounts of Southern bravery. Yet Fighting for the Confederacy is not an entirely onesided memoir. The leadership of both Grant and Jackson comes in for praise and censure. Even Lee, Alexander's beloved commander, is held accountable for mistakes, particularly in Alexander's stirring recollection of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. Rich in personal anecdote and military detail, Fighting for the Confederacy provides an immediate sense of the war, though it also offers reflection and judgment.

COMMON SOLDIERS

In the nineteenth century American histories for the most part focused on powerful men. Many Civil War memoirs fit this "top-down" model of history, though rank-and-file soldiers also recorded their wartime recollections. A wealth of their diaries, journals, and letters is available in modern print editions, many of which are listed in Garold L. Cole's Civil War Eyewitnesses (1988–2000), an annotated bibliography. As might be expected, these documents tend to show a different side of the war. Though the Virginian Robert Catlett Cave insisted that "privates did not concede to their generals a monopoly of military judgment" (p. 14), common soldiers wrote less about large-scale strategies and more about their own immediate experiences—the hardships and joys of camp life, individual actions in battle, the less conspicuous but important roles played in national events.

Along with John Esten Cooke's Wearing of the Gray; Being Personal Portraits, Scenes and Adventures of the War (1867), one of the best-known Civil War memoirs from the ranks is George Cary Eggleston's (1839–1911) A Rebel's Recollections (1875), a book first serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and one that went through four editions by 1905. Eggleston was raised in Indiana but moved to Virginia as a teenager. He voted against Virginia's secession but eventually fought on the Confederate side. Having lived in both the North and South, Eggleston understandably wrote his memoir to foster sympathy between sections. In deference to the South, Eggleston retains some features of the Lost Cause narrative. The Confederacy fights for honor, not slavery. Southern generals are depicted as heroes. Slaves are well treated in Eggleston's book, until they are freed and become "desperados" (p. 181). At the same time, Eggleston also appeals to a Northern readership. He admits the utter defeat of the South and looks forward to peaceful race relations. Like other Northern writers, he lays much blame not on the South as a whole but on Jefferson Davis. Unrepentant about secession and yet respectful to the Union, A Rebel's Recollections works toward reconciliation, even as it overlooks more brutal and contentious aspects of the war.

Ambrose Bierce was critical of the Civil War in his memoirs:

One would think war horrible enough without the monstrous exaggerations that seem inseparable from the story of it. Nothing is more common than to hear and read about "mowing down" the enemy or being mown down by them, projectiles cutting "wide gaps" through charging columns, "heaps of slain" that clog the cannon wheels, "rivers of blood" and the rest of it. All this is absurd: nothing of the kind occurs—nothing, rather, of the degree. These are phenomena of the campfire, the hearthstone, the "rostrum" and the writing-desk. They are subjective—deeds of memory in a frame of mind. They have a fine literary effect when skillfully employed, and in purely literary work are allowable in landscape painting to aggrandize the mountains. Outside of literature their use is to humbug the civilian, frighten the children and grapple the women's hearts with hooks of steel—all tending to the magnification of the narrator.

Bierce, "Prattle," p. 61.

Like Eggleston, other common soldiers found opportunities to publish their memoirs. Privates and sergeants received occasional space in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. Others published pieces in newspapers and magazines, including James P. Sullivan, whose reminiscences are gathered in An Irishman in the Iron Brigade (1993), and the novelist John William De Forest, whose war nonfiction is collected in A Volunteer's Adventures (1946). Some of the war's most evocative and most critical depictions came from Ambrose Bierce, who reprinted many of his war memoirs in his Collected Works (1909; also in A Sole Survivor: Bits of Autobiography, 1998). Bierce entered the Union army as a private and left as a first lieutenant. He witnessed some of the war's most furious fighting and later wrote such classic short stories as "Chickamauga" (1889) and "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890). Like his fiction, Bierce's memoirs are polished performances that yet reveal the horrors of the war—eviscerations, burned corpses, brain fragments, even pigs feeding on the faces of the dead. Ironic and caustic, Bierce understands how the war is romanticized and sanitized by memory, even as he sometimes falls prey (and knows he falls prey) to the cheerful temptations of nostalgia.

Yet for all the common soldiers who wrote about the war for family, self, and posterity, relatively few published their memoirs between 1870 and 1920. One explanation for this is that prominent generals commanded larger audiences and had more access to publishers. Only in the twentieth century did many "bottom-up" recollections appear in their entirety. Among these posthumously published memoirs are Cave's Raw Pork and Hardtack (published 1996), David Holt's A Mississippi Rebel in the Army of Northern Virginia (written in the early 1920s, published in 1995), and Henry Kyd Douglas's I Rode with Stonewall (completed in 1899, published in 1940). A Virginian on Stonewall Jackson's staff, Douglas (1838–1903) disapproved of slavery but fought for the Confederacy. His memoirs paint a complex picture of Jackson—capable of great tenderness and violence, fearless as well as God-fearing. Another interesting memoir, this time from a Yankee, is Alfred Bellard's (d. 1891) Gone for a Soldier (written in the late 1880s, published in 1975). The New Jersey–born Bellard enlisted as a private in the Army of the Potomac, and his memoirs (including rough sketches and drawings) focus on his day-to-day life as a soldier—marches, weather, work details, food, accommodations, and battles. Reflecting the boredom, complaints, and cynicism that could mark the life of a soldier, Bellard's memoirs give an unromantic, revealing picture of the war.

BLACK SOLDIERS

Another perspective on the war focuses on African American soldiers. Not allowed in the Union military until 1863, almost 200,000 black troops enlisted in the Union cause (while a lesser number served or were conscripted on the Confederate side). As David W. Blight has shown, the presence of blacks in the Civil War was often "whitewashed" away in the decades that followed, in part because conflicts over racial equality remained an obstacle to national reunion. But if many postwar Americans sought intersectional harmony at the expense of black rights, others memorialized African American contributions during the war.

One such figure was the white abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), whose Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870) details his experiences commanding African American military units. Higginson's regiment was composed of ex-slaves freed by Union forces. At a time when Northerners debated whether blacks should be allowed in the military, Higginson's First South Carolina Volunteers vindicated the abilities of black soldiers. In Army Life in a Black Regiment, Higginson describes his men as disciplined, intelligent, honest, and—most important—courageous. Like most white Americans of the time, abolitionists included, Higginson engages in some racial stereotyping. But while he often depicts his men as naturally musical and childlike, he also attends to the cultural conditions that shaped their lives under slavery. Higginson's memoirs insist upon the potential of African Americans as citizens. By looking back on the Civil War, he fights for black rights in the postwar period.

The same is true of other war accounts written by African Americans. Refusing to forget black achievements, William Wells Brown's The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867), George Washington Williams's A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (1888), and Joseph T. Wilson's The Black Phalanx (1888) all recall black Civil War soldiers from a historian's perspective. Of particular interest was the renowned Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, a black regiment that suffered massive casualties in its assault on Fort Wagner, thus demonstrating to the nation and world the mettle of African American soldiers.

Though not precisely a soldier, Susie King Taylor (b. 1848), in her Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops (1902), describes her work as a laundress, nurse, and teacher in a black regiment. Taylor was stationed in South Carolina near Higginson, who wrote an introduction to her book. Her narrative is sparse but also remarkable, detailing her escape from slavery into Union lines, her dedication to her "boys," her learning to shoot, and her resourcefulness in caring for the wounded and hungry. Taylor ends her memoirs with a chapter titled "Thoughts on Present Conditions," making explicit her call for racial equality and assailing those Americans who refused to fulfill the egalitarian promises of the war. The broader cultural desire to ignore black rights, coupled with educational and economic disadvantages, can help to explain the relative dearth of Civil War memoirs published by African Americans between 1870 and 1920. However, many primary documents are now available in print collections, such as On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier's Letters from the Front (1991), A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army (1993), Voices of the 55th (1996), A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stevens (1997), and Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War (1998).

THE HOME FRONT

The Civil War is traditionally associated with military forces. But as scholars such as Elizabeth Young, Kathleen Diffley, and Drew Faust have shown, the experiences of women and men on the home front are no less compelling. For Americans not directly involved in the fighting, the war affected family members, domestic arrangements, and entire worldviews. Noncombatants provided material support and ideological direction to various war efforts. Civic unrest and the return of the wounded brought the war home to many Americans. With battles raging on native soil and with news spread quickly by voice, print, and image, the war changed the lives of many civilians, some of whom wrote their memoirs.

From a Southern perspective, Kate Stone's Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868 (1900) reprints her writings from the war and its aftermath, revealing the anger, anxieties, and privations Stone (1841–1907) endured on her family's Louisiana plantation before fleeing into Texas to escape the Union army. Stone's narrative traces a dramatic arc—from initial optimism, to utter despair, to a homecoming and a final acceptance of defeat. Along the way Stone describes such traumatic events as the deaths of two brothers, an uprising of slaves, and the destruction of her childhood world. Most famously, Mary Boykin Chesnut's (1823–1886) memoirs show the war as seen—and reconstructed—by a South Carolina woman married to a prominent Southern politician. Chesnut kept journals of her wartime experiences (later published as The Private Mary Chesnut, 1984). Her memoirs first appeared as A Diary from Dixie (1905), a text presented as a day-to-day diary but one that Chesnut wrote in the early 1880s by revising her earlier journals. The complicated composition history of A Diary from Dixie shows how memories of the war are under constant revision. Chesnut's book is also a fascinating portrait of a witty, willful, and complex woman who disliked slavery but supported the Confederacy, was simultaneously inspired and disabled by the war, and found both a solace and a burden in the writing of her wartime experiences.

Like Chesnut's texts, Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868) describes the domestic contexts in which Civil War struggles took place. Keckley (c. 1818–1907), a freed slave, became the dressmaker for Mary Todd Lincoln, the president's wife. Her book is part slave narrative and part memoir, mixing fiction with historical fact while gossiping about famous war figures and, more intimately, their wives. Showing the cruelty and generosity of both Northern and Southern whites, Behind the Scenes is an antislavery book that yet appeals to national reconciliation. Keckley's careful use of symbol and voice also suggests that while blacks and women were often forced behind the scenes, they nonetheless played powerful roles in the war, a point made more explicitly in Frederick Douglass's autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, expanded 1892).

The most notable memoir from a noncombatant may be Walt Whitman's Specimen Days (1882), an autobiography that recounts (among other things) his work in Union hospitals. Like many of his generation, Whitman (1819–1892) calls the Civil War "the distinguishing event of my time" (p. 689). He describes the horrors of the hospital—groans and blood, despairing deaths, wagons full with amputated limbs. Yet as in his book of Civil War poems, Drum-Taps (1865), Whitman finds heroism and wholeness in the war without denying its destructive effects. Based on Whitman's wartime journals, Specimen Days is a visionary but also grounded effort to find in the grim realities of the war a vindication of America's indestructible potential for unity, freedom, and compassion, all represented, Whitman suggests, in his own personal largesse.

Finally, another major literary figure who looks back on the war is Mark Twain (1835–1920), whose "Private History of a Campaign That Failed" (1885) simultaneously satirizes and participates in the genre of Civil War memoirs. Published in Century Magazine during the heyday of its memoir series and appearing after Twain was criticized for profiting from the dead Grant's Personal Memoirs, Twain's "Private History" begins by noting the rage for Civil War heroes only to present his own wartime experience as someone who "didn't do anything" (p. 417). In his fictionalized story, Twain and his teenage friends are swayed by romantic views of the war, but their laughable efforts to form a military company show that they lack the skill and will to take part in the conflict. It is only after they ostensibly kill an innocent stranger that they learn the true magnitude of the Civil War. That tragedy erupts in the comic plot indicates how hard it was in the postwar period to romanticize the war. And that Twain and his Missouri company barely dodge, allegedly, an engagement with the young Grant shows how close the war came to many Americans, even those who lived through it as a private affair.

See alsoAutobiography; Century Magazine; Civil War Memorials and Monuments; Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant; Reconstruction

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Bierce, Ambrose. Collected Works. New York: Neale, 1909.

Cave, Robert Catlett. Raw Pork and Hardtack: A Civil War Memoir from Manassas to Appomattox. Edited by Walbrook Swank. Shippensburg, Pa.: Burd Street Press, 1996.

Eggleston, George Cary. A Rebel's Recollections. 1875. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959.

Grant, Ulysses S. Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. 1885, 1886. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

Lincoln, Abraham. Speeches and Letters. Edited by Peter Parish. London: Everyman's Library, 1993.

Sherman, William Tecumseh. Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman. 1875, rev. 1886. New York: Library of America, 1990.

Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens). "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed." In The Portable Mark Twain, edited by Tom Quirk, pp. 417–437. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982.

Secondary Works

Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 1973.

Ayers, Edward. "Worrying about the Civil War." In Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History, edited by Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry, pp. 145–166. Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Berlin, Ira, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds. Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Cole, Garold L. Civil War Eyewitnesses: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles, 1955–1986. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

Cole, Garold L. Civil War Eyewitnesses: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles, 1986–1996. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.

Diffley, Kathleen, ed. To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861–1876. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2002.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962.

Young, Elizabeth. Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Maurice S. Lee