Although written in 1969, this essay was, I felt, appropriate for our first issue because it speaks to the nature of rebellion among writers of the Civil War era. In fact, this spirit of rebellion has appeared again and again during our history. Tom Paine was all about rebellion and believed that the pen was mightier than the sword. “On the Subject of Rebellion” was written during the Vietnam era, but one can only wish that the spirit of rebellion could move today’s writers.

Chuck Brown

Earlier this year [1969] I was asked to speak at a small college in New Jersey on the subject of rebellion, a subject which has virtually become in the past year or two a national obsession. We see, hear, and read about what we believe are signs of rebellion going on all around us, day in and day out. The consensus seems to be that these phenomena are quite new, quite different from anything that has appeared before in the great American pageant. But those of us who possess even a limited sense of history cannot accept the assertion that what is happening in our country today is wholly unique. I would call such a misleading conclusion “sensational” because it suggests journalistic motives. Think for the moment how the news media and slick mass-circulation magazines have capitalized on the beat, hippie, and anti-war movements, turning “sensational ” copy about them into dollars and cents.

We know that the spirit of rebellion is more native to our soil than the spirit of conformity, which produces the organization man and the conscripted soldier. We know what American history teaches us: that our ancestors on this side of the ocean have often stood upon a grumbling volcano of potential rebellion, which on occasion actually did erupt, though with varying degrees of intensity. Only in the case of the Civil War did it cause serious devastation, with much death and suffering, yet also much change for the better. And it was this latter point, progress through rebellion or even the threat of rebellion, as evidenced by our own history, which I attempted to clarify in my New Jersey talk.

Consequently, I do not believe we need resort to twisting the facts when we assert that all this has happened before and will undoubtedly happen again. It is in the nature of man to periodically rebel against what he is convinced are static conditions of social, political, economic, and intellectual injustice. As a practicing poet, I can vouch for the fact that this spirit of rebellion permeates the arts as well.

In this connection, I am reminded of something that happened nearly 135 years ago, only a few miles from where I am now standing (University of Dayton), in Cincinnati to be exact, at a time when it was a pork-packing center and its muddy streets were jammed full of pigs. The place was the Lane Theological Seminary, whose head and founder was Lyman Beecher, the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was during the early days of the abolitionist movement. The American people were already in the process of choosing sides, though the vast majority of them had yet to be persuaded in favor of one extreme or the other. Then as now, students were often in the vanguard of what they believed was the most just, the most moral cause. Their elders too were cautious, even if they held kindred sentiments. They did not want to rock the boat. The students of the Lane Theological Seminary were by and large anti-slavery partisans, and they had lately formed the habit of holding meetings in the school’s buildings.

Although not a participating activist, Lyman Beecher did nothing to discourage these meetings. One day when he was away on business, the board of trustees met and decided to ban all anti-slavery gatherings in the buildings of the seminary. Student reaction was swift and vigorously defiant. Suddenly the Lane Seminary began to resemble the University of California campus at Berkeley in our own day. Eventually a large portion of the student body vacated Lane and enrolled in a newly established seminary at Oberlin College. Twenty years later, incensed by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe (who by this time had left Cincinnati after living there for eighteen years and moved to New England) published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, probably the most famous American novel ever written. (When she was introduced to Abraham Lincoln at the White House during the war, the president, smiling down from his towering height of 6′4″ at the diminutive author, exclaimed, “So you’re the little lady who started all this.”) Nine uneasy years followed Uncle Tom’s initial appearance before Fort Sumter was fired upon and the War Between the States commenced.

The Civil War was rebellion manifested in its most vicious form. Critic Edmund Wilson calls it “patriotic gore.” The South was rebelling against the imposition of federal laws on individual states where these laws were considered by the states to be detrimental to their welfare. Thus the South was defending its own sectional economic interests against the alien economic interests of the richer and more populous states of the North. The North, on the other hand, was rebelling against the self-righteous attempt of the seceding states to destroy the Union, and also against the injustice and denigration of our national character caused by the institution of slavery. In a narrower sense, the North rejected the disproportionate control, in terms of wealth and population, over the federal government which the Southern slave states had been exercising.

To these rather cold, uninspiring facts we must add those much-hallowed sectional myths that had engulfed the minds and hearts of so many hundreds of thousands of people in both the North and the South. These myths were, to a large extent, the chief instigators impelling them towards the field of battle. In the North there was a powerful theological tradition of Puritanism that quickly became the source of a fanatical, holy, crusading mentality bent on liberating the slave and punishing his ungodly master: the will of the Lord. The Southern myth, although of an entirely different vintage, was nevertheless also the fruit of deep traditional roots. This myth seemed to spell out for the people of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi that they had been elected, also by divine edict, to rescue the heavenly inspired aristocratic code of gallantry, privilege, fine manners, and luxurious living from the materialistic vulgarity of Yankee mercantilism and Yankee industrialism. The South, in other words, thought of itself as representing a higher civilization. Thus, after many months of simmering delay, the bubble of our nation’s false sense of tranquility burst and these two rebellious factions met head-on in what was to be the bloodiest holocaust the people of this country have ever experienced. Its reverberations were so great we are still much preoccupied with them today. In fact, we are so preoccupied with them at the moment that there is even talk of another and perhaps more costly civil war in the offfing for the American urban dweller.

Most of our published writings on the Civil War consist of descriptions of battles and their generals, combat strategies, the ordeals of private soldiers as recorded by hundreds of participants, and finally, romantic versions of events, partly imaginative and partly based on fact, as contained in countless novels and stories. Much of this material is of inestimable value as a contribution to our understanding of this most crucial event in our history. Yet there is another side to this picture, and surely in the long view, a more significant one. The intellectual side of the war, which is only rarely given the attention that it deserves, concerns the effect the war had on the minds of people, and especially on the minds of the leading thinkers and writers of the time. After all, when the rubble of civilization has finally crumbled to dust, what is most likely to survive is its art, philosophy, and poetry, and not the memory of anything said or done by its kings, generals, politicians, bankers, or merchants. Posterity cares nothing, or little at best, for what fails to stimulate its profoundest thoughts and feelings.

Other than Whitman’s “Drum-Taps” and “Memories of President Lincoln,” some of Melville’s “Battle-Pieces,” James Russell Lowell’s “Biglow Papers” (second series) and a part of his “Commemorative Ode,” perhaps Whittier’s “Barbara Frietchie” and Ambrose Bierce’s tales about soldiers, the traditional art forms did not flourish during the Civil War or, for that matter, in the years immediately following it. The numerous poems and novels that were written were of a very minor order and are generally unreadable today. Nevertheless, the period was abundantly rich in the literature it produced in the form of letters, journals or diaries, essays, articles, orations, and memoirs. In this context the Civil War was surely the most fruitful event in our history. American writers (amateurs as well as professionals) were busy pouring out their thoughts, observations, and opinions - not always for the enlightenment of the public, but rather more frequently simply to communicate with family and friends or even do nothing more than orient or reorient their own personal thoughts so as to harness themselves to a proper perspective of the times.

Whitman’s fear that the real war would never get into the books has proved unfounded, for our Civil War is probably the best and most written about war in the entire history of the world. It is, so to speak, all down on paper for those curious enough to want to read about it.

Today we are living in the midst of another war (Vietnam), and even though the actual shooting is 10,000 miles away, most of us are deeply concerned about it. Each of us has personal feelings and opinions about this war. We too write letters, articles, and a few of us even make speeches in which we express ourselves on the political, military, and ethical issues involved. Consequently we of this generation especially should feel perfectly at home amidst the writings of our Civil War era ancestors, and particularly among those of famous authors whose classic contributions to American literature in a different vein are well known to all of us. Think of Walden, The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass, the essays “Self-Reliance” and “The American Scholar,” Little Women, and Huckleberry Finn, then take yourself back in time, recalling that the authors of all these great books were alive during the Civil War. Is not your curiosity aroused? Mine was. And the result was a book entitled The Conflict Of Convictions in which seventeen of the most famous of these writers express their views on the war.

Let us now turn to the writers themselves; perhaps after sampling some of their words we can draw certain conclusions concerning their attitudes.

I can detect no pacifist sentiments among these writers. Even Whittier calls on his fellow Quakers to do their duty as auxiliaries to the anti-slavery cause. As the war proceeds, there is compassion for the suffering, and when it is over, a desire to forgive on the part of most of the Northern writers. But the war itself is always a just war, its motives never for a second questioned except in the very beginning by the most genuine anomaly among the immortal scribes of nineteenth-century America, Henry Thoreau. A year before his death Thoreau has come to distrust all public endeavors. Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Mark Twain certainly have none of the fanatical partisanship displayed by the New England Brahmins. Sidney Lanier, on the other side of the Mason-Dixon, never doubts the righteousness of the Confederacy, while Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Stowe, Higginson, and Whittier cling to their abolitionist frames of mind, always viewing the war as a necessary cathartic for ridding the national bloodstream of the virus of slavery. However, none of these writers really sided with the extreme radical Republican position during the Reconstruction Era, though all of them were very much concerned over the freed Negro being granted not only his civil rights but also the opportunity to elevate himself. Economic reasons or causes of the war seemed to have never really entered their minds, proving - and we have every right to assume this - that this sort of thinking, so characteristic of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century intellectual, at least since the end of the First World War, had not yet become a fashionable mode of interpretation of social and historical phenomena. Morality instead was the major issue dominating their minds. For them it was better that an individual or nation cease to exist than act wrongly. I wonder if this profound concern, above all other concerns, for the moral or ethical element in life does not set the Civil War generation a rung or two above our own generation on the humanistic ladder.

I would like to make one final point which has more to do with the techniques of writing than anything else. The Civil War was a period of transition in American prose. It delivered our authors from the rather florid, rhetorical style that characterized most American writing up until this time. It speeded up the processes of our national life, which now demanded from our writers a straightforward, crisp, almost journalistic manner of expression. People wanted not only facts but also clear and lucid thoughts. The old circumlocutions and poetic embellishments had to go. The war would not allow aimless wanderings through dreamy landscapes or long philosophic dissertations on the state of man in the universe interjected into narratives or articles on current affairs. The cry everywhere was, “For God’s sake, come to the point! Say what you have to say! Tell us what really happened!”

The style of writing identified with the antebellum famous or classic establishment of the pre-war years did not alter greatly in those formal works which were produced, but rather in the letters and diaries which were written with the same pens. But for the young writers there was something entirely new in the air. Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce can be counted among the truest progenitors of this new trend. Lincoln’s speeches and letters, as well as the memoirs of Grant and Sherman, can also be placed in this category. Henry James and Henry Adams, both of whom were young men of military age when the war began, though neither of them became soldiers, were of course bypassed by this new revolution in style. Why? I would guess that the tempo of life which it represented was simply unsuited to their constitutions. Yet this tendency to trim words down to the bone, imposed on American writers by the eruptive circumstances of the Civil War, rapidly assumed a dominant, influential position in our literature, culminating perhaps in the celebrated Hemingway style.

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