Haunted by the Civil War : Cultural Testimony in the Nineteenth-Century United States

How the legacy of the Civil War-as presented by writers, poets, and artists of the time-has shaped American visions of democracyIn Haunted by the Civil War, Shirley Samuels explores the work of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others to investigate the long cultural shadow of America’s cataclysmic sundering.Juxtaposing these texts with images-ranging from paintings by Winslow Homer to newspaper and magazine illustrations of political controversies-Samuels argues that the Civil War still haunts our attitudes toward democracy.The recent toppling of Confederate monuments, the continuing protests over racial and sexual discrimination, immigration, and Indigenous land rights: each of these forms part of the war’s legacy. Examining the fraught deliberations about an ideal American democracy in the early republic, Samuels turns to the language of sensation in the poetry of Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman alongside Lincoln’s rel