“The real war will never get in the books.” This may be the most famous sentence ever written about the Civil War, at least by a writer of literary consequence. But what kind of reality did Walt Whitman have in mind when he made that claim more than 130 years ago? And considering the scores of thousands of Civil War books that have appeared since, how well has the prediction held up?
In the first place, he meant the reality he had seen, heard, and smelled while working as a nurse in a Union hospital: the sight of boys with worms burrowing into their wounds, the sound of their whispers as they dictated letters home, the smell of dysentery and gangrene mixed with chloroform and lime—all of which he tried to capture with phrases (“seething hell,” “butchers’ shambles,” “slaughter house”) whose lameness only made his point.
Even before its official start in 2011, the Civil War sesquicentennial has brought many attempts to prove Whitman wrong. There have been hour-to-hour accounts of the major battles, notably Allen Guelzo’s Gettysburg; scholarly studies and popular biographies of key figures (Eric Foner on Lincoln, Michael Korda on Robert E. Lee); an “international history of the American Civil War” as a struggle between North and South for the allegiance of contending European powers (Don H. Doyle’s The Cause of All Nations); assessments of the war’s legal and literary ramifications (John Fabian Witt’s Lincoln’s Code, Randall Fuller’s From Battlefields Rising); as well as sweeping narratives of events before, during, and after the war (David Goldfield’s America Aflame, Brenda Wineapple’s Ecstatic Nation).
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