Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War

Civil War America

by Stephen Cushman

War destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates. It is, in this way, a muse, and a powerful one at that. The American Civil War was a particularly prolific muse--unleashing with its violent realities a torrent of language, from soldiers' intimate letters and diaries to everyday newspaper accounts, great speeches, and enduring literary works. In Belligerent Muse , Stephen Cushman considers the Civil War writings of five of the most significant and best known narrators of the Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Considering their writings both as literary expressions and as efforts to record the rigors of the war, Cushman analyzes their narratives and the aesthetics underlying them to offer a richer understanding of how Civil War writing chronicled the events of the conflict as they unfolded and then served to frame the memory of the war afterward.

Elegantly interweaving military and literary history, Cushman uses some of the war's most famous writers and their works to explore the profound ways in which our nation's great conflict not only changed the lives of its combatants and chroniclers but also fundamentally transformed American letters.

Genres: History, Civil War

213 pages, Hardcover

First published October 13, 2014

About the author

Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Reviews

[Mark Valentine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found it interesting that Cushman's literary analyses has been categorized as American History and not as American Literary Criticism; he writes on rhetorical analysis composition techniques of the five writers and the focus is more on style and less on content. Personally, I gained more from the first three chapters (on Lincoln, Whitman, and Sherman) than from the final two (on Bierce and Chamberlain). I admit my interest lagged because I had not read the texts referenced and written by the final two authors.

The surprise nugget that I thoroughly enjoyed came in Cushman's relating a rejection letter that Twain had written to Sherman--brilliant! For me, this gem from the middle of the book made it the reading worthwhile for me.

[Matthew Bartlett · Rating 5 out of 5]

The premise of Belligerent Muse is quite different than anything published in recent years. For the first time, an author has taken a certain few people and analyzed their works in order to understand how we look at the war today. What Stephen Cushman has come up with is interesting in not only an analysis of the war, but of an analysis of the people themselves. The five writers he looks into are Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William T. Sherman, Ambrose Bierce and Joshua L. Chamberlain. These five essays are pose different questions about the different authors and what we are left with is an excellent work of critical analysis.
Stephen Cushman is the Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. His work Belligerent Muse is part of the Civil War America series. This series of works , published by the University of North Carolina Press, publishes historical works that explore all aspects of the war and shed new light on the great conflict. The foreword of this work was written by Gary W. Gallagher.
The essays of the book talk about the many different ways in which these influential authors and officers shaped our understanding of the American Civil War outside of the realm of Lost Cause Historiography since Cushman focuses on Union voices. His analysis of Lincoln is quite interesting in the almost song like style which he wrote his speeches. The two main speeches which he focuses on is the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural and the reasons for which we gravitate toward them. Cushman also talks about the influence which Emerson and his speeches had on Lincoln. The work shines, however, during the essay about Sherman and the way in which he penned his memoirs. This was my favorite chapter in the book and is full with intricate details on the mindset of Sherman. He even shows research into the process of Sherman showing that the officer did not want to print anything that was not true unlike the others who were writing in the Reconstruction period. Throughout the essay on Sherman, there are constant comparisons between Grant and his memoirs. While Grant may have embellished some of the details, Sherman was straightforward and published the truth to the best of his abilities. The essay of Bierce details some of the issues which plagued Civil War fiction since the end of the conflict mainly the description of the dead. Cushman details the inaccuracies in Bierce’s work when dealing with a place such as Chickamauga. The essays close out with the shortest entry into the book on Joshua L. Chamberlain. Chamberlain gained much of his fame recently due to Ron Maxwell’s Gettysburg and Gods and Generals along with the works written by the Shaara family. This essay was the most telling about the officer during the Civil War and the way in which history was written. His analysis of Chamberlain comes off as the “Big Fish” story where the situation became more and more embellished and detailed. The last recounting of the story is left up to the reader and the historian as to the truth of the situation. It can be said that due to Chamberlain’s self-promotion, many historians have questioned the reality of his words over time. This is an angle which Cushman analyzes and concludes in this essay.
This work is interesting in the very scope of what it attempts. For quite some time, there have been historians who have looked into the realm of Lost Cause Historiography but not many have looked into the works of Union soldiers and civilians after the war. What Cushman has delivered here is an analysis on the ways in which the victors wrote the war and even alludes to the people outside his main five subjects. It is quite amazing that five different ways of writing were shown here and these five different ways have even stood tall today in the study of the war. The mindset of “primary sources must be trusted” is a good one to have, but most of them should be taken with a grain of salt as you will see within the essays written here by Cushman. I highly recommend this book to the Civil War student and scholar who wishes to know more about the reality of the sources we trust and I praise Cushman for the scholarship which he has brought to this study.

Matthew Bartlett - Gettysburg Chronicle

[Sarah Gardner · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars, perhaps. Chamberlain chapter seemed rushed. Falls flat, especially when compared with the first three chapters.