Book Reviews

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Book Reviews

Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War. By Stephen Cushman. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. xxi, 214.$28.00 cloth; $27.99 e-book.) Stephen Cushman compels us to see anew five pivotal “writers” who helped forge our modern views of the American Civil War. He illuminates the writings of Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in new and sometimes startling ways. Cushman also has mastered relevant military history, rarely to be expected of a professor of English literature, while interpreting his subjects’ writings as “historical configurations of rhetorical strategies, rhythmic pat- terns, quotations, allusions, echoes, and revision” (p. 4). He uncovers surprising influences upon these writers and elucidates how they, in turn, have influenced us. Cushman writes in a way reminiscent of Robert Penn Warren, whom the author clearly admires, and ultimately crafts a jeremiad about the future of Civil War memory in the national consciousness. Although Garry Wills, Robert A. Ferguson, and Robert Alter have traced similar ground in considering Lincoln’s enduring appeal and the sources of his at times majestic prose, one would be hardpressed to find a more concise and thoughtful examination than Cushman’s. “Assimilating” Emerson, Presbyterian hymns, and the language and forms of the King James Bible, Lincoln at his best would employ alliteration and repetition with a momentum capped by a “final shift in verb tenses away from the past and present to the future perfect . . . and the future” (pp. 37–38). He employed parataxis in a way that simultaneously invoked collective guilt and specific blame for the horrors of civil war. For Cushman, Lincoln manifested an astonishing capacity to marshal meter and form to reimagine the Union, close out the war, and recast the future based on the same Christian charity that had fueled the North’s resistance to slavery. All of this he did

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without dwelling directly on slavery and race—a shortcoming in both Lincoln and in Belligerent Muse. Cushman amusingly admits to the less appealing aspects of Whit- man, his “self-referentiality and self-description” (p. 53). But to Cushman, this approach to literature and history—not accepted or acceptable during Whitman’s lifetime—has become customary today. By focusing on himself, Whitman’s Civil War writings could trans- port the reader “into a zone traveled only by authorized personnel” and establish his own credibility as a trustworthy guide (pp. 54–55). Through Whitman, we have the first important case of the personal being identified with the real and, ultimately, the historical. In his self-referential glory, Whitman opposed the “top-down narrative of courteous generals” in favor of the “bottom-up narrations” of ordinary people—what has become the standard in contemporary academia (p. 63). With Sherman’s memoir, Cushman asserts a level of artistry hereto- fore unrecognized. He sees in the work the general’s conscious desire to construct and act in his own drama. Cushman recognizes an artis- tic inclination missed by Sherman’s biographers. Indeed, early in his life, Sherman did cultivate an interest in art, ultimately sublimating it into “the art of writing about waging war” (p. 78). In his later years, he developed a taste for reading, and in a remarkable insight, Cush- man explains how Sherman employed the standard travel narrative as an archetype for his own memoirs. Without significant support from secondary sources, scholars may wonder about the Sherman-as-artist claim, but as Cushman points out, the general’s literary innovation broke new ground. He wrote in an era that preceded full publica- tion of the Official Record of the War of the Rebellion (1880–1901). “Sherman,” Cushman proclaims, “had to act as his own compiler” (p. 103). In the end, the general crafted a particular—and enduring— image of himself, dominated as much by his art of omission as by his determined documentation. Consideration of Ambrose Bierce and Medal of Honor winner Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain displays Cushman’s remarkable range and innovation. He dug deeply into Bierce, best remembered for his Devil’s Dictionary ([1906, 1911] in which he defined “academy” as “a modern school where football is taught”) and his riveting short stories. Bierce served as an officer in the Ninth Indiana Regiment and participated in the Battle of Chickamauga—the title of one of his best-remembered short stories and one that Cushman analyzes with remarkable contextual detail—in the fall of 1863. Most significant,

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Cushman discovered that despite his reputation as “Bitter Bierce” and the ironic horror of his Civil War short stories, the writer re- mained captivated by the military, common soldiers and generals alike, and especially by the language of command. So taken with his “theory and system of giving oral commands” (p. 133), Bierce, in 1908, successfully lobbied the head of the Army War College to visit West Point and deliver his ideas in a lecture. For those familiar with Bierce’s short stories, his lasting and respectful fascination with the army is astonishing. Finally, Cushman traces the fifty-year development of Chamber- lain’s relation of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. Did Union soldiers under Chamberlain’s command “salute” surrender- ing Confederates? His first account emerged from a brief 13 April 1865 letter to his sister, which said simply, “We received them with the honors due to troops—at a shoulder—in silence” (p. 151). As time passed, Chamberlain elaborated his account, placing himself in a more central position and increasing the levels of emotion on the part of all the soldiers involved—“honor answering honor” (p. 160). The scene, as Chamberlain eventually crafted it, became, as Cush- man relates, part of the growing desire for sectional reconciliation; and in modern times it became a cultural touchstone, embodying as- sumed enduring lessons for business management, human relations, and pastoral theology. Readers will appreciate Cushman’s imaginative approach, but this reader wishes he had applied the same techniques and level of analy- sis to the centrality of the African American voice—surely every bit as important and persistent as a debate over how Americans understood the drama of the Confederate surrender, Whitman’s self-referential innovations, Sherman’s self-fashioning, and Bierce’s irony. Freder- ick Douglass, whose words are spoken every summer beside Saint- Gaudens’s famous monument before the Massachusetts State House, would have been a fit subject to do battle against a memory of the war and its meaning as the domain of the dead, the white, and the male.

Donald Yacovone, Associate of Harvard University’s Hutchins Cen- ter, is the co-author of The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013) and coeditor of the forthcoming “An Arrow to the Future”: Essays on the Life and Legacy of Wendell Phillips.

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