'I Saw a Banner in Gladsome Air—'

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.