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Chapter 2

The “Ghastly Harvest”

The pastoral tradition is well suited to explore war’s environmental devastation, but only if poets strain the tradition to accommodate the sorts of scenarios it consistently denies; otherwise, the poems themselves offer a form of denial. Imagery of harvest time was ubiquitous in Civil War poetry. Autumnal poetic traditions offered a vocabulary with which to compare mass death in wartime—the “ghastly harvest”—with natural cycles signifying perpetual renewal.¹ This chapter explores the ways that writers adapt the conventions of autumn poetry to the conditions of war. Claiming “that the pastoral and picturesque aesthetics were important in the constitution of nationalist ideology in the antebellum period,” Timothy Sweet stresses the ways that Walt Whitman and others “mobilize the idealized representation of the Union encoded in these aesthetics to heal the wounds of war and to envision the restoration of the nation” at the cost of acknowledging the physical reality of mass death.² Interpretations of Emily Dickinson’s “The name – of it – is ‘Autumn’ – ” offer a counterpoint to this formulation. Tyler Hoffman, David Cody, Faith Barrett, and others have read the poem as a critique of war, one that so strongly associates the red leaves of autumn with the bloodshed of Antietam (whose name echoes the season) that it is impossible to imagine the poem as an innocent meditation on New England fall: the tenor overrides the vehicle.³ But as is often the case with her poetry, Dickinson’s “The name – of it – is ‘Autumn’ – ” is understood as an exception to a more general practice. According to Barrett, for example, “what separates Dickinson’s poem from its popular counterparts … is Dickinson’s refusal to read battlefield bloodshed as a cycle of redemptive suffering for the nation that is endorsed by God.”⁴ This chapter demonstrates that the evocation of the pastoral in poems of the period doesn’t necessarily support national ideology, nor must it serve as a means of creating escapist fantasies that evade the acknowledgement of war’s human or environmental tolls. On the other hand, the poems examined in this chapter do not uniformly critique war’s carnage. Instead, I identify a broad range of ways this aesthetic is used. Through figures of autumn, some poets affirm the righteousness of the Northern cause, while others raise questions about nature’s regenerative powers, the possibility of human extinction, God’s existence, and whether poetry has lost its relevance in the face of total destruction. The pastoral tradition offers not a set ideological viewpoint, but a vocabulary with which to address the complex issues accompanying environmental and human devastation, issues that necessarily evoke mixed, confused, and unsettled responses that extend beyond political binaries. Writers, ranging from popular newspaper poets to Dickinson and Whitman, draw upon seasonal tropes to grapple with the costs of total war, offering meditations on wartime violence as well as the capacities of poetic language to accommodate it. The first part of the chapter traces the prominence of the figure of the ghastly harvest in response to the Battle of Antietam, which epitomizes a more widespread treatment of environmental devastation and untimely death via autumnal figures. The second section shows the way some poets explicitly acknowledge and contemplate the effect war has had on these autumnal figures; these writers are as interested in the aesthetics of violence as in articulating their response to unfolding events.

Antietam’s Autumn

The Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862), in which Union soldiers turned Confederate troops back from Maryland, across the Potomac River into Virginia, resulted in the largest casualty count of the war for a single day: twenty-three thousand dead and wounded.⁵ The engagement was also, according to a number of reports, the most visually stunning. For George Smalley, a reporter for the New York Tribune, the battle was a “magnificent, unequalled scene”; no one “could be insensible of its grandeur.”⁶ Edwin Forbes, a sketch artist for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, recalled that “the Battle of Antietam was probably the most picturesque battle of the war, as it took place on a corn field and could be fully viewed from any point north of Antietam Creek, where our reserve batteries were posted. The engagement with the spectacle was not surpassed during the whole war, as the hills were black with spectators.”⁷ Noncombatants watched the spectacle from a position close enough to feel awe but far enough away to totalize and aestheticize the battlefield; newspaper readers at home were encouraged to assume a similar perspective through sketches, such as Alexander Waud’s, of unfolding events (fig. 7).

The coverage was laden with a central irony that was immediately noted by the reporters and crystallized in the poetry that emerged after the battle. Many of the dead had fallen in a field ready for harvest, bloodying and destroying the corn. The substitution of young men killed in their prime for the corn that would normally nourish their growth gave rise to the image of the “ghastly harvest.” Smalley’s report coins the term and offers the first delineation of the figure: “The field and its ghastly harvest which the reaper had gathered in those fatal hours remained finally with us. Four times it had been lost and won. The dead are strewn so thickly that as you ride over it you cannot guide your horse’s steps too carefully. Pale and bloody faces are everywhere upturned. They are sad and terrible, but there is nothing which makes one’s heart beat so quickly as the imploring look of sorely wounded men who beckon wearily for help which you cannot stay to give.”⁸ Shifting to the present tense and zooming in to a far more intimate frame than the panoramic descriptions of the battlefield at a distance, Smalley transmits his immediate, downward gaze to readers, encouraging them to associate reading the page with looking upon the faces of the dead.⁹ His description tightly links the materiality of the dead to the materiality of the page that contains his inscription. In doing so he brings the metaphor of the ghastly harvest before the reader in vivid, stark detail.

General Joseph Hooker’s description provides the details informing Smalley’s concise figuration, bringing out the doubled image of harvest: “In the time that I am writing every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few moments before. It was never my fortune to witness a more bloody, dismal battle field.”¹⁰ Heavy fighting neatly cut the corn, and the men fell just as “precisely,” as if both had been carefully mown. The men’s death in harvest time substituted bodies for grain, killing for sustenance. The figuration is repeated in news reports, memoirs, and poems about the battle with remarkable regularity. Overdetermined by the facts on the ground as they were first reported, the figure of the ghastly harvest was indelibly inked in the public imagination in a way that mirrored the shock of participants and onlookers. A sketch by F. Schell from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on October 8, 1862, conveys a sense of linearity of the scene that General Hooker evokes: the battle trenches, the fallen lines of the dead, and the long graves being dug to accommodate them (fig. 8). One row, stretching to the horizon, suggests the seemingly limitless number of dead, which in turn recalls the rows of corn no longer standing. On the right, spectators, surrogates for the viewers at home, and perhaps representatives of the farmers of the region, watch the scene closely; they summon a recent, peaceful past that lent itself more to unreconstructed—or deconstructed—pastoral poetry. The image suggests military order as well as carnage, foregrounding the Union’s control over the scene.

Figure 7. “The Battle of Antietam, fought September 17, 1862—General Mansfield’s Corps in position in the centre—Sketched by Mr. A. W. Waud,” Harper’s Weekly, October 11, 1862, 648–649. Courtesy of HarpWeek.

Another illustration in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper also shows the way that viewers at home are encouraged to take on the position of onlookers at the scene, exemplifying the kind of mediated immediacy that characterized the experience of reading Civil War periodicals (fig. 9). Visually staging the juxtaposition between an antebellum agrarian ideal and the ghastly harvest of war, the sketch depicts farmers—identified in the title—including a woman and a child, looking at the men’s bodies piled where crops would normally be growing. The background, where a pair of men carry away the dead and wounded and piles of bodies fade away into shapeless forms, is lightly sketched, as if the horror of the immediate scene has riveted the farmers’ attention and prevented them from seeing anything beyond the pile of dead in front of them. Readers are encouraged to compare the gruesome scene with the indications of nature’s continued presence: the line of birds draw the eye to the horizon and toward the trees in the distance that remain unharmed.

The newspaper poems about Antietam draw on such visual depictions, expressing verbally the emotions that the images evoke, making use of literary tropes and traditions in attempts to translate eyewitness reportage into intelligible verbal patterns. One of the most extreme responses to the event, an unsigned ballad entitled “After the Battle of Antietam,” published in the July 4, 1863, issue of Harper’s Weekly, elaborates on the image of a cornfield overlaid with a more perverse harvest:

The harvest-moon o’er the battle-plain

Shines dim in the filmy eyes of the dead,

And the yellow wealth of the later grain,

Ground by the millstones of death and pain,

And wet with the life-blood of the slain,

Is kneaded to horrible bread.¹¹

Figure 8. “Battle of Antietam—The 130th Pennsylvania regiment of volunteers burying the Rebel dead Friday, Sept. 19…From a Sketch by our Special Artist, Mr. F. H. Schell,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, October 18, 1862, 52. Courtesy of HarpWeek.

Figure 9. “Maryland and Pennsylvania farmers visiting the battle-field of Antietam while the national troops were burying the dead and carrying off the wounded, Friday, Sept. 19. From a sketch by our special artist Mr. H. F. Schell,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, October 18, 1862, 49. The juxtaposition of the farmers with the devastation evokes the destruction of the pastoral lamented in many of the poems of the period. Courtesy of HarpWeek.