The Civil War marked a turning point in American history like no other. As the historian Shelby Foote observed, "any understanding of this nation has to be based on an understanding of the Civil War." And yet, while the American experience in World War I, World War II or Vietnam produced an outpouring of great literature and artistic expression, the Civil War produced no outstanding similar examples — no great war novels or paintings of note.
This absence of great art has puzzled many historians and literary critics. The book that is often viewed as the war's most significant literary work — Stephen Crane's "Red Badge of Courage" — was published in 1895. It was written by an author born six years after the end of the war, who had no military experience and who had used his participation in college football as the basis for his understanding of combat.
Much like the paucity of fine literature involving the war, the postwar paintings produced by American artists avoided war subjects and focused mostly on landscapes or classical imagery. One of the most prominent American artists in the postwar period was Winslow Homer, an artist who had served as a war correspondent and field artist for Harpers' Weekly during the war. Homer avoided war paintings and focused his artistic attention on scenes of farm and family life in the years after the war.
Edward Wilson observed in his 1962 book, "Patriotic Gore," that while the Civil War period is not known for great books, "it did produce a remarkable literature which mostly consisted of speeches and pamphlets, private letters and diaries and personal memoirs." Wilson queried whether there had ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861-1865 in "which so many people were so articulate."
And yet, while President Abraham Lincoln may well have been one of the greatest writers of the 19th century, the question remains: Why did the Civil War, for all of its catastrophic drama and impact on the nation, not inspire great art?
The answer is perhaps more complicated than not. The era that followed the end of the Civil War was populated by artists who, if they did not produce great works related to the war, were still greatly influenced by it.
Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson each experienced the Civil War in significant ways and produced art that was greatly influenced by the war. Louisa May Alcott, who published "Little Women" in 1868, set her novel within the context of the war, but scarcely considered it in her story of family life and the coming of age of the four March sisters.
If their artistic outpouring did not seek to define the war, it at least appears to have come in reaction to it. Much like Winslow Homer, whose paintings ignored the horrors of the battlefield, the published works of Emerson, Hawthorne and Melville largely reacted to the omnipresence of war without precisely chronicling it or seeking deeper meaning. Whitman, whose poems and war journals went largely unpublished until after his death, and Dickinson, who scarcely published any poems during her lifetime, produced works that offered more of a personal reaction to the war, rather than any attempt to interpret the war experience on behalf of their generation.
The literature and art of later American wars, whether inspired by the grim experience World War I or World War II, or even Vietnam, seems intent on extracting meaning and establishing purpose from the wreckage of war on behalf of the surviving generation. This effort of discovery has produced some great art ranging from the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, to Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller and Tim O'Brien. Even America's most recent military experience has been deftly captured by authors such as Sebastian Junger and the war photographer, Tim Hetherington. In comparison, the Civil War seems devoid of such legacy.
It is perhaps in the absence of such great work that aims to interpret, however, that real meaning can be found. The work of Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson and other painters of the era, in finding expression in churning seascapes and bucolic farm fields, offers a counterview to the typical and destructive perspective of war.
In fact, the absence of war in such art that pervades the postwar period is a statement in and of itself. It is as if turning ones artistic back on war to write elegant Victorian novels or paint colorful landscapes is exactly the point — an entire nation that passed through the tumultuous fire of war, now content in the reflection of nature or the grandeur of the mundane.
If the literature of the Civil War period produced no great "war books," what was written at the time was at least authored by some of the greatest writers in American history — the introspective poetry of Dickinson and Whitman, the complexity of William Dean Howells and the genius of Mark Twain.
Given the impact of Civil War and the loss of more than 750,000 American lives, it is no wonder that a nation weary of the battlefield did not linger long to analyze or reflect on canvas or in print. The artistic response was one of absence — a reaction to all that had been lost — that was reflected in an art that fondly remembered the world that had come before the great loss and before the nation had been engulfed by the flames of cruel war.
The desire to forget, to ignore and to move on, was as valid an artistic response as anything that had come before, or would come after in the wake of other wars.
Bill Howard is a historian and writer. He most recently published "The Civil War Memoir of William T. Levey."