This Republic of Suffering (46 page)

54. Twain,
Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.

55. Bierce quoted in Roy Morris Jr.,
Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 182; Bierce quoted in Daniel Aaron,
The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 183; Bierce quoted in Morris,
Ambrose Bierce,
p. 137. See Lara Cohen, “‘A Supper of Horrors Too Long Drawn Out': Ambrose Bierce's Literary Terrorism and the Reinstatement of Death,” B.A. paper (University of Chicago, 1999), courtesy of Lara Cohen; Cathy N. Davidson,
The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce: Structuring the Ineffable
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Cathy N. Davidson, ed.,
Critical Essays on Ambrose Bierce
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).

56. Bierce quoted in Morris,
Ambrose Bierce,
p. 205; Ambrose Bierce,
Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce,
ed. Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Ambrose Bierce,
The Devil's Dictionary
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 161.

57. Ambrose Bierce, “What I Saw of Shiloh,” in
Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period,
p. 103.

58. Ambrose Bierce, “A Tough Tussle,” in Ernest Jerome Hopkins, comp.,
The Civil War Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 39.

59. Edmund Wilson,
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 622.

60. Bierce, “Tough Tussle,” pp. 39, 41.

61. Ibid., pp. 41, 43, 44.

62. Bierce quoted in Morris,
Ambrose Bierce,
p. 205; Bierce,
Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period,
p. 21.

63. Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in
Civil War Stories of Bierce,
pp. 45–52; Robert C. Evans, ed.,
Ambrose Bierce's “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” An Annotated Critical Edition
(West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 2003).

64. Bierce quoted in Morris,
Ambrose Bierce,
p. 205; Bierce,
Devil's Dictionary,
p. 34.

65. Ambrose Bierce,
The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce
(New York: Neale Publishing Co., 1911), vol. 8, p. 347.

66. Herman Melville, “The Armies of the Wilderness,” in
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War: Civil War Poems
(1866; rpt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 103; Melville quoted in Lee Rust Brown, “Introduction,” ibid., p. viii. See also Robert Penn Warren, “Melville's Poems,”
Southern Review
3 (Autumn 1967): 799–855.

67. Herman Melville, “The March into Virginia,” in
Battle-Pieces,
p. 23; Melville, “On the Slain Collegians,” ibid., p. 159. See also Stanton Garner,
The Civil War World of Herman Melville
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Warren, “Melville's Poems,” p. 809; Joyce Sparer Adler,
War in Melville's Imagination
(New York: New York University Press, 1981); Andrew Delbanco,
Melville: His World and His Work
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

68. Hawthorne quoted in Lee Rust Brown, “Introduction” to Melville,
Battle-Pieces,
p. iv; Aaron,
Unwritten War,
p. 88.

69. Melville, “Armies of the Wilderness,” pp. 101, 102; Melville, “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight,” in
Battle-Pieces,
p. 62.

70. Melville, “Shiloh,” in
Battle-Pieces,
63; “Armies of the Wilderness,” p. 103; Melville, “Shiloh,” p. 63.

71. Emily Dickinson, “My Triumph lasted till the Drums,” #1227, and “They dropped like Flakes—,” #409 in Thomas H. Johnson, ed.,
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
(Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960). See Robert Milder, “The Rhetoric of Melville's Battle-Pieces,”
Nineteenth-Century Literature
44 (September 1989), pp. 173–200; Maurice S. Lee, “Writing Through the War; Melville and Dickinson After the Renaissance,”
PMLA
115 (October 2000): pp. 1124–28.

72. David Higgins,
Portrait of Emily Dickinson, The Poet and Her Prose
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967); Thomas W. Ford, “Emily Dickinson and the Civil War,”
University Review—Kansas City
31 (Spring 1965): 199. For the most systematic exploration of the importance of war to Dickinson, see Shira Wolosky,
Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Daniel Aaron relegates Dickinson to Supplement 4, a page and a half, in
The Unwritten War
and emphasizes the personal nature of her experience, although at the same time he shows the impact of war imagery on her poetry, pp. 355–56.

73. Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, June 8, 1862, and [n.d.] 1863, in Mabel Todd Loomis, ed.,
Letters of Emily Dickinson
(Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894), vol. 2, pp. 304, 310.

74. Emily Dickinson to Fanny Norcross and Loo Norcross, April 1862,
Letters of Dickinson,
vol. 2, p. 243; William A. Stearns,
Adjutant Stearns
(Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1862), p. 106. See also Roger Lundin,
Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 122–23. The death of another Amherst neighbor at Antietam “in Scarlet Maryland” prompted Dickinson's “When I was small, a Woman died,” later the same year, #596 in
Complete Poems of Dickinson.

75. Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, [n.d.] 1863, in
Letters of Dickinson,
vol. 2, p. 309; Emily Dickinson to Fanny Norcross and Loo Norcross, April 1862, ibid., p. 243.

76. Emily Dickinson, “I dwell in Possibility,” #657,
Complete Poems of Dickinson;
Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, April 26, 1862, in
Letters of Dickinson,
vol. 2, p. 302; “Death is a Dialogue between,” #976; “At least—to pray—is left—is left,” #502; “We pray—to Heaven—” #489; “I felt my life with both my hands,” #351; “Ourselves we do inter with sweet derision,” #1144, all in
Complete Poems of Dickinson.

77. “All but Death, can be Adjusted,” #749, in
Complete Poems of Dickinson.

78. “Suspense—is Hostiler than Death—,” #705; “Victory comes late—,” #690; “My Portion is Defeat—today—,” #639; “It feels a shame to be Alive,” #444; “The Battle fought between the Soul,” #594, all in
Complete Poems of Dickinson.
See Maria Magdalena Farland, “‘That Tritest/Brightest Truth': Emily Dickinson's Anti-Sentimentality,”
Nineteenth-Century Literature
53 (December 1998): 364–89. Barton Levi St. Armand,
Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul's Society
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), portrays her as less doubting and more conventional.

79. Helen Vendler, “Melville and the Lyric of History,” in Melville,
Battle-Pieces,
pp. 262, 265.

80. “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind,” #937, in
Complete Poems of Dickinson;
Wolosky,
Emily Dickinson,
p. xv. See also David T. Porter,
Dickinson: The Modern Idiom
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 39, 98, 120. On Amy Lowell's judgment that Dickinson was a uniquely “modern” voice in nineteenth-century American poetry, see S. Foster Damon,
Amy Lowell: A Chronicle
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), p. 295. Historian Michael O'Brien has argued that Mary Chesnut's Civil War diary, refashioned in the 1880s but unpublished during her lifetime, reflects these same modernistic tendencies. A South Carolina aristocrat who survived on wit and irony as she watched her world disintegrate around her, Chesnut has been well known since the appearance of bowdlerized versions of her writings early in the twentieth century. At last in 1981 historian C. Vann Woodward published a carefully edited version of the 1880s manuscript that recognized it as a literary construction—and reconstruction—not a series of daily jottings from the midst of war. Chesnut's effort might be seen to have much in common with those of Bierce, Melville, and Dickinson. Chesnut eschews narrative for voices and fragments, reflecting in her chosen form the substance of her own disbelief—in God, in science, in her society, in herself. O'Brien connects her with Virginia Woolf, suggesting a continuum of doubt and dislocation from an American war to a European conflagration a half century later. Michael O'Brien, “The Flight Down the Middle Walk: Mary Chesnut and the Forms of Observance,” in Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, eds.,
Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), pp. 109–31.

81. Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Occasional Speeches,
comp. Mark DeWolfe Howe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 82; Reuben Allen Pierson in Thomas W. Cutrer and T. Michael Parrish, eds.,
Brothers in Gray: Civil War Letters of the Pierson Family
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), p. 101; James P. Suiter quoted in Earl Hess,
Union Soldier in Battle,
p. 20; Daniel M. Holt,
A Surgeon's Civil War: Letters and Diaries of Daniel M. Holt, M.D.,
ed. James M. Greiner, Janet L. Coryell, and James R. Smither (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994), p. 100; John O. Casler,
Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade
(1906; rpt. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), p. 37.

82. Cordelia Harvey, letter from Memphis dated December 6, 1862, published in
Wisconsin Daily State Journal,
December 30, 1862, Cordelia Harvey Papers, WHS, online at www.uwosh.edu/archives/civilwar/women/harvey/harvey6.htm; Kate Cumming,
Journal of a Confederate Nurse,
ed. Richard Barksdale Harwell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), p. 15. See the almost identical remark by northern nurse Cornelia Hancock in Hancock,
South After Gettysburg,
ed. Henrietta Stratton Jaquette (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1956), p. 7. On the unspeakability of suffering, see Elaine Scarry,
The Body in Pain
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Paul Fussell writes of the incommunicability of World War I and the failure of language it generated in
The Great War and Modern Memory
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 139, as does Jay Winter,
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 5. Thomas Leonard writes of the Civil War that “in some ways the most important legacy…was silence.” Thomas C. Leonard,
Above the Battle: War Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 25. See also Allyson Booth,
Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First World War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 52, 62.

83. David T. Hedrick and Gordon Barry Davis Jr., eds.,
I'm Surrounded by Methodists: Diary of John H. W. Stuckenberg, Chaplain of the
145
th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry
(Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1995), p. 44.

CHAPTER 7. ACCOUNTING

1. Horace Bushnell, “Our Obligations to the Dead, July 26, 1865,”
Building Eras in Religion
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1881), pp. 322, 327, 321, 340. On Bushnell, see Conrad Cherry, “The Structure of Organic Thinking: Horace Bushnell's Approach to Language, Nature and Nation,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
40 (March 1972): 3–20, and Daniel Walker Howe, “The Social Science of Horace Bushnell,”
Journal of American History
70 (September 1983): 305–22.

2. James Russell Lowell, “Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865,” in Richard Marius, ed.,
The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry: From Whitman to Walcott
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 372, 380.

3. Clara Barton to Brigadier General D. C. McCallum, April 14, 1865; Barton to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, draft letter, October 1865, final version dated November 27, 1865, Clara Barton Papers, LC.

4. “To Returned Soldiers and Others” [1865], Clara Barton Papers, LC; Elizabeth B. Pryor,
Clara Barton: Professional Angel
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), p. 154.

5. On general orders, see Brevet Brigadier General J. J. Dana to Brevet Major General J. L. Donaldson, March 19, 1866, in Whitman, Letters Received, RG 92 E-A-1 397A, and E. B. Whitman, Cemeterial Movement, in Final Report, 1869, RG 92 E646, both in NARA; “Civil War Era National Cemeteries,” online at www.va.gov/facmgt/historic/civilwar.asp. See also U.S. War Department, Quartermaster General's Office,
Compilation of Laws, Orders, Opinions, Instructions, etc. in Regard to National Military Cemeteries
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1878);
Roll of Honor: Names of Soldiers Who Died in Defence of the American Union,
27 nos. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1865–71).

6. Special Order no. 132 in “Report of Captain J. M. Moore,” in
Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives During the First Session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress,
1865–66 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1866), vol. 3, pp. 264–66; James M. Moore to Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, July 3, 1865, M619 208Q 1865, Roll 401, NARA. See also Requests received by Colonel James Moore, 1863–66, RG 92 E581, Requests for Information Relating to Missing Soldiers 1863–67, RG 92 E582, and Letters Received by Tommy Baker, Clerk of Office of Burial Records, 1862–67, RG 92 E580, all in NARA.