Civil War still haunts American attitudes toward democracy

Talking about ghosts ­- both warding them off and inviting their return - makes for compelling storytelling, scholar Shirley Samuelswrites in "Haunted by the Civil War: Cultural Testimony in the Nineteenth-Century United States." The chill of hearing or seeing a ghost, she writes, "mingles with the desire to know the story behind the fear."

In this spirit, Samuels, the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, looks for the story behind today's divided America in literature and art created during and soon after the Civil War. Her new book examines the work of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott and others, as well as visual artists, connecting the fiction, poetry and images of the period to current events and attitudes.

Movements to topple monuments and protests over discrimination, immigration and Indigenous land rights are all part of the war's legacy, she argues.

"To declare that the Civil War haunts America is also to note that the disunified nation still called the United States persists as a haunted house, with ghosts as a legacy of its foundation," she writes. "Abraham Lincoln, considered during his lifetime as divisive and controversial, famously issued a warning about a 'house divided' that persists."

The College of Arts and Sciences spoke with Samuels about the book.

Question: Where do you see the Civil War haunting America today? Would you put names to the ghosts?

Answer: It's hard to miss that there are still controversies about how to remember the war. The names of battleships, the presence of certain statues, these are still being debated. The remodeling that happened to a statue of Stonewall Jacksononce the artist Kara Walker got her blowtorch handy might serve as a case in point.

Q: Why are fiction, poetry and visual art helpful for linking the trauma of the Civil War and its legacy in the current state of American democracy?

A: The contact points between memory and imagination for most citizens appear in visual artifacts and language. We still respond to images, probably more than to language. The idea that a Confederate statue can be melted down, as in my previous example, still arouses demonstrations. It's also the case that presidents then and now worked to associate political positions with their appearance in front of monuments, such as Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg and Barack Obama at the Lincoln Memorial.

Q: How do you think "Haunted by the Civil War" might influence the way we read 19th century American writers today?

Newer historical interpretations of American authors note that even when they lived far from the battlefields, the neighborhoods they lived in during the late 1850s and early 1860s resonated with the sounds of troops marching, practicing, firing guns, and sometimes with the sound of guns firing to mark bodies returning in coffins. The language of myth and metaphor might conceal some of this engagement, but the ramifications of the war happened North and South and far into the western states.

Some writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne deliberately mocked the process of patriotic excitation. Writers like Henry David Thoreau had practiced political engagement during the 1840s and 1850s, notably protesting the 1848 war with Mexico; abolitionists often folded in other arguments in favor of human rights such as what we now know as feminism (then "the woman question") and the overlooked attention to utopianism and spiritualism.

Writers who emerged on the lecture circuit as outspoken political voices, such as Frederick Douglass, tended to show up on other occasions. Douglass went to the Seneca Falls convention and signed the Declaration of Sentiments. Many of the statues that still appear in village squares to celebrate soldiers were erected 50 or more years later as part of a resurgence of identifying markers both North and South. Overall, the goal of this book is to encourage an understanding that writers and artists might have had complex reactions to the stated goals of the war, but still, however they expressed it, all of them reacted.

Q: Looking into the future, do you think ghosts from the Civil War that haunt American democracy can be eventually driven away?

A: No, I don't think that these ghosts can be exorcised. But I am arguing that we need to understand and acknowledge ghosts of past violence. How does the attempt to rename the motivation for battles reflect the desire to disavow the racism that is a vivid legacy of the practices of legalized enslavement in this country? Can we absorb these lessons and still work for a democracy?

Kate Blackwood is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.