Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 28: Melville's Civil War poems (2)

Herman Melville

The more I read Melville's Civil War poems, the more intriguing I find them.

But I have to remind myself that poems like novels or short stories have a point of view, a narrator's perspective that isn't necessarily identical to the perspective of the author. And Melville does employ different perspectives in these poems. For example, one poem is called "Stonewall Jackson. Mortally wounded at Chancellorsville. (May, 1863)". It is clearly from the viewpoint of a Union sympathizer: "Dead is the Man whose Cause is dead,/Vainly he died and set his seal". This narrator takes grudging notice of Jackson's death but refuses to pretend he or his cause were noble:

Justly his fame we outlaw; so
We drop a tear on the bold Virginian's bier,
Because no wreath we owe.

The poem immediately following is called "Stonewall Jackson. (Ascribed to a Virginia.)" This one is from a Confederate viewpoint, and employs the more flowery images of which Southern fans of Sir Walter Scott's novels were so fond:

But who shall hymn the Roman heart?
A stoic he, but even more:
The iron will and lion thew
Were strong to inflict as to endure:
Who like him could stand, or pursue?
His gate the fatalist followed through;
In all his great soul found to do
Stonewall followed his star.

In the final stanza of this piece, we catch a glimpse of the emerging romance of the Lost Cause:

O, much of doubt in after days
Shall cling, as now, to the war;
Of the right and the wrong they'll still debate,
Puzzled by Stonewall's star:
"Fortune went with the North elate,"
"Ay, but the South had Stonewall's weight,
And he fell in the South's vain war."

One thing I appreciate about these poems is that while Melville - or at least the narrator's voice in many of these poems - understood the Union cause and supported it, he also kept his eyes open to the gruesome reality of war. For instance, in "The College Colonel", not specifically identified as being North or South, he pictures a colonel returning home after long service:

He brings his regiment home -
Not as they filed two years before,
But a remnant half-tattered, and battered, and worn,
Like castaway sailors, who - stunned
By the surf's loud roar,
Their mates dragged back and seen no more -
Again and again breast the surge,
And at last crawl, spent, to shore.

He invokes the plight of prisoners of war in the poem, "In the Prison Pen. (1964.)" The treatment of prisoners of war, particularly the treatment of Federal prisoners by the Rebels, and the atrocious treatment of African-American Union troops, was a source of long resentment. He pictures an ill-treated prisoner:

A smiting sun. No shed, no tree;
He totters to his lair -
A den that sick hands dug in earth
Ere famine wasted there,

Or, dropping in his place, he swoons,
Walled in by throngs that press,
Till forth from the throngs they bear him dead -
Dead in his meagreness.

In a longer selection near the end of the collection, he gives a verse account of "Lee in the Capitol", describing Robert E. Lee's postwar plea for leniency toward the white South. Lee's voice in the poem pleads:

A voice comes out from these charnel-fields,
A plaintive yet unheeded one:
'Died all in vain? both sides undone?'
Push not your triumph; do not urge
Submissiveness beyond the verge.
Intestine rancor would you bide,
Nursing eleven sliding daggers in your side?
Far from my thought to school or threat;
I speak the things which hard beset.
Where various hazards meet the eyes,
To elect in magnanimity is wise.

We can't tell from the work itself whether Melville is sympathetic toward this viewpoint, this plea for reconciliation among whites North and South at the expense of the rights of the newly freed black men and women.

The final selection in the book is called "A Meditation: Attributed to a Northerner After Attending the Last of Two Funerals From the Same Homestead - Those of a National and a Confederate Officer (Brothers), His Kinsmen, Who Had Died From the Effects of Wounds Received in the Closing Battles." That setting of the stage is a reminder that the conflict was a civil war, not the War Between the States of Lost Cause lore.

But this poem seems to catch the sense of a war-weary white Union veteran, tired of the conflict and ready to look to the business of the future and a reconciliation among the white "brothers" of America. This Northerner betrays perhaps a feeling of bitterness at the former slaves themselves:

Of North or South they recked not then,
Warm passion cursed the cause of war:
Can Africa pay back this blood
Spilt on Potomac's shore?
Yet doubts, as pangs, were vain the strife to stay,
And hands that fain had clasped again could slay.

This desire for reconciliation among former foes didn't have to have come at the expense of the rights of the freed slaves. In practice, it did. But it didn't have to. The final three stanzas of this concluding poem catch a moment in which the future held the danger and promise of paths to which the country had not yet irrevocably committed:

Mark the great Captains on both sides,
The soldiers with the broad renown -
They all were messmates on the Hudson's marge,
Beneath one roof they laid them down;
And, free from hate in many an after pass,
Strove as in school-boy rivalry of the class.

A darker side there is; but doubt
In Nature's charity hovers there:
If men for new agreement yearn,
Then old upbraiding best forbear:
"The South's the sinner!" Well, so let it be;
But shall the North sin worse, and stand the Pharisee?

O, now that brave men yield the sword,
Mine be the manful soldier-view;
By how much more they boldly warred,
By so much more is mercy due:
When Vicksburg fell, and the moody files marched out,
Silent the victors stood, scorning to raise a shout.

One of my favorite poems in this collection is in an account of the conflict at Vicksburg, "Running the Batteries. As observed from the Anchorage above Vicksburgh. (April, 1863)". He writes about the seductive and false appeal of war:

A baleful brand, a hurrying torch
Whereby anew the boats are seen -
A burning transport all alurch!
Breathless we gaze; yet still we glean
Glimpses of beauty as we eager lean.

The effulgence takes an amber glow
Which bathes the hill-side villas far;
Affrighted ladies mark the show
Painting the pale magnolia -
The fair, false, Circe light of cruel War.

While the poems themselves tell us of the perspective of the narrator but not necessarily of the author, Melville added a prose "Supplement" at the very end, which was clearly meant as his own statement at the time. And, sadly, it seemed that Melville's generous heart was too ready to see civility and Christian decency in his white Southern countrymen. Still, even as he urged restraint toward the white South, he validated the truth of John Brown's final declaration that he had once believed that slavery could be ended without the shedding of much blood, but now knew he was in error. Melville wrote:

Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall. But we should remember that emancipation was accomplished not by deliberate legislation; only through agonized violence could so mighty a result be effected.

He continued directly:

In our natural solicitude to confirm the benefit of liberty to the blacks, let us forbear from measures of dubious constitutional rightfulness toward our white countrymen — measures of a nature to provoke, among other of the last evils, exterminating hatred of race toward race. In imagination let us place ourselves in the unprecedented position of the Southerners — their position as regards the millions of ignorant manumitted slaves in their midst, for whom some of us now claim the suffrage. Let us be Christians toward our fellow-whites, as well as philanthropists toward the blacks, our fellow-men. In all things, and toward all, we are enjoined to do as we would be done by. Nor should we forget that benevolent desires, after passing a certain point, can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied. Something may well be left to the graduated care of future legislation, and to heaven. In one point of view the coexistence of the two races in the South — whether the negro be bond or free - seems (even as it did to Abraham Lincoln) a grave evil. Emancipation has ridded the country of the reproach, but not wholly of the calamity. Especially in the present transition period for both races in the South, more or less of trouble may not unreasonably be anticipated; but let us not here after be too swift to charge the blame exclusively in anyone quarter. With certain evils men must be more or less patient. Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.

Despite his overly optimistic view of Southern white reaction, its clear he foresaw the assimilation of former slaves as full citizens.

And, since this series of posts is broadly in relation to Lost Cause mythology, it's worth noting that in this "Supplement", Melville had no doubt that slavery had caused the war, whatever other elements were dragged into the mix along the way:

It was in subserviency to the slave-interest that Secession was plotted; but it was under the plea, plausibly urged, that certain inestimable rights guaranteed by the Constitution were directly menaced, that the people of the South were cajoled into revolution. Through the arts of the conspirators and the perversity of fortune, the most sensitive love of liberty was entrapped into the support of a war whose implied end was the erecting in our advanced century of an Anglo-American empire based upon the systematic degradation of man.(my emphasis)

Melville may have had illusions about the amount of good will among postwar white Southerners. But he was very clear on what the Confederacy had been about.

Tags: american civil war, battle pieces, confederate heritage month 2008, herman melville, us civil war