The Real War.

“The real war will never get in the books” Walt Whitman, who had volunteered as a nurse in army hospitals, famously claimed in Specimen Days (1892) (Whitman). The American Civil War represents a decisive and far-reaching turning point in the development of the United States as a nation. But how much of the “real war” can actually be conveyed via literary narrative? The gruesome experiences of the soldiers and the aftermath of battle? What about the establishment of a national identity and the transformation or disintegration of national ideals and ideology? Writers such as Ambrose Bierce, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Francis Lieber, or Henry W. Bellows did attempt to provide representations of war experiences and provide interpretations of the conflict. Mid 19th-century American nationalism tended to employ literature as a means of sustaining national ideals, evoke patriotic feeling and provide meaning in the face of unprecedented human tragedies. A comparison between two essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 can provide an assessment of the role of literature during the war. These texts have been chosen not as a comprehensive representation of political, social or perhaps aesthetic attitudes regarding the Civil War and its meanings, but rather as an indication of the various, often contradictory, responses the war provoked. A close reading of the essays will enhance our understanding not only of public interpretations of the Northern war aims, but also the conflicting views on national promise and idealized hopes for the future along with the notion of national crisis – or a possible crisis in art and representation.

The most common perception of the Union on the ev...

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...and successful construction of American nationhood. In the First Inaugural Address (1861) Lincoln still spoke of a “Union”; in the Gettysburg Address (1863) the word “Nation” is stress, while “Union” is not mentioned once (Grant 105). In his “Supplement” at the end of his poetry collection Battle-pieces and aspects of the war (1866), Herman Melville calls the Civil War a “terrible historic tragedy” (Melville 272). While Emerson advocated the notion of a nation destined for a glorious future, Hawthorne, by refusing to adapt one single point of view, similarly defied the general consensus in his representation of the war and complicated the common public discourse. Chiefly About War-Matters is as much a contemplation of a national and political crisis as of an author’s personal crisis and the impossibility of a truthful artistic representation of historical realities.