'All Americans Are Children of the Civil War'

During our first visit to Gettysburg, a month after the centenary of the battle, my brother and I went in search of a dead man or at least the place where he died. We had seen the photo of the Confederate sharpshooter taken in Devil’s Den by a former photographer for Mathew Brady, Timothy O’Sullivan. The rebel was a young man lying on his back in a sniper’s nest of lichen-covered boulders, with a rifle leaning against them – a scene at least partially staged, we know now, by the photographer. Behind the dead man, rocks are stacked in a makeshift wall. 

We had been following the hundred-year commemoration of the war, reading Bruce Catton, Fletcher Pratt and Life magazine. Somewhere we saw O’Sullivan’s photo, possibly in National Geographic. We were boys safely removed in time and space from the war zone. War was romantic. We collected Civil War cards as though battles were baseball games, though we sensed Gettysburg was sacred ground.

 

Today is perhaps the most important date in American history. July 3, 1863 was the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, culminating in Pickett’s Charge. Melville describes the attack in his poem “Gettysburg: The Check (July, 1863)” (Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 1866):

 

“He charged, and in that charge condensed

His all of hate and all of fire;

He sought to blast us in his scorn,

And wither us in his ire.

Before him went the shriek of shells-

Aerial screamings, taunts and yells;

Then the three waves in flashed advance

Surged, but were met, and back they set:

Pride was repelled by sterner pride,

And Right is a strong-hold yet.”

 

The late poet Helen Pinkerton adds another layer of historical resonance to our understanding of Melville and the Civil War. In her  dramatic dialogue “Melville’s Letter to William Clark Russell” (Taken in Faith, 2002), she channels Melville’s voice much as Melville channeled Robert E. Lee’s in “Lee in the Capitol (April, 1866)”:

 

“. . . at Antietam,

When the red sun seemed almost to go backward,

So slow the day, so endless seemed the firing;

The heights of Fredericksburg, where Cobb’s men saw

Our blue ranks melt like snow, and the living piled

The frozen dead as breastworks; in Stonewall’s storms

At Manassas and Chancellorsville; in the three great acts

At Gettysburg.”

 

Rosanna Warren writes of Melville’s Civil War poems: “[T]he knowledge that counts most, I think, is tragic knowledge; so I find myself returning to those ancestral battlefields to try to understand where we have come from. All Americans are children of the Civil War whether we know it or not.”

 

My brother and I never found Devil’s Den.

 

[I inherited Helen Pinkerton’s copy of Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, the Prometheus Books edition published in 2001. The quote above from Rosanna Warren is taken from her essay included in the volume, “Dark Knowledge: Melville’s Poems of the Civil War.”]