2 - Remembering civil war

Summary

The civil war initiated a publishing industry. The war between the Northern Union and the Southern Confederacy inspired chronicles – photographic, historical, journalistic, and literary – at a rate unmatched by previous wars. As one soldier noted of his appetite for “cheap literature … I, certainly, never read so many such before or since.” Dime novels written for soldier audiences and run in series such as “Dawley's Camp and Fireside Library” and Redpath's “Books for the Camp Fires,” sold in the hundred thousands. More conventional novels such as Metta Victor's The Unionist's Daughter (1862); Charles Alexander's Pauline of the Potomac (1862); John Trowbridge's The Drummer Boy (1863); Edward Willett's The Vicksburg Spy (1864); and Sarah Edmonds's Unsexed: or, The Female Soldier (1864) provided those at home and at war on both sides with a steady stream of courageous soldiers, wartime courtships, and cross-dressed spies. Newspapers and magazines featured dramatic war testimonials, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s account (Atlantic Monthly) of his frantic search for Oliver Jr. (the future Supreme Court Justice), who was wounded at Antietam. Editors like Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune, Horace Greeley of the New YorkTribune, and Henry J. Raymond of the New York Times, assumed the role of elder statesmen, as they reviewed military and diplomatic strategies, while one Alabama editor warned those corresponding with soldiers to avoid news “that will embitter their thoughts or swerve them from the path of duty.”