10 - From “Facts” to “Pictures”

Summary

Drawing on her border-state experiences, Rebecca Harding Davis explored the meaning of the Civil War and its complicated legacy throughout her career. Her insistence on realism in her writing about the conflict as it unfolded prefigured her later skepticism about the emerging memory of the war as a Lost Cause. Her early Atlantic Monthly stories, such as “John Lamar” and “David Gaunt,” frame political justifications for a war of competing rights and anticipate her use of the trial metaphor to suggest justice deferred at the end of Waiting for the Verdict. Her postbellum work, such as “The Rose of Carolina” and “How the Widow Crossed the Lines,” acknowledges the force of cultural memory, itself an adversarial contest of competing claims in late nineteenth-century America. Davis invites her readers to revisit the lessons of the war, its cultural legacy, and its impact on a verdict too long deferred.