Shortly after, he penned “A Death Sonnet for Custer,” announcing that America now had its national epic:
Continues yet the old, old legend of our race,
The loftiest of life upheld by death.
The ancient banner perfectly maintain’d,
O lesson opportune, O how I welcome thee!
Here Whitman subscribes to the myth that war ennobles mankind; that death in battle is the finest act one can undertake for one’s country. The poet had already forgotten his musing of a decade earlier on the bleak darkness in men’s souls revealed by the cruelty of armed conflict.12
As veterans aged, they, too, distanced the horrors of the Civil War in nostalgia for their passing youth. Could dentures and rheumatics pills ever make a fair substitute for the glow of the campfire on the mountainside, where young men had camped, and for the adventure of marching ranks? Memory became highly selective under the influence of sentiment. As time passed, a survivor of Stuart’s cavalry wrote that “the memory of those days seems like a beautiful dream—seen through the mists of the rolling years.” Pining for youth also pervaded a poem written in 1895 for the U.S. 1st Cavalry’s reunion: “Backward, turn backward, oh, time in your flight, / Make me a soldier boy just for tonight.”13
Even being a college president or Supreme Court justice failed to stop an old soldier from donning rose-colored spectacles as he journeyed through middle age. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, severely wounded in the war, by 1865 entered “an emotional abyss.” In 1868, his wife Fannie revealed that he emotionally and physically abused her, almost driving her to divorce. Yet, despite the trauma, Chamberlain came to romanticize military service. He enjoyed returning to Gettysburg, hailed as the hero of Little Round Top, who had saved the Union left flank. He made his last trip in 1913. Toward the end of his life, Chamberlain wrote that Sherman got it wrong about war being hell: it had destructive elements, yes, but it also called forth the best of manhood, eliciting courage, self-discipline, fortitude, and comradeship.14
Perhaps the most vivid turnabout occurred in the thinking of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Badly wounded several times during the conflict, he resigned his commission in 1864, fearing that the slaughter in Virginia would drive him mad. But, twenty years later, in a Memorial Day address, on May 30, 1884, he pronounced that his generation had been specially privileged to fight in the war. “Through our great good fortune,” he asserted, “in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.” Allowing the rhetoric to soar, he proclaimed, “We have seen with our own eyes the snowy heights of honor.”15
The psychologist William James did not fight in the war. He appreciated some of the selfless and courageous qualities elicited by military service, but he had also witnessed what combat did to his brothers Garth and Robinson, both of whom became dramatic postwar failures. William did not see bloody mayhem working out as a great tonic for the human condition. Instead, in a 1910 essay entitled “The Moral Equivalent of War,” he proposed useful but pacific public service outlets for the energy and enthusiasm of youth. These, as much as military service, could be structured to inculcate values of hardihood, civic responsibility, and self-discipline. James’ concept became an important inspiration for President John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps. To the same end, some Civil War veterans promoted football as a mock war game, hoping to encourage the muscular values demanded by soldiering.
But nothing could substitute for the real thing. Watching the American attack go in at San Juan Hill, Cuba, 1898, Stephen Crane declared it to be “the best moment in anyone’s life.” Here he reprised Lee’s exultant sentiment at Fredericksburg, but without the more mature man’s added caution. Crane’s comment might seem odd, coming from an author generally reputed to have written the first fully realistic, perhaps even antiwar, American combat novel. But the authentic settings of The Red Badge may make it too easy to misread the novel’s ambiguity toward war.16
Crane skillfully sketches the character of soldiers, he deftly renders his images of wounded men struggling down the road to the rear, and he demonstrates a real feel for the chaos of battle. Yet the final message of the book fits a time-honored romantic model: the ultimate test, combat, makes men out of boys. We have the climactic moment, right out of chivalric adventure stories, when Henry and his friend Wilson seize the enemy standard, the most knightly of all feats in battle. As Crane says of Henry’s rehabilitation, his running away put safely behind him, “He had slept and, awakening, found himself a knight.” As often as not, The Red Badge would encourage, not deter, adolescent desire to experience the mysterious elevation of combat.17
To read a truly stark depiction of the destruction wrought by war, we might compare The Red Badge (1895) to a contemporaneous French novel, Émile Zola’s The Debacle (1892). Breathtaking in scope, Zola’s story depicts in excruciating detail the 1870–71 demolition of France’s armies by Prussia. We see a defeated and demoralized army descend into a mob, herding behind the defenses of Sedan, trapped like sheep surrounded by wolves. In the rear of the armies masses of looters congregate, and human vultures rob the dead, “pockets jingling with watches and silver coins stolen from pockets.”18
Zola vividly describes the ghastly wounds of men smashed by modern weapons: “a Zouave with his entrails exposed,” an artilleryman on fire from an incoming round, whose “back must have been broken for he was unable to move and was crying bitterly,” an officer “with his left forearm gone and his right side slit down to the thigh,” who was “imploring somebody, in a dreadful high-pitched voice, to finish him off.” The book unflinchingly catalogs the many horrors of field hospitals. Here we read about some head wounds: “smashed jaws with tongue and teeth a bleeding mess, eye-sockets driven in and eyes half out, skulls split open with brains visible.” Injuries do not heal but continue to seep pus and secrete bone chips. Flies drink the blood of wounds, while crows pick at tender morsels.19
In a particularly chilling scene, peasant partisans tie a captured German soldier to a kitchen table and bleed him slowly to death, like a butchered pig. The partisan who cuts the enemy’s throat ensures the end will be drawn-out, lasting hours: he “had taken care with the cut and only a few drops pumped out with the heartbeats.” The victim could neither speak nor move. “The only way the march of death could be followed was on the face, a mask distorted by terror.” In Zola’s final, bleak climax, during the civil war following the Emperor Napoleon III’s abdication, two comrades find each other on opposite sides of a barricade as the Paris Commune suffers its death throes. Without realizing who he faces, Jean, a stoical peasant noncom, bayonets Maurice, a headstrong bourgeois idealist who left the army to join the Communards. Jean will live on to help rebuild a broken nation, but this ending has none of the transcendence of Henry Fleming’s rebirth as a hero at Chancellorsville. Zola died in 1902, before he could witness the next debacle begin in 1914.20
American journalist Richard Harding Davis called the Chicago Exposition of 1893 “the greatest event in the history of the country since the Civil War,” unwittingly suggesting that both were magnificent shows. By this time, promoters advertised vacation trips to renovated battle sites, encouraging a growing tourist trade that treated once-bloody fields as picnics for the family. Panoramic dioramas of the great contests, now as famous as Homer’s Troy, toured the country. Inevitably, as the accuracy of memory faded with time, myth-making embellished the popular drama of the war. The Confederate Veteran lavished praise on the Gettysburg Cyclorama, a panoramic painting of the climactic Pickett’s charge. Having paid the 50 cents entrance fee, the viewer could stand in rapt fascination: “General Armistead, who led the forlorn hopes of the Confederates, is seen falling from his horse desperately wounded, his horse rearing and plunging, mad with terror.” Actually, of Pickett’s three brigadiers, Armistead had been the only one to go forward on foot.21
The Civil War now made an appealing game for children. Margaret Preston, as a mother, worried about boys’ aping of combat: “Almost their entire set of pla
ys have reference to a state of war,” she complained. Her five-year old staged marches and battles with his chums, and commanded an army of paper soldiers he made, even building a toy field hospital for the wounded. Most disturbing to his mother, “He gets sticks and hobbles about, saying that he lost a leg at the Second Battle of Manassas.” The lasting agony of amputation now forgotten, mutilation became in imagination a red badge of courage, not a grim debilitation.22
Reconciliation between white North and South served as a necessary precursor to the renewal of American faith in the positive benefits of military endeavor. The immediate postwar years witnessed great bitterness between the antagonists, whose actions in the latter stages of the conflict had gone well beyond the recognized conventions of war. Mutual recrimination kept the memory of the horror alive. But, at least by the 1880s, anger had mellowed. Recognition of the need to present a united racial front against the possibility of blacks achieving civic and social equality made forgiveness imperative.
In the 1890s, Memorial Day observances at sites such as Gettysburg featured both white Confederate and Union veterans, coming together in fellowship. Speakers increasingly insisted that preservation of slavery had never been the South’s primary war aim, nor had the Northern cause encompassed racial equality. Researchers have studied the role of selective memory in reconfiguring the nature of the conflict. One authority concludes that a storyline developed “in which devotion alone made everyone right, and no one truly wrong in the remembered Civil War.” Northerners could afford magnanimity because, after all, they had won, breaking the South’s economic and political power.23
Northerners allowed Southerners to claim they had produced the better soldiers, and had been borne down by sheer numbers only, defending a Lost Cause fought to defend nothing save honor. As late as 1995, novelist Sharyn McCrumb could still use this myth as an effective plot device in one of her ballad books, She Walks These Hills. A character, mulling on the making of a Southern identity, focuses on “the Southern warrior, who prided himself on his bravery and shooting skill, [and] had lost a war to a bureaucratic foe, who won by having more supplies and a vast expendable population of immigrants to throw in the path of Southern gun barrels.” The myth remained potent precisely because it grossly simplified what had actually occurred.24
Not quite all Northerners proved willing to embrace Confederate myths and heroes. In 1896, the Yale graduating class planted ivy from the grave of Robert E. Lee on the university campus as part of the commencement ceremonies. A Yale alumnus, Joseph Twichell, who had served as a chaplain in the Union Excelsior Brigade, spoke out in opposition. He deemed it wrong to plant in Northern soil “ivy from the grave of Robert Lee, a good man, but the representative of an infamous cause.” A huge controversy ensued. Leonard W. Bacon, also from a clerical background, supported Twichell, saying “it can not be too positively impressed on the ingenuous undergraduate mind that, whatever they may think, we old folks have not yet come to the point of looking upon the Civil War as a football game upon a grand scale.”25
What of the great Confederate general himself? Lee stood by his belief that war’s essential nature makes it too terrible to sentimentalize or institutionalize as a high national value. He refused to write an extended memoir of the kind that became popular among other leading figures from the war period, an exercise that helped to make interaction with the war’s memory a pleasurable intellectual exercise to be enjoyed in a study chair. Lee urged his countrymen to put the conflict behind them and concentrate, like Zola’s Jean, on building the peace. In refusing an invitation to help raise memorials at Gettysburg, Lee explained his motivation: “I think it wiser moreover not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the example of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”26
Such pacific sentiments failed to dominate the national discourse. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had already entered the realm of legend, and he himself held a conspicuous position in the pantheon of great American heroes. Charles Francis Adams Jr. from the distinguished family that had given America two presidents and many public servants, found that the more he came to know about Lee, the more he admired the Rebel general: “a great man,—great in defeat, a noble, moral character.”27
Southern boys would long feel badly that they had missed the subliminal experience, marching with “Marse Robert” into the pages of history, before the butchery of the last months smothered the glory. William Faulkner famously captured the martial daydream of youth when he wrote: “For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out.”28
No time machine could turn the clock back to Seminary Ridge, but other opportunities to cheer for war appeared on the horizon. In 1898, the nation declared war on Spain, making the Pacific a sphere of influence and embarking upon the long road to confrontation with imperial Japan. In an ultimate gesture of reunification, Rebel General Joseph Wheeler received command of the dismounted cavalry brigade in Cuba. Future reliance on war as a first-priority tool of policy appeared inevitable. In some ways, America’s road to world power through vast territorial expansion, brought about by military action, had been quietly advancing all along.29
At the close of the War between the States, the United States threatened Emperor Napoleon III of France with force if he did not withdraw his troops occupying Mexico. This assertion of the Monroe Doctrine led France to abort an attempt to add America’s neighbor to its colonial possessions while Uncle Sam had other business. In a remarkable foreshadowing of the concept of “nation building,” the New York Herald, May 24, 1865, expanded upon this muscle-flexing. The paper envisaged the victorious Federal armies marching on to establish republics all across the globe, “on—till the soldiers of Grant, Sherman and Sheridan have saved the world as they have saved the Union.”
The army steadily pushed the Native Americans westward, depriving them of their ancestral lands, and forcing them onto often barren, bleak reservations of poor land. This culminated a process that had begun in the antebellum period and continued apace. A senior military historian has made the thoughtful assessment that Sherman and Sheridan’s method of waging hard war on civilians entered permanently into American strategic and tactical thinking: “making war against non-combatants emerged from the American Civil War as a strategy that American leaders generally regarded as acceptable. Once that acceptance existed, the door was opened enough that a further opening into more ruthless attacks on civilians came at least within the boundaries of contemplation.”30
Thoroughly exasperated by the vexing relations with the Amerindians, Sherman once swore that “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.” That road led to the massacre at Wounded Knee. The so-called “Filipino Insurrection” followed the driving of Spain from the Philippines in 1898, when the United States reneged on its promise to give the islanders full independence: in the fierce unconventional warfare that subdued the people, 220,000 Filipinos died. Some prominent American cultural icons, notably Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, bitterly opposed going to war in 1898. But the public at large showed general enthusiasm for what one of Lincoln’s private secretaries, John Hay, now Secretary of State, labeled “a splendid little war.” American character had been regenerated by a little bloodletting, and the road to major power status had been opened at comparatively little cost.31
We have almost ended our journey together. But, before we part, the time has come to take one last walk together, this time down a dusty road in Texas. It leads us to the railroad tracks. A train has just passed this way. It takes the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry, the famous Rough Riders, from their training camp in the west to their embarkation
point for Cuba at Tampa, Florida. Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, in acting command of the regiment, confides to us in his memoir what he saw from the observation platform of his rail car. “Everywhere,” he recalls, “the people came out to greet us and cheer us.” At depot stops, they brought flowers and food, watermelons and jugs of milk to succor the soldiers.”
This had been Confederate territory, noted Roosevelt, where legendary tales of Forrest and Morgan, Jackson and Hood, told by old soldiers, still held audiences hushed in courthouse squares. Rebel veterans came down to the tracks in their suits of cadet gray to salute the train, and lads came to wave flags and admire the older boys in their blue and khaki uniforms, lucky enough to be going off on a great adventure. “The blood of the old men stirred to the distant breath of battle; the blood of the young men leaped with eager desire to accompany us.” Young girls, too, flocked to the roadbed, thrilled to be sending knights away on romantic quests. They “drove down in bevies, arrayed in their finery, to wave flags in farewell to the troopers and to beg cartridges and buttons as mementos.”
The gray-haired old ladies, too, came down to the tracks to stand and watch. But (and it is a large but) they showed no animation; they did not wave and cheer along with the others. They looked on sadly and kept silent. Long ago, they had waved and blown kisses to other boys, dressed in butternut and gray, as they went off down this same road to another, bigger war. So many had not come back; they had wasted away from disease in hospitals or taken minnie balls, dying in agony on far distant fields. Often, their graves remained unknown. Many others who had come back did so crippled and different, distracted and with a faraway look. The girls had cried and cried then, for the boys they had lost and for the shrunken lives they themselves would lead.32
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