“To Hold Time and Place Together”: The Power of Material Objects in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Civil War Stories

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the editors of this special issue, Robin L. Cadwallader and Alicia Mischa Renfroe, for their insightful commentary and helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this paper

Notes

¹ For more details on Davis’s life and work during the Civil War, see Harris, chapters three and four.

² For more on the cultural and personal importance of material objects during the Civil War, see Cashin.

³ See, for instance, De Gruccio and Cashin, who both also include a discussion of Civil War relics and souvenirs fashioned from human remains. For a detailed compilation of references to such incidents in letters, newspaper articles, and other written documents from the war, see Harrison.

⁴ Originally circulated in periodicals, the poem was subsequently published by J. C. Schreiner & Son in 1864 as well as in South Songs: From the Lays of Later Days in 1866 (de Leon). Its stanzas were then also set to music by John H. Hewitt, and it was frequently performed as a song.

⁵ Interestingly, Davis returns to the theme of taking locks of hair from the deceased in a later story, “Anne” (1889), albeit in a different context. At one point, the protagonist of the story, Anne Palmer, says to her daughter Susy, “I do not like to see pressed leaves and grasses about in vases. It is like making ornaments of hair cut from a dead body. When summer is dead, let it die” (332). While taking hair from the dead is mentioned here as a simile rather than a literal act and the context is one of remembrance rather than violence, the deed still holds negative connotations, making the reader think back to the unsavory war trophies and souvenirs that Davis portrays in her Civil War fiction. I am grateful to Alicia Mischa Renfroe for directing my attention to this story.

⁶ It should be noted that such propaganda and distortions of behavior by soldiers or civilians were common on both sides during the war, but the proliferation of northern print culture and the dwindling resources of southern publishers meant that far fewer images could circulate in southern periodicals. In Ruin Nation, however, Nelson shows that southerners cast northern soldiers in the roles of brutes and savages who raided and destroyed southern homes (99).

⁷ Although helmets were not employed as battle gear in the Civil War, they were part of the decorations used at an 1862 dinner held at the Lincoln White House, which caused quite a stir for its blatant display of excess. In this case, “little cupids held a war helmet whose plumes were of spun sugar” (Epstein 361). The juxtaposition of cupids and the war helmet is a statement in itself of the incongruities of war. The anachronistic visual reference to helmets during the Civil War also creates emotional distance from the reality of war and an emphasis on aesthetic qualities rather than realistic portrayals of the Civil War.

⁸ Fears of body parts being used as war trophies were also stoked by rumors and sensationalized news coverage during the war. Harper’s Weekly, for instance, noted in its 7 February 1863 issue, in a column titled “Southern Chivalry,” that “[b]odies were pried out of their graves, and Mrs. Pierce Butler, who lives near the place, said that she had seen the rebels boiling portions of the bodies of our dead in order to obtain their bones as relics.”

⁹ As Harris shows, Davis not only read but enjoyed Stowe’s serialized “Chimney Corner” writings in the Atlantic (97).

¹⁰ For more on the perceived weakness of words to capture the reality and experience of the Civil War, see De Gruccio (16–17).

¹¹ The word “snuggery” has an interesting parallel in Davis’s own life. In January 1863, she referred to the rooms that she and her husband lived in as newlyweds as her “cozery.” They had moved into her sister-in-law Carrie’s house in Philadelphia because they could not yet afford to rent or buy a house of their own. According to Harris, “What Rebecca called her ‘cozery’ in Carrie’s three-story home constituted a bedroom and two [additional] rooms” (73).

¹² For further discussion on Civil War material culture and material objects in the Civil War writings of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, see Steinroetter.

¹³ Note, too, that Davis herself seemed to have had a fondness for rooms decorated with leaves and plants. According to Harris, before the Davises moved into the first house of their own, her sister-in-law “Carrie and her children had made every effort to prepare the [Davises’] room in ways they knew would cheer Rebecca when she first saw it, with trimmings of wood-leaves and ferns” (88).

¹⁴ Nelson examines “the ways that both southerners and northerners used architectural ruins to contemplate the ‘savage’ behavior of humans and the invasions of domestic privacy during wartime” and “considers how and why soldiers and civilians smashed things to pieces and then examines how they understood the debris” (3, 9).

¹⁵ For more details regarding this incident, see Harris (94–95).

¹⁶ Rather than the happy reunion between Ellen and Joe in the Peterson’s version, the ending of “Ellen” that Davis wrote for the Atlantic is in fact closer to the death notice of the real-life Ellen Carroll as published in the Wheeling Daily Register almost a full year later in June 1866 under the heading “Suicide of a Woman by Drowning.” According to this account, Ellen came from Canada, got drunk, and (after several thwarted attempts) drowned herself in the Ohio River, leaving her basket on the shore. I am grateful to Robin L. Cadwallader for bringing this source to my attention.