Book Review: War Power: Literature and the State in the Civil War North
War Power: Literature and the State in the Civil War North. By Philip Gould. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. Hardcover, 256 pp. $105.00.
Reviewed by Stephen Cushman
Having enlisted in a Massachusetts militia battalion in July 1861, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., mustered out of U.S. military service as a brevet colonel in July 1864. Soon after, in an 1865-66 season of the Concord (Massachusetts) Lyceum featuring appearances by Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Wendell Phillips, and Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Holmes gave a lecture entitled “Poetry of the War.” If this lecture by the future Supreme Court justice was not the first public survey of what has come to be called Civil War literature, it was close to it.
Not quite one hundred years later, Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War appeared in 1962, amid widespread centennial commemorations and discussions. Capacious and idiosyncratic, Patriot Gore founded a field, one to which Philip Gould’s War Power belongs and does credit. Gould acknowledges frankly the connection between his work and Patriotic Gore: “Wilson does not exactly model my own approach to Northern Civil War literature, but his broad focus on the relations between the federal state’s power and literary culture certainly informs it” (25).
Relations between, on the one hand, writings by selected Northern authors and, on the other, powers of the federal state, as those powers expanded quickly, significantly, and (some would say) excessively under Abraham Lincoln, occupy the main chapters of Philip Gould’s War Power. Framed by a substantial introduction and a brief epilogue, Gould’s chapters sample Northern Civil War literature by mixing familiar names with less familiar ones: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s satiric essay “Chiefly About War Matters” (1862); four short stories published by Louisa May Alcott from 1864 through 1881; the novel Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Succession to Loyalty (1867) and short story “Parole d’Honneur” (1868), both by John William De Forest, captain in the Twelfth Connecticut Volunteers, mustered out in 1865 with the brevet rank of major; speeches and writings by Frederick Douglass; William Wells Brown’s The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867) and wartime essays; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s postwar novella Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869) alongside her poetry and speeches; and Herman Melville’s poetry volume Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866).
Whether adding to the large body of commentary on Melville’s Battle-Pieces or helping to break new ground with Frances Harper’s not-so-discussed Minnie’s Sacrifice, Philip Gould’s discussions of these various works are fruitful and welcome. When he seeks to generalize about Civil War literature from these few samples, however, he invites respectful dissent. “As each chapter will address in some way, Northern literary production generally demonstrates deep anxieties about the war’s transformation of the federal state’s powers, and its ramifications for traditional norms of private and social life,” War Power asserts in its introduction (22). Well worth consideration, this ambitious claim cannot help but spark debate.
As Gould himself observes, Northern writers worked “in a variety of genres—memoir, magazine fiction, the novel, lyric poetry, political oratory, and historical writing” (22). If we consider Northern literary production in all these genres from 1862 into the 1880s, we face hundreds of titles. Any study of Civil War literature necessarily makes its strategic selections; yet a study built of different choices could generalize about Northern Civil War literature in different ways, basing its argument instead on, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Ulysses S. Grant, Charlotte Forten, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and James Henry Gooding, who may have had ambivalent feelings toward Lincoln at some point (Emerson, for instance, originally supported William H. Seward for the presidency) but did not fret much in print about how the transformation of the federal state’s powers affected norms of private and social life, especially after the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. A study that also included the skeptical irony of Mark Twain or the macabre cynicism of Ambrose Bierce might produce still other generalizations. Neither Twain nor Bierce singled out overreaching federal power as a specific target, while both directed plenty of criticism toward war-making in general.
Whatever general anxieties may have haunted Northern writers discussed in War Power, one specific anxiety haunts Philip Gould: “At the outset of the Introduction, I did reveal my own political concerns about the dangers of presidential power in the Trump era” (25). Gould returns to the 45th president in his epilogue: “Like it or not, then, this book was researched and written in the Age of Trump” (182). Oxford University Press released Gould’s book in August 2024; three months later, a national election made the 45th president also the 47th. Different readers will have different reactions to a book imprinted by a foreboding sense of “the parallels between the US Civil War and our own civil wars today” (182). While acknowledging certain congruences between the 1860s and the 2020s, many may give equal or greater weight to crucial divergences.
Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (University Press of Virginia, 1999), Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), and The Generals’ Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). He is also the co-editor of Civil War Witnesses and Their Books: New Perspectives on Iconic Works (Louisiana State University Press, 2021) and Civil War Writing, 1866-1989: New Perspectives on Iconic Texts (Louisiana State University Press, 2019).
This may be a great book but not many are going to pay $105 for a 256 page book.
Amidst a very fine piece, just a small item – I’m glad you mentioned how Federal power expanded rapidly and greatly under the Lincoln administration, and post-administration, something I’ve been arguing for decades. The Civil War truly was a major assault on Federalism by the anti-Federalists, something that had been brewing since the day the Constitution was signed. Many people don’t quite get it, don’t quite understand the system we were meant to have, and see the Federal Government as some sort of omnipotent God, when in fact it was supposed to be small, and limited.
I am very pleased that “Miss Ravenal’s Conversion” has been mentioned. Its a gem!
The most centralized government in American history was the Confederate government: the price of fighting a war for survival. Of course slave states had been running roughshod over constitutional rights for decades, in defense of the sacred institution of slavery. And this doesn’t count the absolute tyrannical power exercised over the 40% of the Confederate states’ population on a daily basis. “Federalism” is like “states’ rights” to be taken up or abandoned as the defense of slavery/white supremacy required.
Well, just the interjection of undebatable facts:
1. Slavery could not be running roughshod over Constitutional rights, as slavery was legal and protected by the Constitution. I refer you to the Constitution for proof of this.
2. Federalism is the absolute design of the Constitution, with the States empowered and the Federal Government kept small and limited…or it would grow out of control and obscenely corrupt, just like the European governments that Americans abhorred. Once again I refer you to the Constitution for proof of this.
3. No matter how one might prioritize the causes of the Civil War, it was beyond doubt the attempt to destroy Federalism by the anti-Federalists – and look at what we have: a central government grown out of control and obscenely corrupt, just like the European governments that all good Americans abhor. Without doubt, that huge 7% of Southerners who owned slaves in order to feed the fabric mills of the North with cotton agree.
4. Slavery and (the fantasy myth of) White Supremacy equated? Hmm. What would all the blacks and Indians who owned slaves amongst that 7% think of that? And then there are the blacks in Africa who enslaved their own…and the Muslim Arabs and Persians who enslaved whites and blacks – and still do to this day – and the Asians who enslaved their own, in particular the Japanese who enslaved tens of millions of yellow people in Korea, Manchuria, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Solomons – black folks there – and the Philippines over a stretch lasting from 1895-1945. Indisputably, slavery has nothing to do with racial supremacy. The Romans enslaved other Europeans – all white. The Nazis enslaved fellow Europeans – all white. At the same time that the National Socialists were trying to declare some sort of bizarre equation of White Supremacy based actually on religion and ethnicity and not race, their bosom buddy allies in Japan were somehow anti-white and declaring “No whites in Asia! Asia for the Asians!” – without bothering to add that this meant they’d be in charge in Asia, and all the non-Japanese yellows and blacks would be their slaves. Today in Zimbabwe, black supremacy reigns, and it is legal to discriminate against whites.
5. Isn’t it odd, as well, that the crusaders who ended slavery and “white supremacy” in the South saw fit to hold onto their slaves until six months after the Civil War ended – and then barred blacks from white schools, restaurants, hotels, public transport, higher education, state and federal government jobs, intermarriage, etc. throughout the North for decades – and that 80% or more of the race riots in America have occurred in the North?
1. I was refering to white people, whose constitutional rights were curtailed in order to protect slavery. Although its always a little gross to see the nearly four million people held in chains sort of waved away, “it’s constitutional.” like the constitution dropped down from Mt. Sinai.
2. Oh dear.
3. The CW was the slaveholders violent attempt to hang on to their human property. Because they were afraid the rest of the country would use the constitution to limit the spread of the sacred institution of slavery.
4. Confederate apologists like to sputter about slavery in other times and places. That doesn’t change the fact that American slavery was race based. White supremacy and slavery go together like dung and flies.
1. No white people’s Constitutional rights were curtailed for the sake of slavery.
2. “Oh dear.” Yeah – you didn’t know that. Well, now you do.
3. Oh dear. Then why did six states that were in the Union practice slavery throughout most of the war, with some continuing until December 1865? Why did the Federal Government not get around to banning slavery in the Constitution until after the war? You can’t rewrite facts to suit a 21st century newly-invented narrative. In the end, only 7% of people in the states that seceded held slaves – and they included blacks and Indians, something you chose to ignore. How does this reconcile with white supremacy? It can’t. Which is why it doesn’t. Unnecessary white guilt is not assuaged by wild-eyed claims of white supremacy.
4. Having not read your history, you are unaware that there veritably was no such thing as “American slavery.” It was begun in the Americas by these guys called Europeans, who brought more than 80% of the people sold them in Africa by Muslims to Central and South America and the Caribbean, which no one ever screams and cries and wails about because it’s not profitable. Slavery was established in what became the United States by the English, Dutch and French, and inherited by the Americans…and practiced in America by whites and blacks and reds, thus your claims of a desperate need to establish the supremacy of one race over another through slavery holds no water.