Battle Lines. Eliza Richards
we seem to have lived since the 12th of April last.”4 Because people can’t stop reading and thinking about the news, their brains register the physical stress of war. In defining and diagnosing this mental condition, Dr. Holmes forges correspondences between external and internal events via trope. Just as soldiers tramp in line for a stage show, so those who read about the spectacle of war will find that their thoughts leave deep grooves in their brains. Though he uses metaphor and analogy, Holmes goes beyond loosely associating the massive intake of information with troop movements, instead asserting a direct, causal impact. He imagines that, in thinking about the calamity, the brain receives shocks—or “impressions”—that are as physical as wounds to other parts of the body.5 Trains of thought are as inexorable and potentially lethal as the trains that carry troops bristling with bayonets. Holmes’s idea of the national nervous system blurs the distinction between figure and ground, vicarious and direct experience of events. Because violent shocks are transmitted directly from the war front to the home front, readers of the news become casualties of war.
Though Holmes’s particular theory may seem idiosyncratic, he addresses a central concern of his time: the effect on perception of mass media warfare. The conglomeration of new communication and transportation technologies, combined with a large literate population, created the conditions for the flow of information to influence the struggle, and the war in turn to stimulate the development of news into a central cultural force.6 By the late 1850s, technological developments had transformed American newspapers into “truly mass media, with the power that term now implies”: the steam press allowed for rapid reproduction of newspaper copies; railways supported broad dissemination of the news; and a network of telegraph lines could almost instantaneously transmit information across large distances.7 Journalism became a profession in this period; an early generation of war correspondents traveled with army regiments in order to convey eye-witness accounts back to the home front.8 Illustrated newspapers established a popular audience during the war years (they were already popular in England); sketch artists conveyed renditions of battle scenes that appeared alongside verbal reports.9 The consolidation of mass media networks in wartime informed what Holmes called a profound “change in our manner of existence.” Because “reading habits changed dramatically with the onset of the war,” the literary landscape transformed. Booksellers complained that the public was entirely absorbed by current events and was no longer buying books. Alice Fahs asserts that during the Civil War, “newspapers suddenly became an urgent necessity of life, with readers eagerly gathering at bulletin boards outside newspaper offices in order to read the news as soon as it was printed.”10 A poem in Harper’s Weekly portrays this scene:
The “Extras” fall like rain upon a drought,
And startled people crowd around the board
Whereon the nation’s sum of loss or gain
In rude and hurried characters is scored.11
Stimulated by bulletins traveling over the nervous network, “startled people” experience collectivity, becoming part of a national body. Crowding around the board, they receive the news together; its characters, the poem suggests, are “scored” into the people as well as on the bulletin: the news is imprinted upon them. The news itself has become news as people contemplate this “new necessity”: sketch artists capture groups of people reading newspapers and telegraph bulletins in various locations, from New York City to the army camps (figs. 1–2).
Walt Whitman recalls a similar scene in New York City when the news of Sumter was transmitted: “I bought an extra and crossed to the Metropolitan Hotel, where the great lamps were still brightly blazing, and, with a small crowd of others who gather’d impromptu, read the news, which was evidently authentic. For the benefit of some who had no papers, one of us read the telegram aloud, while all listen’d silently and intently. No remark was made by any of the crowd, which had increas’d to thirty or forty, but all stood a moment or two, I remember, before they dispers’d. I can almost see them there now, under the lamps of midnight again.”12 Whitman marks a moment of collective introspection. The same thought travels not only through the mind of one individual, “tramping around in a circle through the brain.” It circulates through all the people present, causing them to fall silent because no words are needed. That the news is “evidently authentic” draws attention to a general understanding that the news was frequently wrong, incomplete, and subject to change. That knowledge intensifies the immediate moment of common understanding. If coherence cannot be found in the unfolding narrative of events, it can be found collectively in a moment of common understanding. The moment haunts Whitman in its perfect sense of union.
Figure 1. “News from the War.—Drawn by our Special Artist, Mr. Winslow Homer,” Harper’s Weekly, June 14, 1862, 376–377. This is a close-up of the lower right-hand section of the illustration, which presents a collection of news scenes. Courtesy of HarpWeek.
With the news, poetry thrived, published alongside and often working together with the reports on the conflict in Northern papers. Hundreds of poems tracked, responded to, and shaped the reception of multiple aspects of the war. Poems urged men to enlist, fight, and die for the sake of the Union; they urged civilians to support the soldiers and to accept the sacrifice of loved ones; they insisted that soldiers’ deaths would sanction and promote the growth of a stronger democratic nation purged of the sin of slavery. A number of critics have recently shown that a central rhetorical task during wartime is to invest death with meaning, so that the weight of human sacrifice gives national ideology force and persuasive power.13 The poems published during the Civil War repeatedly proclaimed that this was a just war for a moral purpose, and that the thousands who were losing their lives were not doing so in vain. “The Volunteer,” for example, published anonymously in May 1862 in the highly influential, widely circulated, strongly pro-Union genteel magazine the Atlantic Monthly, concludes that “To fight in Freedom’s cause is something gained— / And nothing lost, to fall.”14 The poems about wartime sacrifices circulated widely during the Civil War, binding together communities of readers and forging relations between civilians and combatants. Via mass media circulation, poetry served a crucial role in negotiating new necessities of representation, both political and poetic, instigated by the war.
Figure 2. “Reading the War Bulletins in Broadway, New York,” Harper’s Weekly, July 20,1861, 458. Courtesy of HarpWeek.
Some of the poems responding to the emotional and political necessities of wartime were closely tied to news reports in all their immediacy and particularity. As soon as news of a battle appeared, so did poems that responded to events: the hanging of John Brown; the unexpected retreat of Union troops at the Battle of Bull Run; the massive death tolls at Antietam, Shiloh, and Gettysburg; the heroism of the Massachusetts 54th at the Battle of Fort Wagner; the Siege of Charleston; the Battle of Mobile Bay. These and hundreds of other “aspects of the war,” to use Herman Melville’s phrase, were documented and circulated not only through journalistic reports but through poetry. When Confederates fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and Union troops surrendered, Union poets were forced to admit an embarrassing defeat. In Harper’s Weekly, a poem entitled “The War” muses on the event:
Fort Sumter taken! and its siege will fill
No bloody chronicles in after-time.
It was a tame bombardment, if you will,
But in its consequences how sublime!
The first boom of the cannon sent a thrill
Not through the North alone, for every clime
Where liberty is prized, struck with deep sorrow,
Mourns for to-day, and fears the dread to-morrow.15
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