Battle Lines. Eliza Richards
of a sleeping “happy land,” suggesting that the white Southern conscience that Timrod constructs and bolsters here might require anesthesia in order for its dream of perfect whiteness to operate properly. “Ethnogenesis” self-consciously works within a Northern tradition in order to oppose it, but in responding to Northern criticisms of Southern slavocracy, Timrod’s poem betrays influences of the positions he opposes.
Timrod clearly hopes his readership will extend beyond his region and sway foreign readers to a Confederate viewpoint of the conflict. While Dickinson’s “even face” stretches grimly around the world from “east to east,” Timrod imagines that markets for cotton, like the Gulf Stream, will transport the warmth of Southern hospitality far and wide, convincing the world that there is a kinder, gentler alternative to the capitalism of the North:
The hour perchance is not yet wholly ripe
When all shall own it, but the type
Whereby we shall be known in every land
Is that vast gulf which lips our Southern strand,
And through the cold, untempered ocean pours
Its genial streams, that far off Arctic shores
May sometimes catch upon the softened breeze
Strange tropic warmth and hints of summer seas!40
The Gulf Stream travels from Florida north along the East Coast of the United States to Newfoundland before crossing the Atlantic to warm the western shore of Europe (Timrod is significantly silent about the southern branch of the stream, which circulates off the coast of West Africa). Ocean currents, like news, weather, and desirable commodities, circulate widely; Timrod’s snowy cotton evokes all these currents in its appeal for global acceptance for the new nation, which he promises will be superior to the former United States and its remnant, the Northern states.
A companion piece to “Ethnogenesis,” “The Cotton Boll” (published in the Charleston Mercury on September 3, 1861) underscores the inevitability that Southern cotton trump Northern snow. Its infinitude rivals its competitor’s only as blessed land rivals a wasteland:
To the remotest point of sight,
Although I gaze upon no waste of snow,
The endless field is white;
And the whole landscape glows,
For many a shining league away,
With such accumulated light
As Polar lands would flash beneath a tropic day!41
The “waste of snow” is countered by an “endless” white field that glows with holy light. Timrod could not be more adamant about the righteousness of the Southern cause, which he articulates by turning an inherited tradition of winter war poetry back against itself. In order to accomplish this rhetorical feat, however, he must turn cotton into weather, vaporize its materiality so that it may become a medium of illumination, a means of communication, rather than a substance imbricated in material forms of exploitative labor.
In “The Cotton Boll,” even more than in “Ethnogenesis,” Timrod registers awareness of his evaporation of materiality that renders his poetic logic suspect. The poem begins by drawing attention to the very figure he almost erases: the slave.
While I recline
At ease beneath
This immemorial pine,
Small sphere!
(By dusky fingers brought this morning here
And shown with boastful smiles),42
The poem presents a rhetorical problem from the outset: the white speaker’s “ease” depends upon the labor of the “dusky” other. The cotton he casts as a pure, ethereal symbol—of global interconnectedness (“small sphere!”), of white superiority, of mystical climatic harmony—only underscores the presence of a slave system that removes the speaker from the very thing he claims fully to possess. If leisured white superiority and black servitude were so natural, the slave would either be more fully present—an entire body rather than fingers and smiles—or totally absent, as he is in “Ethnogenesis,” where the sister “months” plant, cultivate, and grow the cotton without visible help or effort. Here the slave leans into the frame of the poem, partially materialized and partially dematerialized. In a poem where white signifies holy illumination, it is not surprising that the slave is the absence of light, but he is not fully turned to night; his “dusky fingers” and “boastful smiles” linger, as a reminder that the dream of the South hinges on a mythology of “the little boll,” “a spell” like that “in the ocean shell.”43 Timrod draws attention to the fantastic element of his reverie even as he seeks to naturalize it, suggesting that the material conditions of slavery are more present and contrary to the vision than he or his readers might longingly wish. The “dusky fingers” hold and support the small, white globe, after all, in much the same way as a divine creator secures the earth. In choosing cotton as his ideal mode of disseminating the good news of the South, Timrod acknowledges that his “trembling line[s]” form a “tangled skein” that he fails to unravel.44
By 1863, snowy cotton has disappeared from Timrod’s poetry. “Spring,” published in the Southern Illustrated News on April 4, tries to celebrate the beauty of the South in springtime, but, as in the Northern poetry of this time, thoughts of the dead and the wounded seep into the images, until the war finally takes over the poem. As in Allen’s “Snow,” the process is gradual; it seems unconscious or accidental at first, and then gains momentum. At the outset, only “pathos” indicates the darker, advancing vision:
Spring, with that nameless pathos in the air
Which dwells with all things fair,
Spring, with her golden suns and silver rain,
Is with us once again.45
Soon, blood appears, at first only as part of a playful personification—“In the deep heart of every forest tree / The blood is all aglee.”46 The tree’s blood rises to the surface in a “flush” it shares with the sky: “the maple reddens on the lawn, / Flushed by the season’s dawn.” The seeds working their way toward the sun, figures of rebirth, unsettlingly recall the myriad war dead:
As yet the turf is dark, although you know
That, not a span below,
A thousand germs are groping through the gloom,
And soon will burst their tomb.
The thousand groping germs are suggestive of future flowers, but also of dead men, who strive uncertainly for resurrection—to “burst their tomb.” Just before facing the submerged topic of violence directly, the viewer sees a flood of purple in anticipation of the imminent profusion of blossoms:
Still there’s a sense of blossoms yet unborn
In the sweet airs of morn;
One almost looks to see the very street
Grow purple at his feet.
Drawing attention to the sense of unbirth summons the possibility of abortion. The purple pool on the street extends that line of thought: though the speaker may be anticipating the blossoming of hyacinths or violets, the figure of the undifferentiated, spreading mass is just as readily associated with blood.
The undertones of morbidity are confirmed retroactively when the poem turns directly to the topic of “war and crime” and “the call of Death” in “the west-wind’s aromatic breath.”47 Unthinkably, Spring may awaken the sap in trees and the song of birds, but she will also “rouse, for all her tranquil charms, / A million men to arms.” Then, the fields will run with real blood rather than the flushed hues of dawn, the purple flowers, and the dark red of just-unfolded maple leaves. Metaphors will become material truths:
There shall be deeper hues upon her plains
Than