If your definition of literature includes speeches and
historical documents, Lincoln's Inagural Address together with the Gettysburg Address
and the Emancipation Proclamation are certainly worth looking at. In these documents,
Lincoln illustrates the irreconciliable arguments on slavery that have led to the
conflict between the Union and the South. You can also look at Frederick Douglass's "An
American Apocalypse" (1861) to see that the Union was not so easily persuaded that the
abolishment of slavery should be one of the main points of their agenda and preferred to
see the conflict as an effort to preserve the unity of the nation. Common people such as
soldiers and civilians also wrote about the trauma of the civil war in journals and
memoirs. The second links takes you to a comprehensive list of these contributions and
primary sources.
As with other traumatic historical events,
the American civil war has continued to attract the attention of writers well beyond its
conclusion. In The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Stephen Crane used
the memoirs of civil war soldiers, filtered through the war stories by Russian writer
Tolstoy, to give a naturalist reconstruction of the civil war. To this naturalist
foundation, Crane also added psychological depth and symbolic overtones. The war is
potrayed in all its horror and the narratives emphasizes the alienation and loneliness
of soldiers as well as the lack of free will and personal
choice.
For a Southern perspective on the civil war, you
could look at Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman (1905), which
served as the basis of D. W. Griffith's film Birth of a Nation.
Making African Americans little more than caricatures, the novel exemplifies
the appeal for white supremacy that characterized the post-reconstruction era. Margaret
Mitchell's bestseller Gone with the Wind (1936) also offers a
Southern perspective on the war together with a focus on the gender and class structure
of Southern society and how this organization is affected by the
conflict.
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