[In the following essay, Ridgely studies the literature of a culturally-isolated South during the Reconstruction era.]

Hath not the morning dawned with added light?
And shall not evening call another star
Out of the infinite regions of the night,
To mark this day in Heaven? At last, we are
A nation among nations; and the world
Shall soon behold in many a distant port
                    Another flag unfurled!

The lines are from “Ethnogenesis,” by Henry Timrod, the Charleston poet who set them down as the first Confederate Congress met in Montgomery in February 1861. The mood was exultant as the realization swept over the South: “A nation among nations.” As the geologist Joseph Le Conte later recalled in his Autobiography, he had at first opposed the secession movement and dreaded the inevitable conflict; but, he added, “gradually a change came about—how, who can say? It was in the atmosphere; we breathed it in the air; it reverberated from heart to heart; it was like a spiritual contagion—good or bad, who could say? But the final result was enthusiastic unanimity of sentiment throughout the South.” One doubts the unanimity of assent to any war, but thousands were indeed marching off under “another flag.” After the initial southern military successes, William Gilmore Simms was able to crow to a New York friend, “We are resolved on Independence. We have been persecuted for 30 years & will stand it no longer—from our brethren. … Every battle, thus far, has resulted in a Southern Victory.—Sumter, Bethel, Bull Run, Manassas, Harpers Ferry & Missouri,—all tell the same tale. Your Generals are cashiered. Your army demoralized.”

Simms's sneer at northern weakness of will betrays the fatal delusion of southern patriots; they could not fail because they were asserting fundamental political rights. Even after the war was lost, a writer in the Southern Presbyterian Review could still state with conviction the philosophical ground upon which the South had stood: “The thing on trial in the American Union, as Southern men thought, was liberty—constitutional liberty; the power of the States, the power of persons, to maintain all their constitutional rights, against all claims of power whatever; against the irresponsible constructions of the extent of its own powers by the Federal Government; against reckless and passionate majorities.” Simms had earlier supplied a more mundane consideration. In a public reply to a northern correspondent who had spoken for the preservation of “the blessed Union,” he retorted: “We can easily conceive the reluctance of your section to see it dissolved. The Union … has been the source of all your prosperity. You have, at length, destroyed it. … You have allowed our enemies—and I think your own—to triumph; and if you will permit me to say, now, your present mistake still consists in the desire, rather to save the Union, than to do justice to the South.”

The dissolution of the Union, welcomed though it was by such men as Simms, left the South in almost complete cultural isolation. The disruption of supply routes, especially the blockade of southern ports, dried up the flow of both northern and European publications. But local entrepreneurs now saw an unprecedented chance to rout northerners from southern library tables as well as from southern fields. As the Southern Illustrated News put it in 1862, readers would no longer be forced to buy “the trashy productions of itinerant Yankees … but will, in future, have Southern books, written by Southern gentlemen, printed on Southern type, and sold by Southern publishing houses.” For a time the claim was made good; books were indeed more widely circulated and wartime magazines proliferated. But, as all commodities grew scarce in the closing years of the war, production and distribution became more difficult; few periodicals survived their infancy. Moreover, as editors had been complaining for years, southerners were a capricious people; when things got tough, they always deserted first the artists who were toiling to create pride in southern letters.

In fact, the formal literature of the wartime South was not much to take pride in. What best expressed the true feelings of beset southerners were the ballads, songs, and poems which had both folk and written circulation. Military bands and parlor pianos alike cheered hearts with songs like “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” with its stirring chorus of “Hurrah! Hurrah! for Southern rights, Hurrah!” As in all wars, soldiers recalled old tunes and set new words to them, sometimes patriotic paeans to their states or military units, occasionally scurrilous reflections upon their commanders. The violence and horror of the most tremendous conflict fought upon the North American continent stirred writers on both sides to produce a sizable amount of often moving verse.

After defeat, Simms recognized that such works would be an important part of the record of the inner life of his people. In the preface to his anthology War Poetry of the South (1867), he could also plead that the North accept it as a contribution to the national heritage: “Though sectional in its character, and indicative of a temper and a feeling which were in conflict with nationality, yet, now that the States of the Union have been resolved into one nation, this collection is essentially as much the property of the whole as are the captured cannon which were employed against it during the progress of the late war. It belongs to the national literature, and will hereafter be regarded as constituting a proper part of it, just as legitimately to be recognized by the nation as are the rival ballads of the cavaliers and roundheads, by the English, in the great civil conflict of their country.” Tactfully, Simms did not identify which people were “cavaliers” and which “roundheads.”

Actually the best of southern wartime poems were those which commemorated not the triumphs of the Confederacy but its horrendous collapse. In the stunned silence of surrender, the price of it all moved the hearts of those who had so joyously greeted the birth of a nation. It was Father Abram Joseph Ryan, a militant Catholic cleric who refused to be reconciled to the Union until 1878, who most memorably echoed what he called “the unuttered feelings of the Southern people” in his hymn to “The Conquered Banner.” The first stanza, despite its heavily reiterative rhyme pattern, rises to a true elegiac pitch:

Furl that Banner, for 'tis weary;
Round its staff 'tis drooping dreary;
                    Furl it, fold it, it is best;
For there's not a man to wave it,
And there's not a sword to save it,
And there's no one left to lave it
In the blood which heroes gave it;
And its foes now scorn and brave it;
                    Furl it, hide it—let it rest!

In the final two stanzas despondency is assuaged by Father Ryan's forecast that the deeds of the Confederacy will enter hallowed history:

Furl that Banner! True, 'tis gory,
Yet 'tis wreathed around with glory,
And 'twill live in song and story
                    Though its folds are in the dust:
For its fame on brightest pages,
Penned by poets and by sages,
Shall go sounding down the ages—
Furl its folds though now we must.
Furl that Banner, softly, slowly!
Treat it gently—it is holy—
                    For it droops above the dead.
Touch it not—unfold it never,
Let it droop there, furled forever,
                    For its people's hopes are dead!

In such lines we hear the first chords of a tremendous new theme—the Lost Cause.

Wartime verse boosted the morale of the southern nation, but the war was to make victims of the three most talented poets of the period: Henry Timrod, Paul Hamilton Hayne, and Sidney Lanier. Timrod, who had served as a tutor on plantations in the decade before conflict began, published a collection of pallidly romantic poems in 1860. The war sharpened his tone and released the talent for occasional verse that earned him the sobriquet “Poet Laureate of the Confederacy.” Ill health ended his brief service in the army; in the war years he was, variously, correspondent, reporter, and then editor of the Columbia South Carolinian. The sacking of the state capital by Sherman's army left Timrod destitute. Suffering from poverty and weakened by tuberculosis, he survived only until 1867. The first stanzas of his “Ode,” which had been sung at the decoration of Confederate graves in a Charleston cemetery the previous year, might stand as his own epitaph:

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves
          Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
          The pilgrim here to pause.
In seeds of laurel in the earth
          The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
          The shaft is in the stone!

Timrod's close friend, Paul Hamilton Hayne, would live some years beyond the war's end; but he, too, lost his house and possessions to northern invaders. In 1866 he settled with his small family in a shack in the pine barrens west of Augusta, Georgia; it would be his home for the last twenty years of a life of poverty, literary drudgery, and ill health. As a link between Old South and New, and as heir to Simms of what remained of a southern literary establishment, he tried to encourage new talent. His own verse, however, remained old-fashioned, just as his political sentiments went unreconstructed. And yet he kept up a surprisingly large correspondence with northern and even English writers; in literature, at least, he attempted to allay sectional prejudices. It is hard to say whether a less isolated life and a closer contact with the developing cultural life of the nation might have made a better poet of Hayne; likely, his taste for the ornate, his love of subject matter remote from everyday affairs would never have been significantly altered. In retrospect, he seems more important as a representative southern literary man than as the creator of memorable verse.

The youngest of these three poets, Sidney Lanier, published nothing until after the end of the Civil War; but, like the other two, he was wrecked physically during the war and shared in the general poverty of the postwar South. Lanier saw war at firsthand in some of the great Virginia battles; in 1864 he was captured and sent to a federal prison in Maryland. When he emerged he was afflicted with the tuberculosis that would undercut his strength during his final sixteen years of life. Lanier's first book, a novel called Tiger-Lilies (1867), suffered general, and not unwarranted, neglect, even though it contains inside views of his life in military prison.

Despite the undeniable achievements of his later years, Lanier scattered his talents. Early drawn to music, he became for a time first flutist in the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in Baltimore. In Baltimore, too, he achieved a second ambition—to be a literary scholar—when he was appointed lecturer in English at the recently founded Johns Hopkins University. Poetry, though, remained his chief love; and in the mid-1870s his work began to receive national recognition. “Corn,” written in Georgia, was a plea for an agricultural reform that might lead to a new South, one free of the domination of a single cash crop. “The Symphony,” printed in 1875, uses the imagery of music, which he saw as a universally harmonizing force, to protest the rise of commercialism. With “The Marshes of Glynn,” Lanier achieved the dual goal of prosodic experimentation and revelation of his sense of the transcendental in nature—a linking of his esthetic and religious concerns. The poem has so frequently been anthologized as to blunt the original effect of an unexpected freshness and originality in a southern poet; but perhaps its musicality may still be heard in the closing lines:

How still the plains of the waters be!
The tide is in his ecstasy.
The tide is at his highest height:
                    And it is night.
And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep
                              Roll in on the souls of men,
                    But who will reveal to our waking ken
                    The forms that swim and the shapes that creep
                              Under the waters of sleep?
And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in
          On the length and the breadth of the marvellous
                    marshes of Glynn.

The relative success of Lanier, however, only underscores the general aridity of poetry in the South from which he sprang. For all the straining to produce a theory of poetry—from Poe's “The Poetic Principle” to Lanier's ambitious The Science of English Verse—southerners never gave the poet the sort of homage which Longfellow had won in the North. This lack of concern for the professional, the inability to understand those who would make a separate career of verse-writing, was deadly to the growth of a southern school. Since good poetic models, from Pope through the recent Romantics, already existed, what encouragement could there be for the seeking of a personal and unique voice? Lanier's discovery of Walt Whitman as late as 1878 is revelatory of his region's cultural backwardness. Writing to a friend from whom he had borrowed the book, he remarked: “Leaves of Grass was a real refreshment to me—like rude salt spray in your face—,” though Lanier had to confess that his reaction was “in spite of its enormous fundamental error that a thing is good because it is natural, and in spite of the world-wide difference between my own conceptions of art and its author's.” A short time later, Lanier wrote to Whitman himself, seeking to buy a copy of his volume and sounding a more appreciative note: “It is not known to me where I can find another modern song at once so large and so naive: and the time needs to be told few things so much as the absolute personality of the person, the sufficiency of the man's manhood to the man, which you have propounded in such strong and beautiful rhythms.”

Lanier's tribute is touching evidence of his sense of provinciality. And it was also a testimonial to the accuracy of his friend Timrod, who had made one of the acutest analyses of the restraints put upon the poet in his essay “Literature in the South.” Timrod opened his piece with what had become a truism: “In no country in which literature has ever flourished has an author obtained so limited an audience.” The chief reason, Timrod felt, was simple sectional prejudice:

It is the settled conviction of the North that genius is indigenous there, and flourishes only in a Northern atmosphere. It is the equally firm conviction of the South that genius—literary genius, at least—is an exotic that will not flower on Southern soil. Probably the book [of a Southern writer] is published by a Northern house. Straightway all the newspapers of the South are indignant that the author did not choose a Southern printer, and address himself more particularly to a Southern community. He heeds their criticism, and of his next book,—published by a Southern printer—such is the secret though unacknowledged prejudice against Southern authors—he finds that more than one half of a small edition remains upon his hands. Perhaps the book contains a correct and beautiful picture of our peculiar state of society. The North is inattentive or abusive, and the South unthankful, or, at most, indifferent.

Timrod now focussed his attack: “The truth is, it must be confessed, that though an educated, we are a provincial, and not a highly cultivated people. At least, there is among us a very general want of a high critical culture.” Part of the South's problem, he admitted, was shared with the North—the cry earlier in the century for “Americanism” in literature. “To be an American poet, it was sufficient either in a style and measure imitated from Pope and Goldsmith, or in the more modern style and measure of Scott and Wordsworth, to describe the vast prairies of the West, the swamps and pine forests of the South, or the great lakes and broad rivers of the North. It signified nothing to these critics whether the tone, the spirit, or the style were caught from European writers or not. If a poet, in genuine Scott, or genuine Byron, compared his hero to a cougar or grisly bear—patriotically ignoring the Asiatic tiger or the African lion—the exclamation of the critic was, ‘How intensely American!’”

Timrod was no supporter of more recent regionalism: “We regard the theory of Southernism in literature as a circumscription both unnecessary and unreasonable, of the privilege of genius.” In a closing shot, he aimed at the local arbiters of taste who would deny personal freedom to the southern author:

After all, the chief impediment to a broad, deep, and liberal culture is her own self-complacency. With a strange inconsistency, the very persons who decry Southern literature are forever extolling Southern taste, Southern learning, and Southern civilization. There is scarcely a city of any size in the South which has not its clique of amateur critics, poets and philosophers, the regular business of whom is to demonstrate truisms, settle questions which nobody else would think of discussing, to confirm themselves in opinions which have been picked up from the rubbish of seventy years agone, and above all to persuade each other that together they constitute a society not much inferior to that in which figured Burke and Johnson, Goldsmith and Sir Joshua. All of these being oracles, they are unwilling to acknowledge the claims of a professional writer, lest in doing so they should disparage their own authority. It is time that their self-complacency should be disturbed.

The critique was entirely just. But it was published in 1859 and was an insider's plea to his own culture for greater artistic freedom. It was the fate of the southern poet, however, that he could not escape his time and place. Within two years after the publication of his diatribe, Timrod gave his pen unreservedly to the defense of this same culture. Now the quondam impugner of southern self-complacency could see danger only in enemies from the outside—those northern hordes who, he wrote in “Ethnogenesis,” “might with a hostile step profane our sod!”

The North-South clash which reached its military conclusion at Appomattox could not so definitively be settled in the minds and emotions of the reunited American people. Though Lincoln had promised in his second inaugural address to “bind up the nation's wounds” and to exhibit “malice toward none,” the Radical Republicans who took over control of the South in the decade of Reconstruction quickly abandoned Lincoln's sympathetic approach. The once-proud southern states were divided into military districts and placed under martial law. Thousands of white voters were disenfranchised, while scores of ex-slaves were placed in positions of authority. It was to be expected that white southerners would respond with Black Codes to ensure their own political domination over Negroes and with vigilante bands like the Ku Klux Klan to terrify them. The North had destroyed the Confederacy and left it a ruined and occupied land; it could not extirpate the southern spirit.

For now the South had its own history, quite apart from that of the Union. It had its heroes, men far grander than those imagined by its romancers: the knightly Lee, the saintly Jackson, the dashing Mosby. Its sacred battlefields, soaked with the blood of martyrs, stretched wide across the land: Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness. Of the great ironies of southern history, one of the most striking is that no great poet arose to hymn its arms and men, no Tolstoy wove together the story of those hellish days at Gettysburg. There were, of course, scores of biographies, massive histories recounting the course of the war as seen from a distinctly southern point of view. There was the ultimate defense of the southern cause written by Jefferson Davis, who alone of southern leaders had refused amnesty. Its title proclaimed the grandeur he saw in his theme: The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. But the fact remains that no poet or novelist ever had the moral nerve to confront the meanings of the nation's greatest trauma; it remained, in the phrase of a recent critic, “the unwritten war.” Perhaps the horror of battle was too great, the memory too recent for the literary mind to deal with it without danger to its sanity. Perhaps, too, an emotional resistance to recording the actual experience was linked to a refusal to shoulder the moral guilt of slavery.

Certainly some sort of psychological blockage is at the center of the problem. But, at least in fiction, literary convention also played a part. When a northern writer, John W. De Forest, set down realistic battle scenes in Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), he was quite aware that readers would shrink from such gross depiction and that critics would censure his lack of ideality. But even De Forest could not get the whole war into the book. After he had read Tolstoy's War and Peace, he wrote to William Dean Howells, “I tried, and told all that I dared, and perhaps all that I could, but did not dare state the extreme horror of battle and the anguish with which the bravest soldiers struggle through it.” Yet De Forest's realism was by far the strongest in all American letters before Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895). The South would never even approach the factuality of such books.

The most typical of the southern romancers was John Esten Cooke, who had seen the truth of combat but refused to write it down. Cooke had published a popular tale of the colonial South, The Virginia Comedians, as early as 1854, but he reached a wider audience in the immediate postwar years. An active soldier, he had served on the staff of General J. E. B. Stuart and had an insider's view of the conflict. Beginning in 1866 with a tale called Surry of Eagle's-Nest, he devoted seven books to the course of the war—the first significant body of such fiction to come from either side. Son of the Old Dominion in temperament as well as birth, Cooke portrayed Lee, Stuart, and Jackson as avatars of the Cavaliers, and many a southern youth must have felt personal pride in the daring exploits through which these knightly commanders ride. He showed some skill in constructing battle scenes, but unhappily he allowed plot (and outmoded Gothic mystery at that) to overwhelm whatever historical insights he might have given his reader. The Civil War simply wasn't picturesque enough to him to sustain a whole book. True romance was always to be sought in the distant past, especially eighteenth-century Virginia, and it was romance that Cooke wanted to purvey. Quite characteristically, he told a fellow writer that he saw in modern warfare “nothing heroic or romantic or in any way calculated to appeal to the imagination.” Cooke's Civil War, then, had to be reconstructed on literary models and peopled with toy soldiers; the noise and smell of the real battles he had seen were too indecorous for the taste of those who wanted heady heroics without the reek of blood.

Cooke is representative of most southern authors in the post-war decade in his refusal to acknowledge that a new voice might be needed to express the changed times. In physical bondage to their military administrators, southerners remained in what appears to be a self-imposed mental captivity. Northern books again flooded in; southern writers often found northern markets closed off to them. There were occasional exceptions. Augusta Jane Evans (Wilson), who had already had a hit with the deliriously sentimental Beulah in 1859, produced a nationwide best-seller in St. Elmo (1867), an incredible brew of melodrama, pseudo-intellectualism, and mild sex which may stand as the benchmark of the low taste of the period.

Isolation from the life of the nation again stimulated the founding of a number of local magazines, all loftily conceived and all ill financed. Sectionalism is rampant in these periodicals and some are frankly organs of Lost Cause mentality. But by the end of the Reconstruction period in 1877, the atmosphere was changing, and there seemed no pressing need for an organ to succor southern writers and broadcast their views. After a long period of vilification of their persons, their morals, their ideas—even their landscapes—southerners were about to make a triumphal entry upon the national literary scene. Many of them, of course, remained resolutely prejudiced against the North and all its ways. What was really shifting was the North's view of them.

Bibliographical Note

In the past few decades the study of southern literature in all periods has become a major academic undertaking. Though the chief research centers are southern-based, they are far from being southern-biased; scholars are finally able to examine a regional literature dispassionately without undergoing the criticism of regional patriots. The criticism, biography, and history which they have produced is immense; a basic aid to sorting it out is Louis D. Rubin, Jr., A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge, 1969). A follow-up volume is Southern Literature, 1968-1975, edited by Jerry T. Williams (Boston, 1978). An annual bibliography, published in the spring issue of the Mississippi Quarterly, brings this information up to date. Useful information about current activities can also be found in the News-Letter of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (currently issued by Mississippi State University).

In writing a concise survey of literature in the South before 1900, I have been very conscious of how much I have had to omit. I have attempted to put together a coherent essay by concentrating upon those whom I take to be key figures, whatever the intrinsic quality of their work. I have emphasized what seems to me most “southern” in the authors I have surveyed; inevitably, this approach has meant neglect of the work which many did in other areas. Fortunately there is a long and authoritative study which will help to fill in these and other gaps: Jay B. Hubbell's The South in American Literature, 1607-1900 (Durham, N.C., 1954). I am indebted to this work throughout my own essay; a number of brief quotations, otherwise unidentified, are taken from this source. I have also quoted texts from one of the best one-volume anthologies, Southern Writing, 1585-1920 (New York, 1970), edited, with excellent introductions and headnotes, by Richard Beale Davis, C. Hugh Holman, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. A later anthology, The Literary South (New York, 1979), is edited by Rubin alone. Two earlier collections remain standard: Edd W. Parks, editor, Southern Poets (New York, 1936) and Gregory L. Paine, editor, Southern Prose Writers (New York, 1947). A guide to the whole range of southern authors is Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (Baton Rouge, 1979), edited by Robert Bain, Joseph M. Flora, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. A useful discussion both of accomplishment and of remaining problems in the field is Southern Literary Study: Problems and Possibilities, edited by Rubin and Holman (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975). Of the journals which regularly print articles on the South, I especially recommend the Southern Literary Journal (Chapel Hill, N.C.); its review section is both dependable and stimulating. In the notes on individual chapters which follow I have identified the sources of my quotations; because of space limitations, I have listed only those articles and books which have most directly contributed to my remarks.

… Books which directly treat the Civil War and literature are: Robert A. Lively, Fiction Fights the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1957); Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York, 1962); and Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War (New York, 1973). “The Conquered Banner” is quoted from Father Ryan's Poems (Baltimore, 1881). Texts of Timrod and Hayne are from the Davis-Holman-Rubin anthology. My remarks on Lanier owe much to Charles R. Anderson, editor, Sidney Lanier: Poems and Letters (Baltimore, 1969).