The Civil War Was Fueled by Poetry

Winslow Homer, “A Bayonet Charge”

There’s a new book out, To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave, arguing that the Civil War was “a poetry fueled war.” On the queston of whether literature can influence history, the Civil War often comes up because of a novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Lincoln’s remark to Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” I hadn’t realized that poetry also played a key role.

In an interview with Poetry Magazine, author Faith Barrett notes that there are

so many accounts in newspapers of soldiers dying with a poem in their pockets, poems written on a scrap of paper folded up inside a book; so many accounts of songs or poems being sung or read to political leaders at particular moments. For example, after Lincoln announced the second call for a draft … James Sloan Gibbons wrote this song poem called “Three Hundred Thousand More,” which he supposedly sang to Lincoln in his office one day. So there’s a kind of immediacy of impact, that poetry is actually, I suggest, shaping events, not just responding or reflecting on them.

It we find this surprising, Barrett explains that it’s because we’re unaware how ubiquitous poetry used to be:

 It was everywhere in newspapers and magazines, children were learning it in school…. Americans were encountering poetry on a weekly basis, if not a daily basis, in the Civil War era, and that’s a profound difference from contemporary poetry and its place in our culture.

The poetry that impacted the war came from both the north and the south. Poets from both sides, Barrett notes, claim

that God is on their side. Both sides—and this is particularly startling to us as 21st-century readers—are arguing they’re fighting for independence, although obviously they’re using that word quite differently with quite different meanings.

The most famous of such poems became a song. Barrett points out that to read “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as a poem—which is how it originally appeared–highlights just how militant it is. Today we may not think of poetry/music as having the power to inspire men to go into battle, but that was one of the effects of Julie Ward Howe’s verses:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hellelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on.

Barrett finds it both understandable and disturbing that “Battle Hymn of the Republic” experienced a revival following the attacks of 9-11. It captured the marshal spirit that led the United States into Afghanistan and Iraq.

It wasn’t until midway through the Civil War, Barrett says, that poems commenting on the senselessness of the slaughter began to emerge. These include poems by Emily Dicksinson and Herman Melville although Barrett adds that well-known authors were reluctant to sign their names to poems questioning the war. She also notes that, while Dickinson was at times skeptical of nationalistic ideologies, she also wrote “poems of grief and mourning that suggest that death in battlefield is a noble and good thing.” In other words, she was not always ahead of her time.

The news for us is that poetry packed a punch. People from both sides knew that poetry could impact history and wrote with that aim in mind. Some of them could point to tangible results.