Reconstructing rebellion: the politics of narrative in the Confederate memoir.

Higgins, Andrew C.

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP ON VETERANS' REMEMBRANCES OF THE CIVIL WAR HAS focused on how, after Reconstruction, the veterans ignored race and slavery in favor of a sentimental emphasis on the brotherhood of soldiers. James M. McPherson, writing about the joint encampments of the Grand Army of the Republic and the United Confederate Veterans in the 1890s, claims that "somehow the Civil War became a heroic contest, a sort of grand, if deadly, football game without ideological cause or purpose" (68). And David W. Blight makes this the central theme of his excellent work, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American History. Discussing a factual feud between Sherman and Joseph E. Johnston, Blight writes, "these new battles on paper not only served the ends of personal aggrandizement, but they also engaged questions of how the war was waged in front of a growing readership, and diverted some embittered emotions to the pursuit of facts and accuracy" (165). Blight's point here is that the obsession with factuality and detail served as a way of avoiding the larger questions of the war.

McPherson, Blight, and others amply document this erasure of race and the sentimentalizing of the soldier's life, but their efforts are not a complete account of the Civil War soldier's attempt to inscribe his experience in war. In the Confederate enlisted man's memoir, at least, the depiction of graphic violence and deprivation in wartime along with the intense bonds of brotherhood amongst members of the same unit was not simply a sentimental memory, it was a deliberate assertion of self-worth, a claim to power in the postwar struggle between the Old and New South. When Sam Watkins, the author of Company Aytch: Or, A Side Show of the Big Show, tells us, "I propose to tell of the fellows who did the shooting and killing, the fortifying and ditching, the sweeping of the streets, the drilling, the standing guard, picket and videt" (5), he is making a clear contrast between himself and the officer class, who clearly did not do these things.

This article will explore three Confederate memoirs written during and after the final days of Reconstruction--George Cary Eggleston's A Rebel's Recollections (1874), Richard Taylor's Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Last War(1879), and Sam Watkins's memoir Company Aytch: Or, A Side Show of the Big Show (1881-82)--in order to show how Reconstruction-era politics shaped the rhetorical and narrative strategies of Eggleston and Taylor and how Watkins's memoir is a populist response to officers' memoirs like those of Eggleston and Taylor. Each of these Confederate authors claims to depict the war as he saw it. And yet, the memoirs are remarkably different in tone, style, content, and narrative technique. Eggleston's narrative exemplifies the romanticization of the war typical of Southern writers in the 1860s-1880s, while Taylor's narrative anticipates the novelized "grand view" histories of Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton. Sam Watkins's narrative is an early version of contemporary foot soldiers' literature more typical of the post-Vietnam War literature, including present day works about the Civil War such as Ian Frazier's Cold Mountain and Andrew Hudgins's The Lost War (Hudgins's Sidney Lanier is much closer in voice and attitude to Sam Watkins than he is to the historic Lanier), as well as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Larry Heinemann's Close Quarters, movies such as Glory and Saving Private Ryan, and even contemporary Civil War reenacting, itself a kind of performance art or street (or rather, field) theater.

The officers' memoirs, which formed the bulk of the memoirs up through the mid-1880s, though individually written for a variety of reasons, including the defense of war-time military decisions, as a group argued for the reassertion of antebellum power structures, including the re-subjugation of blacks and suppression of poor whites. For example, in 1877, Taylor argues that race is not only at the center of the meaning of the War but also at the center of the meaning of Reconstruction. Of course he does this as part of an argument that blacks need to be re-enslaved in all but name. Watkins, writing just five years later, barely mentions race. He humorously depicts the cause of the war as an argument over "the strange and peculiar notion that the sun rose in the east and set in the west, and that the compass pointed north and south," which Watkins facetiously declares is a ridiculous idea (3-4). To read Watkins's Co. Ayrch is to read about a war of which race is not even a peripheral issue. And yet something else is also at work here. Watkins is writing at a time when the ex-Confederate enlisted man's place in the South was uncertain. Reconstruction was coming to an end and an array of forces in the South were rushing to fill the void created by the retreat of Federal power. A major part of that struggle was the conflict between the forces of the New South and the Old South, a struggle in part over whether the post-Civil War South would be a commercial culture with social mobility at least partly based on accomplishments, or a closed agricultural society ruled by a de facto aristocracy. Memoirs of former enlisted men such as Sam Watkins and William A. Fletcher, author of Rebel Private Front and Rear, respond to the officers' memoirs, in which the combat veteran presents his own experience in combat as a way of asserting the value and importance of the middle class, to which these authors typically belonged.

The question of whether or not the Civil War veteran's memoir constitutes a genre distinct from those of Civil War-era noncombatants is thorny, as genre questions always are, but a brief look at the memoir of the Confederacy's most accomplished literary son can suggest some of the conventions of this form. In his 1885 Civil War memoir "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed," Confederate veteran Samuel Clemens claims to speak for a group of former soldiers who, up to that point, hadn't been spoken for: the idle.

 You have heard from a great many people who did something in the
 war; is it not fair and right that you listen a little moment to
 one who started out to do something in it, but didn't? Thousands
 entered the war, got just a taste of it, and then stepped out
 again, permanently. These, by their very numbers are respectable,
 and are therefore entitled to a sort of voice,--not a loud one, but
 a modest one; not a boastful one, but an apologetic one.... Surely
 this kind of light must have a sort of value. (863)

The humor in Twain's piece consists, as one might expect, in its deflationary rhetoric. Twain's companions are lazy, easily-spooked, and ignorant, but take themselves as seriously as Jefferson Davis no doubt took himself. Though Twain's piece is still funny today, it would have been more so (or just more sacrilegious) to Twain's original readers, for the "Private History" first appeared in Century Magazine's series of Civil War memoirs, which would go on to form the famous Battles and Leaders of the Civil War series. In addition to Century Magazine's series, readers at this time also had access to the Philadelphia Weekly Times series which ran from 1877-1899 (much of it was recently collected and published in Peter Cozzens and Robert Girard's The New Annals of the Civil War).

The book-length Civil War memoir was also well established by this time. The first, Jubal Early's A Memoir of the Last Year of the War of Independence, in the Confederate States of America, appeared in 1866 and was followed by a steady barrage of memoirs, usually written by former generals or their staff officers. These memoirs soon became big business. In 1875, William Tecumseh Sherman's memoirs were published in two volumes at $7.00 a set, a large sum in those days. Yet according to Sherman, 25,000 sets were sold (Sherman 1121). Publishing historian John William Tebble credits the memoirs of Sherman, Joseph E. Johnston, and others as playing a significant part in establishing Appletons as a major publishing house (205). And one of the most significant publishing events of the post-helium period was the publication of Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs in 1885. Famously finished just days before his death, the book earned his widow a first royalty check of $200,000, easily the highest sum ever earned by an author up to that point (Tebble 526). It was Grant's memoir that prompted Mark Twain to pen "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed."

Twain's parody of the memoir is certainly evidence that this literary form was familiar to readers in the 1880s. "The Private History" contains many of the conventions of the veteran's memoir, including an explanation of the author's allegiance during the war, a description of how raw recruits are turned into soldiers, and an account of the horrors and uncertainty of combat. But in Twain's case, as one might imagine, these conventions are observed in parody. Twain's description of a battle, an experience he calls "perhaps the most mortifying spectacle of the civil war," recounts how his command was set upon by a pack of farm dogs, each of which stubbornly grabbed onto a soldier's trouser leg (872). He even included with the narrative in Century Magazine a map of the "Engagement at Mason's Farm," which carefully shows, using the same symbols used in other war-time maps to indicate infantry units, the "First position of Dogs" and "Second position of Dogs" (873).

But toward the end of the narrative Twain appears to break with the conventions. When he describes shooting an unidentified man who he and the other Rangers thought was a Union soldier, Twain shifts from comedy to tragedy. They fire at night, without any real knowledge of who he was. Twain describes the aftermath of the shooting:

 When we got to him the moon revealed him distinctly. He was lying
 on his back, with his arms abroad; his mouth was open and his
 chest heaving with long gasps, and his white shirt-front was all
 splashed with blood. The thought shot through me that I was a
 murderer; that I had killed a man--a man who had never done me any
 harm. (879)

This transition in "The Private History," while typical of Twain's style in his late non-fiction, also represents a dividing point in the Civil War memoir: that between the accounts of general officers who ordered men into battle and those of the soldiers who fought it, between the officer's memoir and the enlisted man's memoir.

In all effective writing, technique is a product of purpose, and in these memoirs, the different literary techniques are, in large part, products of the authors' responses to Reconstruction and the re-establishment of white power in the post-Reconstruction South. Eggleston's romanticization of war, written two years before Rutherford B. Hayes's narrow "victory" over Tilden, was an attempt to downplay the differences between North and South, in order to hasten the end of Reconstruction. Taylor's grand view approach, written during the ascendancy of the Democratic party during the Hayes presidency, acts as a conservative reassertion of antebellum class structures and white power. Conversely, Watkins's "private history" is a rejection of the officer-class focus of many Southern memoirs. It is a post-war redefinition of "the Southerner" in a democratic, populist mold, drawing on the tradition of Southern humorist fiction by writers like Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and George Washington Harris, but closer still to the work of the Phunny Phellows and Bill Arp (Parker xvi). (The sub-title of Watkins's book, "A Side Show of the Big Show," is a tribute to Bill Arp's 1866 collection of war-time essays called Bill Arp, So Called: A Side Show of the Southern Side of the War.) Watkins may have recognized that the curtailment of the planter-class aristocracy's power after the War created the opportunity for the middle-class white Southern male to become more prominent in the Southern power structure. After a long, slow rise, this group would come to exert great power in national politics, first in the Democratic Party of the 1930s through 1960s, and afterward, ironically, through the party of Lincoln. More likely, though, Watkins was just mad at the way that general officer memoirists such as Taylor and William Techumseh Sherman could speak calmly about casualty figures that rose into the thousands.

Whatever his intention, Watkins begins this redefinition of the Southerner

through his rejection of the political aims of the officer class, his acceptance of Union victory, and his focus on the immense sacrifice made by the web-foots, the Confederate enlisted men. In focusing on the action of his fellow soldiers, Watkins creates a palpable tension between a romantic individualist identity grounded in action--an identity that offers potentially limitless union with others--and an exclusive identity based on membership in a forever closed and diminishing society: Confederate veterans. Ultimately, Watkins cannot resolve this tension.

What is so intriguing about Watkins's redefinition of the Southerner is that it so closely matches the image of the Southern Rebel in popular American culture today: defiant but resigned to defeat, voicing his own rejection of politics in a way that further alienates him from power. Having suffered brutally for four long years in service to a failed cause, he rejects all claim to political agency and keeps vigil over the memories of the dead and the suffering of the living.

Of these three memorists, George Cary Eggleston had the best literary connections. A novelist and journalist himself, he was also the brother of Edward Eggleston, the author of The Hoosier Schoolmaster(1871) and many other novels, whom Hamlin Garland would call the father of the Midwestern regionalist writers of the early twentieth century, writers that included, in addition to Garland, Booth Tarkington, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis. Though the family's literary fame would come from Edward's depiction of Midwestern life, the family itself came from upper-class Virginia. But by the time of George's birth, the family had moved to Indiana, in part due to his father's attitudes towards slavery. In 1857, however, at the age of eighteen, George left Indiana for the family's ancestral land: Amelia County, Virginia, where he immersed himself in Virginia culture. As Gaines M. Foster explains:

 The eighteen-year-old did not simply move to Virginia, he embraced
 it. He adopted many of its values, within four years would go to war
 in its behalf, and would build his postwar literary career primarily
 on celebrating its prewar civilization. (9)

Originally published at William Dean Howells's urging, A Rebel's Recollections was aimed at much the same Northern, middle-class, Republican audience that Frederick Douglass wrote for before the War, and as Douglass wrote to move that audience to oppose slavery, so Eggleston's stated purpose was to erode support for Republican Reconstruction policies. Eggleston's work is, perhaps, the most consciously ideological of the three memoirs considered here; it attempts to persuade readers that the War came simply because events required Virginia to either go to war or suffer dishonor. As an overt attempt at reconciliation, A Rebel's Recollectionscontains very little of the horrors of combat, though Eggleston himself was present at some of the worst fighting of the War. That someone who fought at the Wilderness and the siege of Petersburg could write such a romantic portrait of those events strikes us today as hard to believe.

Twentieth-century war literature has firmly established that, in Sherman's phrase, war is hell. Ernest Hemingway and Wilfred Owen, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, Tim O'Brien and Larry Heinemann have firmly determined that we experience war as an overwhelming, nihilistic experience. Given this, it is difficult for us to take Eggleston's descriptions of the War seriously. The modern reader can only wonder how Eggleston can declare of the Southern Army fighting in the bleak trenches around Petersburg (a campaign often compared to the trench warfare of World War I) that

 Disaster seemed only to strengthen the faith of many. They saw in
 it a needed lesson in humility, and an additional reason for
 believing that God meant to bring about victory by his own and not
 by human strength. They did their soldierly duties perfectly. They
 held danger and fatigue alike in contempt. It was their duty as
 Christian men to obey orders without question, and they did so in
 the thought that to do otherwise was to sin. (178)

This at a time when Confederate soldiers were daily deserting by the hundreds.

Clearly Eggleston idealizes his war. It is a war without ambiguity--or rather, a war in which ambiguity is tenuously held at bay. For example, in describing the attitudes of Lee's soldiers as the army fled toward Appomattox, Eggleston can write: "We discussed the comparative strategic merits of the line we had left and the new one we hoped to make on the Roanoke River ..., but not one word was said about a probable or possible surrender" (173).

But Eggleston's book is less concerned with combat itself. Most of it consists of sketches of Confederate leaders such as Lee, Jackson, Richard "Baldy" Ewell, and J.E.B. Stuart. If the portrait of Lee is traditional hagiography, the portraits of other generals humanize them. We hear of the time in the first year of the War that Eggleston, on guard duty, nearly shoots Ewell when he tries to enter Confederate lines dressed only in civilian clothes (135-37).

J.E.B. Stuart, to whom Eggleston devotes a whole chapter, is clearly his favorite, and best embodies the Southern Planter class that Eggleston so admires. For Eggleston, Stuart's actions and attitudes exemplify the romance that Eggleston seeks to capture in his recollection of the war. For example, Eggleston describes a scene when Stuart, desiring to test out the author's horse, exchanges mounts with him and takes Eggleston on a scouting mission behind Federal lines. As they are racing home, pursued by a large body of Federal cavalry, bullets flying around their heads, Stuart calmly inquires, "Did you ever time this horse for a half-mile?" (116). Significantly, there is nothing about the spring 1864 campaign in which Phil Sheridan's cavalry ran Stuart's troopers to ground and killed Stuart himself at Yellow Tavern, outside Richmond.

Why would a veteran of some of the War's most terrible fighting write a memoir so free of blood and death? One answer is that such a portrait would have an effect the opposite of that Eggleston is trying to create. Written in the waning days of Reconstruction, A Rebel's Recollections seeks to foster white unity in order to hasten the end of Reconstructionist policies. Thus Eggleston renders the War in a breezy style that humanizes Confederate leaders specifically and Southerners in general, and lessens the cultural and ideological differences between Northerners and Southerners. The bulk of the memoir consists of humorous portraits and tales of Southern leaders, such as those about Ewell and Stuart. The result is more picaresque than Homeric.

To emphasize the book's purpose, it is blessed by Oliver Johnston, one of the founding members of William Lloyd Garrison's New England Anti-Slavery Society and, according to Eggleston, "the best 'original abolitionist' I ever knew." When Eggleston is debating whether or not the book is worth writing, Johnston tells him,

 Write, by all means. Prejudice is the first-born of ignorance, and
 it never outlives its father. The only thing necessary now to the
 final burial of the animosity existing between the sections is that
 the North and the South shall learn to know and understand each
 other. Anything which contributes to this hastens the day of peace
 and harmony and brotherly love which every good man longs for. (19)

Having assured the reader that his goal is reconciliation, he asks the Northern reader to become a Confederate:

 The reader must make of himself, for the time at least, a
 Confederate. He must put himself in the place of the Southerners and
 look at some things through their eyes, if he would understand those
 things and their results at all; [but] ... it is no part of my
 purpose to write a defense of the Southern view of any
 question.... (55)

In the preface to the fourth edition, published in 1905, one of the most dismal periods of race relations in United States history, when nearly all the progress in civil rights brought about by the Civil War and Reconstruction, save emancipation itself, had been rolled back, Eggleston writes of the book's success in helping Northerners to forget or ignore the political and social meanings of the war: "I was satisfied that my work had really ministered somewhat to that reconciliation between North and South which I had hoped to help forward" (23).

Given this romanticization, it is not surprising that the book's final portrait is an example of one of the most cherished white postwar myths: a group of newly freed slaves pledging fealty to their former master (187).

While F.ggleston's audience is specifically Northern, Richard Taylor's audience is more clearly identified with class than region. Taylor, son of president Zachary Taylor, was a Louisiana planter and politician before the war and rose to lieutenant-general in the Confederate Army. His memoir is a defense of limited democracy and powerful leaders and, in the end, an explicit argument against black suffrage. As a consequence, his memoir is a mixture of sketches of generals, accounts of the movements of troops, and commentary on political and military controversies. When he discusses those who elect leaders, be they Confederate soldiers or black voters in the Reconstruction-era South, his theme is the pernicious effects of unchecked democracy.

Of all the memoirs written by Confederate veterans, Taylor's has received the most recognition. Edmund Wilson called Destruction and Reconstruction "the masculine document that, from the point of view of realistic intelligence, is most nearly comparable to Mary Chesnut's diary" (299). Daniel Aaron too praises its realism, declaring it "a real book about a real war" (247). It should be noted that both of these scholars are comparing Taylor's memoir to the various examples of romantic fiction to come out of the war, novels like John De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) or Sidney Lanier's Tiger-Lilies (1867). In comparison to those works, Taylor's narrative is indeed more real, and strikingly less sentimental. His descriptions of combat and army life are crisp, vigorous, and unusually clear. (Unlike that of most military history, Taylor's prose is clear enough to allow readers to keep track of troop movements during combat.) Indeed, Taylor is the finest prose stylist of the writers in this study. At moments, he is lyrical, as when he describes the Shenandoah Valley:

 The great Valley of Virginia was before us in all its beauty. Fields
 of wheat spread far and wide, interspersed with woodlands, bright in
 their robes of tender green. Wherever appropriate sites existed,
 quaint old mills, with turning wheels, were busily grinding the
 previous year's harvest; and grove and eminence showed comfortable
 homesteads. The soft vernal influence shed a languid grace over the
 scene. (45)

Richard Taylor's narrative stands out among the narratives of high-ranking officers of the Civil War in its detachment and reflection. While Taylor is fiercely partisan, the narrative is not an attempt to explain his own actions during the war. Taylor presents himself as an actor on stage with several other more interesting actors, who are always officers. So what we get in Destruction and Reconstruction is an inside look at the officer class of the Confederate Army, much in the same way that the works of the two most popular Southern historians, Douglas Southall Freeman and Shelby Foote, focus primarily on the lives of the officers.

Taylor's realism and style have had an important influence on many major Civil War writers, including Mary Johnston, whose novel The Long Roll (1911) leans heavily on the first half of Destruction and Reconstruction. Many of the characters and episodes of The Long Roll come straight out of Taylor's narrative. George Garrett has suggested that Johnston's Civil War fiction "helped to form the climate" that allowed writers such as Shelby Foote and, by extension, Ken Burns to succeed (87). But Johnston is much more interested in the average soldier than is Taylor. There is a more direct link between Taylor and Foote, and the other giants of Civil War history, including Freeman and Bruce Catton. Freeman in particular, who describes Taylor as "absolutely self-reliant and indisposed to accept any judgement as sound merely because it is authoritative" (32)--high praise from the scholarly Freeman--follows Taylor's nearly exclusive focus on the officers. The only specific enlisted men mentioned in Taylor's memoir are two Louisiana "Tigers" Taylor orders executed. Their deaths, Taylor somewhat proudly notes, were "the first military execution[s] in the Army of Northern Virginia" (22).

Though the subtitle of Destruction and Reconstruction promises the author's "Personal Experiences of the Late War," much of the memoir consists of analyses of the abilities and characters of various military and political leaders, often leaders with whom Taylor had no personal contact. For example, his chapter on the Peninsular Campaign opens with a six-page evaluation of Union General George McClellan's military abilities (29-34). While this is certainly of value, coming as it does from one of the war's most successful combat officers, it is not personal experience. During this stage of the war, Taylor rose no higher than the command of a brigade. It was Johnston and Lee who were matching wits with McClellan, not Taylor.

In his discussion of officers, the overriding quality Taylor favors is professionalism, though Taylor himself was not a professional. Thus he describes general officers of even mixed success, such as Joseph E. Johnston and George McClellan, in glowing terms. One example is his description of Irwin McDowell, who commanded Union forces at the first battle of Bull Run: "The Federal commander at Manassas ... a trained soldier of unusual acquirement, was so hounded and worried by ignorant, impatient politicians and newspapers as to be scarcely responsible for his acts" (15). Taylor contrasts McDowell's professionalism with the "mob" he led: "The late Governor Andrew of Massachusetts observed that his men thought they were going to a town meeting, and this is exhaustive criticism. With soldiers at his disposal, McDowell would have succeeded in turning and overwhelming Beauregard's left ..." (15). Thus the men who fought and died on the field, men in positions similar to Sam Watkins and George Cary Eggleston, are simply a mob, while the general who ordered them into battle is praiseworthy. This pattern is repeated throughout the memoir. The professional officer class is the true aristocracy of Taylor's world. Enlisted men aren't worth noticing, unless they disobey orders.

What's more, Taylor fiercely defends the professional officer class: "As men without knowledge have at all times usurped the right to criticise campaigns and commanders, they will doubtless continue to do so despite the protests of professional soldiers, who discharge this duty in a reverent spirit, knowing that the greatest is he who commits the fewest blunders" (15). His defense of caste and privilege is not surprising given Taylor's personality and background, but it takes on more urgency coming, as it does, from a prominent Louisiana politician during the time when the Democratic Party in that state was dismantling Republican Reconstruction policies. (One of the outcomes of the contested 1876 election was that Democrats were given the governorship and a free hand in Louisiana in exchange for giving the Republicans the presidency.) It is in this context that Taylor closes his book with this conservative hymn (and this just after quoting Edmund Burke):

 Traditions are mighty influences in restraining peoples. The light
 that reaches us from above takes countless ages to traverse the
 awful chasm separating us from its parent star; yet it comes
 straight and true to our eyes, because each tender wavelet is
 linked to the other, receiving and transmitting the luminous ray.
 Once break the continuity of the stream, and men will deny its
 heavenly origin, and seek its source in the feeble glimmer of
 earthly corruption. (331)

But these words are not simply a celebration of conservatism. They are a direct response to black suffrage, as the preceding paragraph makes clear:

 Purified by fire and sword, the South has escaped many of these
 evils; but her enemies have sown the seeds of a pestilence more
 deadly than that rising from Pontine marshes. Now that Federal
 bayonets have been turned from her bosom, this poison, the influence
 of three fourths of a million Negro voters, will speedily ascend and
 sap her vigor and intelligence. (330-31)

In this light, Taylor's narrative focus on the officer class of both North and South becomes far more than simply a realistic portrait of the war. It becomes a rhetorical reconstruction of the War, one that aims to restore antebellum class and racial power structures.

Sam Watkins's Co. Aytch serves a quite different purpose. Watkins did not consider himself a professional writer, and his memoir was written for a relatively local audience. It was published serially in the Columbia, Tennessee Herald, and later issued as a book in a run of 2000 copies (Inge viii). Watkins had one of the most extraordinary service records of the Civil War, having fought in every major engagement with the Army of Tennessee, and his aim is to tell the story of the fighting soldier. He tells us in the beginning that Co. Aytch does not "pretend to be a history of the war" (19). Histories, which are of course, "all correct," "tell of the great achievement of great men" (19). Watkins, rather, proposes "to tell of the fellows who did the shooting and killing, the fortifying and ditching, the sweeping of the streets, the drilling, the standing guard, picket and videt, and who drew (or were to draw) eleven dollars per month and rations, and also drew the ramrod and tore the cartridge" (19-20). In many ways, Co. Aytch is the most modern of the three texts studied here. It focuses on the private soldier, one not wrapped in glory. Watkins faces the horrors of war without romance; he shows brutality in unvarnished prose.

Watkins's readers in the late 1800s would have easily recognized the author's debt to Bill Arp, the pen name of Charles Henry Smith, one of the South's most popular journalists. Smith created the Arp persona in 1861, in a satiric response to Lincoln's call for volunteers to put down the spreading rebellion. The friendly Arp tells "Linkhorn":

 We received your proklamation and as you have put us on very short
 notis, a few of us boys have conkluded to write you, and ax for more
 time. The fact is, we are most obleeged to have a few more days, for
 the way things are happening, it is utterly onpossible for us to
 disperse in twenty days.... I tried my darndest yisterday to
 disperse and retire, but it was no go. (Smith, Peace Papers 19)

Smith went on to write a series of War-time Arp letters defending the Confederacy against all threats external and internal. (A favorite target was Georgia Governor Joseph Brown, who opposed the Confederate government on many stands he believed impinged upon the sovereignty of Georgia.) His popularity among the troops was well known (see Parker 51-66).

But Watkins most closely reflects the post-War Arp. Stylistically, Watkins's prose is more like that of the post-Reconstruction Arp, when Smith dropped the misspellings. Thematically, his writing displays a combination of Arp's Reconstruction-era and post-Reconstruction poses. In his second letter after the end of the war, Arp writes, "I begin to feel kindly towards all people except sum. I'm now endeverin to be a great nashunal man. I've taken up a motto of no North, no South, no East, no West; but let me tell you, my friend, I'll bet on Dixie as long as I've got a doller" (Smith, Peace Papers 116-17). Watkins may well have had these words in mind when he wrote that the War established "that America had no cardinal points, and that the sun did not rise in the east and set in the west, and that the compass did not point either north or south" (4). Throughout his Reconstruction-era letters, Bill Arp, like Watkins, accepts but resents the Union victory. He describes the South as "conquered, but not convinced" (Smith, Bill Arp, So Called 10).

But Company Aytch also strongly reflects the later Bill Arp. In 1877, Smith began writing almost weekly Bill Arp letters for the Atlanta Constitution. As David B. Parker explains,

 The differences between [his Constitution work] and his earlier
 writings are obvious. Gone are the bitterness and frustration of the
 war and Reconstruction pieces, seemingly replaced with the gentle
 musings of a contented farmer. Some of the misspelling is still
 there, but that too would disappear within a couple of years. (78)

As Parker explains in his discussion of the later writings, though Arp demonstrates an enthusiasm for industrialization and the opportunity it will bring to Southern communities, he more strongly distrusts the way New South commercialism threatened small-town, agrarian social structures. These early stirrings of the kind of complaints the Fugitives would articulate some forty years later would resonate with Sam Watkins, then living just fifty miles south of Nashville, in Columbia, Tennessee.

Curiously, Company Aytch has been absent from the few surveys of Civil War memoirs. Neither Edmund Wilson, Daniel Aaron, nor Clay Lewis mentions Watkins. Only M. Thomas Inge has given Watkins any attention, arguing that Company Aytch may well have been read by Stephen Crane as he prepared to write The Red Badge of Courage (Inge xiii). This neglect is surprising given that Watkins is today one of the most famous Civil War writers. He was a major character in Ken Burns's film The Civil War, and Watkins's defiantly "private" view of the war has endeared him to thousands of Civil War enthusiasts. Whatever its cause, this neglect is unfortunate because Company Aytch is one of the richest pieces of literature to come out of the war.

There are probably several reasons for Watkins's neglect by scholars. The first is the fact that he is a Confederate soldier. But in addition to that, Watkins often plays the fool. In fact, in Ken Burns's film, Watkins comes across as a wide-eyed, barely literate rube. But his foolishness, like that of Falstaff, has more method to it than the quips in Burns's film suggest. Though educated (there are a number of classical references in the memoir), Watkins consistently deflates his own pretensions, and anybody else's for that matter, whenever anything besides combat becomes too serious. For example, when Watkins describes the setting of a church service presided over by "an eloquent and able LL.D. from Nashville" just before the Battle of Chickamauga, he writes:

 The scene looked weird and picturesque. It was in a dark wilderness
 of woods and vines and overhanging limbs. In fact, it seemed but the
 home of the owl and the bat, and other varmints that turn night into
 day. Everything looked solemn. The trees looked solemn, the scene
 looked solemn, the men looked solemn, even the horses looked solemn.
 You may be sure, reader, that we felt solemn. (79)

The passage is an excellent example of Watkins's debt to Arp and the Southwestern humorists. The word "varmint" dropped into the otherwise gothic scene and the parodic last sentence, complete with the punch word at the end, all point up Watkins's typical naive pose in the face of great, wise men.

When "the Reverend LL.D." begins, his sermon turns out to be a call to arms. His text, which Watkins quoted "entirely from memory," was "'Blessed be the Lord God, who teaches my hands to war and my fingers to fight.' [Psalm 144:1-2] Now, reader, that was the very subject we boys did not want to hear preached on--on that occasion at least" (80). And the Lord eventually hears the pleas of the soldiers, because as the Reverend warms up, claiming that "he and his brethren would fight the Yankees in this world and if God permit, chase their frightened ghosts in the next," a large, wild bull runs out of the woods, knocks over the Reverend and scatters the congregation. And Watkins tells us, solemnly, "the services were brought to a close without the doxology" (81). Watkins felicitously titled this sketch "The Bull of the Woods," leaving us wondering whether he is referring to the animal or the sermon.

Watkins's treatment of the Reverend LL.D. is typical of his treatment of all who talk of meaning, ideology, and politics. When Jefferson Davis reviews the army at Missionary Ridge, he is met with cries of "Send something to eat, Massa Jeff.... I'm hungry!" (90). And in the memoir's opening pages, Watkins makes clear his feelings about the cause. In the opening sketch, "We are one and undivided," Watkins portrays the war as a squabble over the "strange and peculiar notion that the sun rose in the east and set in the west, and that the compass pointed north and south" (3). The two "sides" in this squabble elect "captains"--Jeff Davis and Abe Lincoln. The fracas that followed established "that America had no cardinal points, and that the sun did not rise in the east and set in the west, and that the compass did not point either north or south" (4). In Watkins's telling, Union power is ultimate, even to the point that it contravenes geographical fact. Having seen that power up close for four long years, Watkins has little interest in carrying on the fight in other spheres. Instead he takes on those who seek to appropriate the memory of the war and the war dead for their own purposes.

The satiric references to authority figures--in addition to calling Jefferson Davis "Massa Jeff," Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens is "smart Aleck" Stephens, and Abraham Lincoln is simply "Abe," "a son of Nancy Hanks, of Bowling Green, and a son of old Bob Lincoln, the rail-splitter" (4)--establish one of the major themes of the memoir: a democratic opposition to the kind of caste system that defined antebellum Southern culture and is exemplified in Richard Taylor's memoir. Watkins strikes this tone in the opening pages when he justifies his right, as a humble private, to write his memoir:

 The histories of the Lost Cause are all written out by "big bugs,"
 Generals and renowned historians, and like the fellow who called a
 turtle a "cooter," being told that no such word as cooter was in
 Webster's dictionary, remarked that he had as much right to make a
 dictionary as Mr. Webster or any other man; so have I to write a
 history. (5)

We can see Watkins's history, then, as a humorous response to narratives like Taylor's and Eggleston's that seek to shape the war for some political program.

Watkins's resistance to the grand historical sweep can be seen throughout the narrative. One brief example is the opening section of chapter 8. Typically Watkins speaks only of what he saw. But in the opening sentences of his account of the Chickamauga]Chattanooga campaign, he writes in the terse, epic style typical of the grand view histories: "Rosencrans' army was in motion. The Federals were advancing, but as yet they were far off. Chattanooga must be fortified" (71). But immediately Watkins deflates the tension by switching back into the "web-foot" pose and jumping ahead to Grant's occupation of the city: "Well we do remember the hard licks and picks we spent on these same forts, to be occupied afterward by Grant and his whole army, and we on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge looking at them" (71).

This is not to suggest that Watkins is never serious. In fact, Company Ayrch, for all its humor, is a grim book, because the purpose of Watkins's resistance to ideology is to focus on death and the human cost of the war. Throughout the narrative, humorous stories keep referring to death and human deprivation. Over and over Watkins quiets our laughter by reminding us that such and such a soldier died at this battle or that fight. For example, the section "Out a Larking," a light-hearted sketch that tells of sending a good-natured soldier out on a lark hunt (a nineteenth-century version of a snipe hunt), turns mournful when Watkins relates that the victim of the hoax "is up yonder--died on the field of glory and honor. He gave his life, 'twas all he had, for his country. Peace to his memory" (73).

Moments like this can leave the reader uneasy. Typically, when Watkins speaks in these kinds of cliches, he is being sarcastic (as when he describes the Reverend LL.D.), but there is a sense in the narrative that these descriptions of dead soldiers are at once parodies and laurels, revealing both the writer's grief and his anger.

Ever distrustful of patriotic pretensions, Watkins does not spare even himself. Just after the lark hunt, Watkins describes his eagerness to see the hanging of two Yankee spies, declaring, "I wanted to see a Yankee spy hung. I wouldn't mind that. I would like to see him agonize" (74), only to discover to his horror that the spies are two boys, aged fourteen and sixteen. Rarely does Watkins's control of language serve him better than as he describes how, on the gallows,

 [t]he youngest one began to beg and cry and plead most piteously. It
 was horrid. The older one kicked him, and told him to stand up and
 show the Rebels how a Union man could die for his country. Be a man!
 The charges and specifications were read. The props were knocked out
 and the two boys were dangling in the air. I turned off sick at
 heart. (74; my emphasis)

But the danger in Watkins's resistance to meaning is that it might work. By refusing to give meaning to the War, Watkins runs the risk of turning it into sentimentality, much like the speaker in Allan Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead," who sentimentalizes the Confederate dead as "inscrutable infantry," "hurried beyond decision." This very fact may account for Watkins's popularity today, especially among groups of Civil War enthusiasts who focus on and sentimentalize the soldier's experience but avoid the political and social issues involved in the War.

The answer to this problem may lie in another Civil War memoir, one written by hospital volunteer and poet Walt Whitman. In Memoranda During the War (1875), also written in response to the waning of Reconstruction policies, Whitman writes:

 to me the main interest of the War, I found ... in those specimens,
 and in the ambulance, the Hospital, and even the dead on the field.
 To me, the points illustrating the latent Personal Character and
 eligibilities of These States, in the two or three millions of
 American young and middle-aged men, North and South, embodied in the
 armies--and especially the one-third or one-fourth of their number,
 stricken by wounds or disease at some time in the course of the
 contest--were of more significance even than the Political interests
 involved. (4-5)

Like Watkins's, much of Whitman's memoir consists of portraits and vignettes of individual soldiers, many of whom died of wounds or disease. Like Watkins, Whitman felt that the war's real meaning lay in the war dead, and his rejection of political interpretations of the war is not a rejection of the question of race and civil rights but rather a rejection of any attempt to ignore the sacrifice of "The Million Dead" (56). For Whitman, following the lead of Lincoln in "The Gettysburg Address," the War dead sanctified and unified the nation:

 the dead, the dead, the dead--our dead--or South or North, ours all,
 (all, all, all, finally dead to me)--or East or West--Atlantic Coast
 or Mississippi Valley--Some where they crawl'd to die, alone, in
 bushes, low gulleys, or on the sides of hills--(there, in secluded
 spots, their skeletons, bleach'd bones, tufts of hair, buttons,
 fragments of clothing, are occasionally found, yet)--our young men
 ... (the land entire is saturated, perfumed with their impalpable
 ashes' exhalation in Nature's chemistry distill'd and shall be so
 forever, and every grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower
 that grows, and every breath we draw,)--not only Northern dead
 leavening Southern soil--thousands, aye many tens of thousands, of
 Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth. (57)

Sam Watkins would have had very little use for Whitman's natural/mystical vision of Union. For Watkins, Union was an objective fact established by force of arms. But he would have fervently agreed with Whitman about the value of those particular people who died, that the loss of so many particular people must never be forgotten, and that to reduce the war dead to political symbol was to betray both the dead and the living (those who, in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "remain'd and suffer'd"): "The bones of our brave Southern boys lie scattered over our loved South. They fought for their 'country,' and gave their lives freely for that country's cause; and now they who survive sit, like Marius amid the wreck of Carthage, sublime even in ruins" (Watkins 212). (1)

In holding off meaning, in rejecting the kind of political reduction of the War found in the memoirs of Eggleston and Taylor, and the study of grand strategy approach taken by Grant and Sherman, Watkins leaves us only the soldiers to value. In its worst form, as in much contemporary Civil War literature and film, this stance can become an easy avoidance of politics and either a gory obsession with the horrors of the war or a vapid celebration of heroes. Jeff M. Shaara's Gods and Generals(1996) is a good example of this. But in its best form, as found in contemporary works like Donald McCaig's novel Jacob's Ladder (1998) and the historical writings of Drew Gilpin Faust, this attitude calls us to remember the human complexity and cost of the war, and to approach it not with preconceived notions of what the war "means" but with humility toward an event so grand that its totality will always elude our grasp, but which, nonetheless, we must try to comprehend as best we can.

In its historical context, however, seen against the backdrop of the officers' memoirs, the political machinations surrounding the end of Reconstruction, the 1876 election, the Tea-Pot Dome scandal, and the rise of the New South, Company Aytch exhibits a tension between two identities: the Confederate soldier and the middle-class individual, both of which offer possibilities of escape from antebellum hierarchy, but both of which ultimately fall short. As Watkins concludes his narrative, he first imagines that he hears, in an oncoming thunderstorm, "the approach of battle": "Listen! The soldiers are charging now. The flashes and roaring now are blended with the shouts of soldiers and confusion of battle" (214-15). Earlier he had offered that the war dead were "up yonder, and are no doubt waiting and watching for those of us who are left behind." And he imagines "a grand 'reconfederation'" in heaven (212). But this is as close as Watkins gets to imagining another rising of the South. And his yearning for the soldiers is quickly replaced by the present reality of his marriage and home, with Jennie, his wife, "pouring the sunshine of domestic comfort and happiness upon our humble home; making life more worth the living as we toil on up the hill of time together ..." (215). Watkins, however, can't, or refuses to, resolve this tension. Though he mourns the Confederacy, he does not mourn the Old South. His memories here are always memories of war-time solidarity, a hellish utopia of a community of soldiers who valued competence and loyalty to each other over caste and privilege. Of course, the New South would not be such a utopia. While it would value competence and reject static hierarchy, it would not value loyalty and other traditional rural values that both Watkins and Bill Arp celebrated. Most likely Watkins sensed this. That's probably why he ends his memoir not with a vision of either martial or marital bliss but rather with the whole world dissolving into oblivion:

 The tale is told. The world moves on, the sun shines as brightly as
 before, the flowers bloom as beautifully, the birds sing their
 carols as sweetly, ... the blue dome of the sky sparkles with the
 trembling stars that twinkle and shine and make night beautiful, and
 the scene melts and gradually disappears forever. (215)

Works Cited

Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American History. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.

Cozzens, Peter and Robert I. Giraldi. The New Annals of the Civil War. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2004.

Early, Jubal Anderson. A Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence, in the Confederate States of America : Containing an Account of the Operations of his Commands in the Years 1864 and 1865. 1866. Columbia SC: U of South Carolina P, 2001.

Eggleston, George Cary. A Rebel's Recollections. 1874. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996.

Fletcher, William A. Rebel Private: Front and Rear: Memoirs of a Confederate Soldier. 1908. New York: Meridian, 1995.

Foster, Gaines M. Introduction. Eggleston 7-18.

Freeman, Douglas Southall. Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command 1942-1944. Ed. Stephen W. Sears. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Garrett, George. "On Mary Johnston's The Long Roll." Classics of Civil War Fiction. Ed. David Madden and Peggy Bach. Jackson: U P of Mississippi. 1991. 83-95.

Inge, M. Thomas. Introduction. Watkins vii-xix.

Lewis, Clay. "Confederate Testimony." The Sewanee Review 108 (2000): 271-83.

McPherson, James M. What They Fought For, 1861-1865. New York: Anchor, 1995.

Parker, David B. Alias Bill Arp: Charles Henry Smith and the South's "Goodly Heritage." Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991.

Sherman, William Tecumseh. Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman. 1875. New York: Library of America, 1990.

Smith, Charles Henry. Bill Arp, So Called: A Side Show of the Southern Side of the War. New York: Metropolitan Record Office, 1866.

--. Bill Arp's Peace Papers. New York: G.W. Carleton, 1873.

Taylor, Richard. Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War. 1877. Ed. Richard B. Harwell. New York: Longmans, Green, 1955.

Tebble, John William. A History of Book Publishing in the United States, Volume II: The Expansion of an Industry, 1865-1919. New York: Bowker, 1975.

Twain, Mark. "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed." Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays: 1852-1890. New York: Library of America, 1992. 863-882.

Watkins, Sam. Company Aytch: Or, a Side Show of the Big Show. 1882. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. New York: Plume, 1999.

Whitman, Walt. Memoranda During the War. 1875. Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1993.

Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. New York: Oxford UP, 1962.

ANDREW C. HIGGINS

Louisiana Tech University

(1) The reference in the last sentence is to a painting of Caius Marius, a Roman general who reformed the army by opening it to the proletarii--the landless men. Specifically, the quotation probably refers to the painting "Caius Marius Amid the Ruins of Carthage" by American painter John Vanderlyn (1807). Presumably, the survivors of the Civil War, like Marius, are noble champions of the people, even in defeat.