Screwed off way to much today.  Read this this evening:

Fahs, Alice. "The Market Value of Memory: Popular War Histories and
the Northern Literary Marketplace, 1861-1868." Book History 1, no. 1
(1998): 107-39.

Discusses how popular war histories, written during the war and sold by subscription, came to be the dominate histories of the Civil War for years after.

Yet during the war itself the popular histories had often created a hybrid mix of ideology and entertainment. Finally, the popular war histories should serve to remind us that, on the one hand, commerical drives do not necessarily strip political meanings from print culture in mid-nineteenth-century America. On the other hand, however, they should also remind us that commercial transactions played a vital role in the construction of national memory—and that within a culture of print capitalism, public forms of memory are never entirely separate from market drives (133).

I’m liking Fahs work (see "The Feminized Civil War" from yesterday).  I like her conclusions and they are so very relevant to today.  I’ll have to try and track down more of her work for my personal edification; after my paper is written. 

Recommended.

Today’s readings and commentaries:

Bailey, Fred Arthur. "Class Contrasts in the Antebellum
Trans-Misssissippi: An Analysis of Twenty-Nine Confederate
Autobiographical Questionnaires." Louisiana History XXXIII, no. 4
(1992): 363-80.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. "Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the
Narratives of War." The Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990):
1200-28.

Bailey‘s "Class Contrasts…" turned out not to be useful for my paper, but was interesting nonetheless.  Much of the rhetoric of the Confederacy, and of postbellum Southern historians, consisted of an image of social cohesion across the white classes.  This simply was not the case; either before, during, or after the war. 

The Tennessee State Library sent out a survey (Civil War Veteran Questionnaires) to Civil War veterans between 1915 and 1922.  There were 1650 respondents, most of whom had lived in Tenn at the start of the war.  Just under 20% came from other slave states.  The completed surveys remanined virtually untouched until the 1980s when Bailey analyzed the Tennessee soldiers’ reponses in several articles and a book, Class and Tennessee’s Confederate Generation.  This article looks at the responses of those who had come from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas (363-4).

Together they conclude that in the antebellum epoch white Tennesseans divided into three distinctive classes—the poor, the yeoman or small farmers, and the planters; that the classes possessed different goals, shared unequally in the region’s material wealth, and rarely engaged in social intercourse; and that new South’s class structure mirrored the veteran’s birth status (364).

Fahs‘ "The Feminized Civil War," is very useful and extremely interesting concerning the gendering of memory of the war.  I really wish I had time to write more about it, and that I had done so before reading the Faust piece.  There was so much going on in my mind when I finished it that all I could say was, "Wow!" 

During the war, and for a few years after, women’s experience of the war and their sacrifices were major influences in the literature of the North.  But, in the 1880s and 1890s, a "masculinized culture of Civil War remembrance focused on the conflict as a war of white "brotherhood"" . . . while "[a]t the same time, interest in a woman’s war moved south, as novelists and memoirists focused on southern slaveholding women’s antebellum and war experiences, contributing to highly racialized "plantation" literature that bathed slavery in a nostalgic glow" (1464). 

This turn to the Southern woman’s experience took several avenues, one of which was new war fiction featuring white Southern heroines.  This was a turn that culminated in the "creation of Scarlett O’Hara, still seen by many as the consummate Civil War heroine. There is great irony here: If Southern white women lost the war, as Drew Faust has argued [the next piece], at the turn of the century they won the popular battle for its memory" (1490).

Fahs does an excellent job of documenting these changes.  One of the themes commented on is that "[f]eminized war literature consciously highlighted the "gifts" that women laid on the "altar of freedom." Many stories set up a moral economy in which women’s suffering was seen as at least equal to, if not greater than, that of men" (1474).  I’ll return to this idea when I discuss Faust’s piece on Southern women’s roles.

…, the emergent masculinized and racialized culture of the late nineteenth century increasingly foreclosed the association of Northern women and African Americans with participation in the war.
    That foreclosure is important, for just as the Civil War was a defining event in our national history, so too have memories of the Civil War helped define membership in the nation.
…
The popular Civil War that emerged in the late 1880s and 1890s belonged primarily to white men and to Southern white women, a late-nineteenth-century reinvention of the war (1493).
…
A larger point here is that our memories of the Civil War have been profoundly shaped by the literary marketplace,… (1494).

Faust‘s "Altars of Sacrifice" argues that "[i]t may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War" (1228).  I think that is a bit too harsh, to say the least.  They most certainly were a contributing factor.  But to lay the defeat of the Confederacy at their feet after reading about the vastly different rhetoric employed to motivate Southern women in comparison to women of the North, and about the amount of sacrifice they endured, is going too far in my mind.  For instance, their "husbands or sons were nearly three times as likely to die as were their Northern counterparts" (1201).

This is another extremely interesting article, of little use to my paper, although of immense value to my education.  This article also looks at the gendering activity of war, but from the perspective of the South.  These two articles are not mirrors of each other.  They are more orthogonal as they have different goals. 

Fahs looks at how Northern literature, during and shortly after the war, was highly feminized, and then radically changed leading to major consequences in later public perception of the war.  Faust looks at the rhetoric used against Southern women to persuade them that their sacrifices were necessary, and how that ultimately failed, leading to Southern women "undermin[ing] both objective and ideological foundations for the Confederate effort;…" (1228).

The rhetoric employed to motivate white Southern women was simply incredible, even from the start.  For example:

"Can you imagine," asked the magazine Southern Field and Fireside, "what would be the moral condition of the Confederate Army in six months" without women’s influence? What but a woman "makes the Confederate soldier a gentleman of honor, courage, virtue and truth, instead of a cut-throat and vagabond?" "Great indeed," confirmed the Augusta Constitutionalist in July 1861, "is the task assigned to woman. Who can elevate its dignity? Not," the paper observed pointedly, "to make laws, not to lead armies, not to govern empires; but to form those by whom laws are made, armies led . . . to soften firmness into mercy, and to chasten honor into refinement "(1204).

The nineteenth-century creed of domesticity had long urged self-denial and service to others as central to woman’s mission. But war necessitated significant alterations, even perversions, of this system of meaning; women’s self-sacrifice for personally significant others—husbands, brothers, sons, family—was transformed into sacrifice of those infdividuals to an abstract and intangible "Cause" (1209).

Songs, plays, poems, even official presidential pronouncements sought to enlist women of all classes in the work of filling the ranks. One popular theme inverted Lysistrata, urging young women to bestow their favors only on men in uniform (1209). <yikes>

In contrast to Fahs’ showing that a major literary theme in the North had women’s sacrifice equal to, if not superior to, men’s, Faust shows that "in honoring men’s supreme offering, [Southern] women reminded themselves of the comparative insignificance of their own sacrifices. Loss of life of a beloved could not compare with loss of one’s own; civilian anxiety and deprivation were as nothing in face of soldiers’ contributions" (1214).  I find this simply incredible considering how much more, and in so many ways, Southern women sacrificed compared to their Northern sisters.

Another major difference between the two groups of women is that, although nursing had been controversial for women before the war, in the North it became glorified as allowing "women to be as heroic as soldiers" (Fahs, 1478), while in the South "nursing continued to be regarded as deviant, requiring behaviors inconsistent with prevailing class and gender expectations" (1216).  There may not, in fact, have been as much difference as the articles seem to allude to, but even if, and especially if, this is the case it only further points to the different rhetorical forms used to "control" women’s response to their wartime experiences.

Both of these articles are highly recommended—and yes gentleman, this applies even more so to you. 

These articles have allowed me to see much further into the rhetoric of war.  I have a different first-hand perspective, of course, from my two decades in the Army, and another from my experience as the father of a Gulf War II veteran, so these have provided me with differing views.  While these strategies may serve a just purpose, they are, nonetheless, rhetorical strategies designed to control the narrative and experiences of the various participants, and of future generations.  Another important point demonstrated, particularly by Fahs, is how history is often rewritten in the popular imagination.

The last line I quoted from Fahs is especially telling today.  "A larger point here is that our memories of the Civil War have been profoundly shaped by the literary marketplace,…" (1494).  How are our memories of the Afghan and Iraq wars being shaped by the [lack of a place in the] literary marketplace today?

I finally got seriously started on my Civil War and libraries paper today.  Spent a fair amount of time in the reference room, the stacks, and in a few databases.  Have I ever told you how much I adore JSTOR?

Here’s what I got read today:

Fen, Sing-Nan. “Notes on the Education of Negroes at Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, During the Civil War.” Phylon 28, no. 2 (1967): 197-207.

Hall, John A. “Disillusioned with Paradise: A Southern Woman’s Impression of the Rural North in 1862.” Southern Studies 25, no. 2 (1986): 204-07.

Hubbs, G. Ward. “”Dissipating the Clouds of Ignorance”: The First University of Alabama Library, 1831-1865.” Libraries and Culture 27, no. 1 (1992): 20-35.

Lovett, Robert W. “The Soldiers’ Free Library.” Civil War History 8, no. 1 (1962): 54-63.

Williams, Lorraine A. “The Acceptance of the Civil War by Northern Intellectuals.” The Journal of Negro Education 31, no. 4 (1962): 515-20.

The title of this post is in reference to the Hubbs article on the burning of the University of Alabama Library by Colonel Thomas W. Johnston under the direct orders of Brig. Gen. John T. Croxton.  This is exactly the kind of thing that could help answer my initial research question.  Too bad I don’t have the time or the dissertation to write that could answer it.

Yes, COL Johnston questioned his orders and asked if he could spare the library, but the answer was no, all public buildings were to be burned as the university was the state military academy.  “It is a great pity,” remarked Colonel Johnston, “but my orders are
imperative.  I will save one volume, at any rate, as a memento of this
occasion” (20).

This event took place only 10 days prior to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.  The holdings were completely destroyed (about 8000 volumes), as were the holdings of the Erosophic and Philomathic literary societies (over 5000 volumes) and the “most valuable part” of University President Garland’s personal library contained in other university buildings.

So which volume did COL Johnston save?

A copy of the Koran.