Visions of the Civil War

PATRIOTIC GORE (816 pp.)--Edmund Wilson--Oxford ($8.50).

Historians never seem to tire of running over the same Civil War battlegrounds. They have fought and refought the great campaigns, while often slighting the larger issues of the war--why it occurred, and what it achieved. Literary Critic Edmund Wilson. 67, returns to the more troubling questions of the Civil War in a book that at first glance hardly seems history. Omitting the usual battle data, he threads together in haphazard chronology a series of essays on the literature of the war. Modestly keeping in the background, intruding only occasionally to make a judgment, he lets the people who lived through the war tell about it in their own words. The result is not only an important Civil War history but an account more stirring than a description of the bloodiest battles.

Lincoln's Epic. Northerners filled their writings with Calvinist fervor, certain that God had willed them to stamp out slavery. "This vision of Judgment," writes Wilson, "was the myth of the North." Though not at first an abolitionist, Abraham Lincoln made this "myth" stick by the power of his words. Driven by ambition to be President, he grew more apocalyptic in his comments on slavery as war approached. "He created himself as a poetic figure," writes Wilson, "and thus imposed himself on the nation. We have, in general, accepted the epic that Lincoln directed and lived and wrote." Some Northerners found chinks in the abolitionist armor. Harriet Beecher Stowe became the scourge of the South by writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, but her next nine novels treated Calvinism as the enemy. Married to a Presbyterian minister who had visions of the Devil, worried that her son might be damned because he had died unrepentant, she pleaded with the abolitionists not to judge their fellow men so harshly. Charlotte Forten, a winsome Philadelphia Negro girl, left behind a diary that tells of her budding romance with a blue-blooded Boston abolitionist, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, on the romantic Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast. She was schooling newly liberated slaves; he was leading a Negro regiment. But the colonel suddenly developed a mysterious injury, left for the North, and never tried to reach Charlotte again. Wilson dryly notes: "We can imagine his attitude toward Charlotte: sympathetic, approving, instructive, very sure of his benevolence. This had all been a beautiful experience."

Sweet Slavery. Southern writers cultivated their own myth as assiduously as Northerners. Theirs was a knightly ideal of chivalry lifted from the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Ignoring the squalor in the real South, they populated fictitious plantations with gorgeous women and jolly slaves. Romantic hyperbole was commonplace. Wrote Poet Sydney Lanier to his wife after 9 1/2 years of marriage: "My heart's Heartsease, My sweet Too-sweet, if I could wrap thee in a calyx of tender words still would they seem but like the prickly husk in respect of thee, thou Rose, within." Southerners spun elaborate apologias for slavery. George Fitzhugh, a Virginia lawyer, urged in Cannibals All! and Sociology for the South the enslavement of whites as well as Negroes for the good of civilization. "We conclude." he wrote, reworking Jefferson, "that 19 out of every 20 individuals have a natural and inalienable right to be slaves."

Though the South lost the war, its literature hardly showed it. Thomas Nelson Page's syrupy novels (Red Rock, Two Little Confederates) perpetuated the Southern myth in the North as well as the South. Disillusioned by the war, Northerners forgot about the Negroes, who were slipping back into servitude, and eagerly devoured trashy romances in which the Confederate girl wins the Yankee guy.

The South's best postwar novelist, George Washington Cable, who treated Negroes in a way that would do credit to any modern-day civil-righter, was hounded out of the South, and Northern publishers expurgated his works of any incidents that might offend the South.

Taut Prose. But in spite of popular taste, prose writing was revamped in the North by men who had fought in the war. The battle memoirs of Sherman and Grant, "perfect in concision and clear ness," changed the "clogged and viscous prose" of the prewar days. In the heat of the war these commanders had no time for overblown eloquence. "Their role is to convince and direct," writes Wilson.

"This is the language of responsibility." They handed down to the 20th century a lean, taut prose that reflected a cooler, grimmer appraisal of life. "I believe that force is the ultima ratio" wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who fought in the war for three years and was almost killed, "and between two groups that want to make inconsistent kinds of world I see no remedy except force." After weaving his way through these Civil War writings, on which he has worked for nearly 15 years. Critic Wilson seems to take a view of the war as bleak as Holmes's. But in stripping the North of its moral pretensions, he may have trimmed the truth as well. He lumps abolitionists with slaveholders, though, as Historian Oscar Handlin remarked, "There is surely a difference between being a fanatic for freedom and being a fanatic for slavery." He likens the two-year imprisonment of Jefferson Davis to Stalin's terrorism, but Stalin was rarely so gentle. When he claims that war is no more justified than one sea slug is in swal lowing another, his elegant prose turns a bit lumpish, like the slugs. He is at his best when he plunges into the minds of his writers and shares their passions; rarely have Grant, Cable or Holmes been so richly portrayed. In understanding them, Wilson seems to say, we can understand the Civil War--or any war.

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