n 1882, Walt Whitman, the American poet of democracy and nearly everything else in the human spirit, worried that his book Specimen Days, compiled from jottings, diaries, and memorandums written during and after the Civil War, would be read as nothing but a “batch of convulsively written reminiscences.” But he decided to publish it anyway. The writings were “but parts of the actual distraction, heat, smoke and excitement of those times,” Whitman admitted. “The war itself, with the temper of society preceding it, can indeed be best described by that very word convulsiveness.”
The American Civil War was a tragedy of cataclysmic proportions. Some 750,000 combatants and other military personnel perished on the battlefield and from disease. Great political, constitutional, and economic transformations followed from the results of the struggle. The American experiment died but was then reborn. The republic tore itself asunder over slavery and conflicting views of the federal Union. After unimaginable slaughter, the United States experienced a second founding of its polity and its constitution. Nearly everything had changed. The Civil War, wrote the southern poet and essayist Robert Penn Warren in 1961, is the country’s “felt history,” the past “lived in the national imagination.”
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