This is how Herman Melville dedicated Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, his volume of poems published a year after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House:
“The Battle-Pieces
in this volume are dedicated
to the memory of the
THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND
who in the war
for the maintenance of the Union
fell devotedly
under the flag of their fathers.”
The number represents
Union deaths as understood during Melville’s time. Total deaths of combatants for
both sides is now estimated at 620,000, not counting some 50,000 civilians. Union
Army dead exceeded 359,000. The statistics are cold but appalling: Roughly one in
thirteen veterans was an amputee. Almost 25,000 died in Confederate prison
camps. More than 388,000 from both sides died of disease.
Melville
writes in the prose “Supplement” appended to his volume of Civil War poems: “[T]he times are such that patriotism—not free
from solicitude—urges a claim overriding all literary scruples.” For the poet,
patriotism means reconciliation. The Union must be healed and preserved. The war
dead are less Union or Confederate than American. One poem, “Lee in the Capitol (April, 1866),” is perhaps the greatest written about the war. Part narrative,
part interior and dramatic monologue, the poem is rooted in historical events:
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s appearance in the U.S. Congress on Feb. 17,
1866, before the Joint Sub-Committee on Reconstruction. The committee convened
to resolve antagonisms between the Radical Republicans in Congress and
President Andrew Johnson over how reconstruction was to be carried out. Melville
crafts a fictional speech for Lee, in which the retired general holds both
sides responsible for the war; in particular, the politicians
(“intermeddlers”):
“I know your
partial thoughts do press
Solely on us
for war's unhappy stress;
But
weigh--consider--look at all,
And broad
anathema you'll recall.
The censor’s
charge I’ll not repeat,
The meddlers
kindled the war’s white heat--
Vain
intermeddlers and malign,
Both of the
palm and of the pine . . .”
The final
lines of Melville’s poem, spoken not by Lee but the narrator, ironically
comment on the likely failure of politicians and others – Radical Republicans,
in particular -- to learn from history:
“But no.
Brave though the Soldier, grave his plea--
Catching the
light in the future’s skies,
Instinct
disowns each darkening prophecy:
Faith in
America never dies;
Heaven shall
the end ordained fulfill,
We march
with Providence cheery still.”
A strong
Union supporter during the war, Melville sympathetically projects himself into
the voice of the great Confederate general and implicitly urges reconciliation.
In the “Supplement,” Melville urged the Radical Republicans to practice
“prudence, not unaligned with entire magnanimity,” and wrote: “Benevolence and
policy—Christianity and Machiavelli—dissuade from penal severities toward the
subdued.” Hershel Parker in Herman
Melville: A Biography, Volume 2, 1851-1891 (2002) says Melville’s poem
overrides “the lessons of history in the hope of promoting reconciliation.”
Parker continues:
“He
mythologizes the man [Lee] who had endured a public renunciation of military
glory—something parallel to the grandeur of his own renunciation, for years
now, of literary glory: informing the poem is Melville’s profound though covert
identification with Robert E. Lee. Even Melville’s depiction of Lee’s choosing
not ‘coldly to endure his doom’ and speak out is infused with his own decisions
to write and publish Battle-Pieces.
And once again he followed rhetorical precedent, classical and Shakespearean,
as well as American classroom exercises, in inventing an imaginary oration for
a real historical figure.”
I inherited
the late Helen Pinkerton’s heavily annotated copy of Battle-Pieces. The only mark she made on the poem “America” is a
check beside this line in the second stanza: “Valor with Valor strove, and died.”
The poem opens with a vision of the triumphant American flag:
“Where the
wings of a sunny Dome expand
I saw a
Banner in gladsome air—
Starry, like
Berenice’s Hair—
Afloat in
broadened bravery there;
With
undulating long-drawn flow . . .”
In the
United States today is Flag Day. On this date, June 14, in 1777, the Second
Continental Congress adopted this resolution: “That the flag of the thirteen
United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be
thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” More
than 2.8 million American service men and women have been killed or wounded
defending the flag since the American Revolution.
2 comments:
A very fine post! Much needed these days. And an added benefit was to learn the mythology of a new phrase - Berenice's Hair! What a knowledgeable man Melville was!
"Shiloh: A Requiem" is my favorite of his war poems. Melville was not a natural poet, but - "What like a bullet can undeceive!"
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