The Civil War Dead and American Modernity

297 Pages·2018·23.623 MB·English

by  Ian Finseth

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity
oxford studies in american literary history
Gordon Hutner, Series Editor
Family Money Surveyors of Customs
Jeffory A. Clymer Joel Pfister
America’s England The Moral Economies of
Christopher Hanlon American Authorship
Susan M. Ryan
Writing the Rebellion
Philip Gould After Critique
Mitchum Huehls
Antipodean America
Paul Giles Unscripted America
Sarah Rivett
Living Oil
Stephanie LeMenager Forms of Dictatorship
Jennifer Harford Vargas
Making Noise, Making News
Mary Chapman Anxieties of Experience
Jeffrey Lawrence
Territories of Empire
Andy Doolen White Writers, Race Matters
Gregory S. Jay
Propaganda 1776
Russ Castronovo The Civil War Dead and
American Modernity
Playing in the White Ian Finseth
Stephanie Li
Literature in the Making
Nancy Glazener
The Civil War Dead and
American Modernity
Ian Finseth
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Finseth, Ian Frederick, author.
Title: The Civil War dead and American modernity / Ian Finseth.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2017] |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017053282 (print) | LCCN 2017053863 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190848354 (updf) | ISBN 9780190848361 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190848378 (online content) | ISBN 9780190848347 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Collective memory—United States—History. |
Popular culture—United States—History. | United States—History—Civil War,
1861–1865—Casualties. | United States—History—Civil War,
1861–1865—Influence. | United States—History—Civil War,
1861–1865—Literature and the war.
Classification: LCC E468.9 (ebook) | LCC E468.9 .F56 2017 (print) |
DDC 973.7/1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053282
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
{ Acknowledgments }
As the manuscript for this book neared completion, I came to un-
derstand, more acutely than I had before, the poignant truth that loss
is one of the basic conditions of creativity. The sense of possibilities
foreclosed upon, of paths discerned yet untaken, of half-formed
ideas immolated in the furnace of revision, grows sharper as the
work takes its final shape. Some relinquishments are easier than
others, of course. But reconciling oneself to the loss of what remains
uncommunicated and perhaps uncommunicable, rather than hold-
ing on to what might have been, is how projects get finished—which
is, I suppose, just another way of saying that this is a flawed book and
that I accept that. It is striking to me, moreover, that this awareness
of the value of loss, so pertinent to the book’s main theme, came so
late in the process of composition.
From the start, however, I have known that whatever originality
may be found in these pages consists, as in any other book, of a good
deal of recombinatory effort. My cairn is built from stones I did not
make, and it sits atop a mountain of work that has gone before. And
along the way, I have been sustained by the help and encouragement
of many friends and colleagues, to whom I want to extend ample rec-
ognition and gratitude here.
First, this book might not even exist were it not for the early sup-
port of Gordon Hutner, who invited me to work up an essay for
American Literary History based on a paper I presented at the C19
conference in Berkeley in 2012. It was in that essay that I began de-
veloping some of the core ideas of the project, although an astonish-
ing amount remained to be figured out. Three years later, at a critical
moment in the project, Gordon said he would be happy to consider
a book proposal for his series at Oxford, and offered some sage
advice: “Don’t fetishize it.” At the press itself, Sarah Pirovitz shep-
herded the resulting proposal through board approval, while pro-
duction editor Gwen Colvin oversaw the transformation of the man-
uscript into an actual book. I am grateful for their expertise, and for
that of Sarah’s assistant, Abigail Johnson, and the eagle-eyed copyed-
itor Rene Carman.
vi Acknowledgments
Other folks read pieces of the manuscript in draft form and
showed me how it could be improved. In particular, I want to thank
Chris Hager, who read and commented generously on chapter 1,
even as he was working on certain similar issues for his own book on
Civil War correspondence; Bob Levine and Chris Hanlon, for both
their encouraging and their critical observations about the introduc-
tion; Nouri Gana, whose intellectual grasp of mourning and melan-
cholia far exceeds my own; Cody Marrs and Mitchell Breitwieser,
who each read a draft of the ALH article; and Colleen Boggs and Bob
Levine (again), who wrote letters on my behalf for major (though
non-forthcoming) fellowships. I am also happy to report that my
mom, Katherine Forrest, read the introduction and liked it.
The Civil War Caucus, which meets every year at the Midwest
MLA convention, was an invigorating and tremendously collegial
forum in which to present my research for this project as it unfolded.
The intellectual community and personal warmth of the caucus have
been, in my experience, unparalleled, and the feedback I received
from fellow attendees has made every page of this book better. For
their wisdom, comradeship, and sundry valuable suggestions, I want
to thank Faith Barrett, Martin Buinicki, John Levi Barnard, Jill
Caddell, Betsy Duquette, Kathleen Diffley, Ben Fagan, Sam Graber,
Cole Hutchison, Jeff Insko, Justine Murison, Elizabeth Renker, Eliza
Richards, Jane Schultz, Michael Stancliff, Julia Stern, Timothy Sweet,
Kristen Treen, and Elizabeth Young. Kathleen deserves special men-
tion as the conceptual architect and driving force behind the caucus,
and I’ll always appreciate her having reached out to me initially.
At the University of North Texas, I’ve been fortunate to have had
the intellectual companionship of a great English department. At
various and unexpected moments, flashes of illumination came to
me during conversations with Laila Amine, Deborah Armintor,
Marshall Armintor, Bruce Bond, Angie Calcaterra, Gabe Cervantes,
Bryan Conn, Jacqueline Foertsch, David Holdeman, Kyle Jensen,
Miro Penkov, Dahlia Porter, Nicole Smith, Robert Upchurch, and
Kelly Wisecup (now at Northwestern). Not all the details of every
conversation have stayed with me, but in countless subtle ways they
have entered into the texture and substance of this book.
Most of the archival research was conducted at the Clements
Library at the University of Michigan, whose staff was indefatigable
in helping me identify and retrieve a large number of fascinating pri-
mary sources, from soldiers’ diaries to civilians’ letters to rare litho-
Acknowledgments vii
graphic prints. The Clements is, truly, a remarkable resource for the
study of the Civil War, and it deserves greater recognition for the
wealth of materials it contains. My work there was supported by an
Earhardt Foundation Fellowship, for which I am sincerely grateful. I
also spent a summer in Washington, D.C., undertaking research at
the Library of Congress, where many of the key insights of this book
were developed, particularly for the chapter on Civil War visual cul-
ture. I am thankful for the Summer Stipend from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, which made that possible. (May the
NEH survive the current presidential administration and thrive long
into the future!) Finally, material support from UNT, including a
couple of internal research grants and a semester-long sabbatical,
was instrumental in allowing me to complete the project.
The earliest and most important inspiration for writing this book
came from my partner in all things, Stephanie Hawkins, who under-
stood better than I the mysterious ways in which it connected to my
own experience. As an intellectual sounding board and source of
steadfast moral support, Steph deserves much of the credit for my
finishing this project. She and our daughter, Audrey, the force of life
itself, have made it all worthwhile.

{ Contents }
Acknowledgments v
Introduction 3
1. The “Ghastly Spectacle”: Witnessing Civil War Death 27
The Problem of Experience 36
Sense, Affect, Representation 40
Faces, Names, Types, Families 54
Melancholy Reflections 68
2. Body Images: The Civil War Dead in Visual Culture 78
Photography and the Question of Empathy 86
The Illustrated Dead 107
Lithography, History, Allegory 117
Painting and the Enigma of Visibility 128
3. Blood and Ink: Historicizing the Civil War Dead 140
Objectivity, Partisanship, Nationalism 150
The Early Years: Northern Determinism 155
The Early Years: Southern Alienation 162
Later Years: The Convergence 176
African American Counter-history 182
4. Plotting Mortality: The Civil War Dead and the
Narrative Imagination 193
Modernity, Disenchantment, and the Agons of Realism 198
“Grieve Not So”: Loss and the New Woman 203
N arratives Ajar: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the Refusal
of Closure 211
Farewell, Sacrificial Hero 219
The Returning Dead 240
Epilogue 246
Notes 249
Index 279