Howells and Higginson: hitherto unbroken

William Dean Howells was just 30 years old when he became editor of The Atlantic Monthly and, immediately upon taking the role, found the pressures of the role at the distinguished magazine. For one, he often received contributions from friends and had the difficult task of deciding their merit as objectively as possible. Further, Howells was a westerner (from Ohio) who suddenly found himself among the New England literary elite. Five years into his editorship, he was still fighting for respect from some.

Such was the case with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had been a regular contributor for years. When Howells hesitated on accepting one of his submissions, Higginson fired back in an angry letter dated September 30, 1871:

I would not on any account have you print anything of mine which you thought "well enough," so I have arranged for it elsewhere — with a regret you can hardly understand, as you have not, like me, written for but one literary magazine for thirteen years & felt identified with it.

Higginson also noted he had already "foolishly" withdrawn his payment for the article before it was even accepted, "relying on an experience hitherto unbroken." He went on: "I shall not make such a mistake again, & shall in the future count on merely business relation with the Atlantic." Further, he threatened, he would happily offer his writings elsewhere.

*Information from this post comes from William Dean Howells: The Development of a Novelist (1959) by George N. Bennett.

Birth of James Edwin Campbell

James Edwin Campbell was born in Pomeroy, Ohio on September 28, 1867. In his adult years, he went back and forth between journalist and educator, moving to West Virginia and Illinois at different times to pursue work. For a short period in the 1890s, he was the founding president of the West Virginia Colored Institute (now the historically black West Virginia State University).

He met fellow Ohioan poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in Chicago in 1893 and, like Dunbar, published two types of poems: dialect and more traditional poetry. His first book of poems, Driftings and Gleanings, was published in 1887 and used only standard English. His second collection, Echoes from the Cabin and Elsewhere in 1895, gained attention from critics, who praised the poems for their realistic depiction of the speech and spirit of African Americans. That book included many poems using "Gullah" (a dialect known in the coastal area of South Carolina and Georgia). Though comparison with Dunbar is inevitable, some declare Campbell the more authentic dialect poet.

His poem "The Mobile-Buck" was meant to capture "the shuffling, jerky rhythm of the famous negro dance," Campbell wrote. As the poet described, dancers "buck" against each other in a "roustabout" shuffle. Each dancer attempts to outdo the other while "their rude but picturesque audience" cheers and laughs:

   O, come erlong, come erlong,
      Wut's de use er hol'in back;
   O' hit it strong, er hit it strong,
      Mek de ol' flo' ben' an' crack.
O, hoop tee doo, uh, hoop tee doo!
Dat's de way ter knock it froo.
               Right erlong, right erlong,
            Slide de lef' foot right erlong.
               Hoop te doo, O hoop tee doo,
            See, my lub, I dawnce ter you.
                  Ho, boy! Ho, boy!
            Well done, meh lady!

   O, slide erlong, slide erlong—
      Fas'ah wid dat pattin', Sam!
   Dar's music in dis lef' heel's song,
      Mis'ah right foot, doan' you sham!
O, hoop tee doo, oh, hoop tee doo!
Straight erlong I dawnce ter you.
               Slide erlong, slide erlong,
            Mek dat right foot hit it strong.
               Hoop tee do, O, hoop tee doo,
            See, my lub, I dawnce ter you.
               Ho, boy! Ho, boy!
            Well done, meh lady!

Birth of Strother, "pencil holder"

David Hunter Strother was born on September 26, 1816 in Martinsburg, Virginia (now part of West Virginia), though he later became known by the pseudonym Porte Crayon (French for "pencil holder"). After a brief attempt at study at Jefferson Academy in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, he turned his attention to art and engraving in Philadelphia. His work as an artist for Harper's was renowned throughout the country; it was said that he was the most famous graphic artist before the beginning of the Civil War.

In the years leading up to the war, Strother (who witnessed the trial of John Brown, and considered it proof of the "majesty of the law") expressed a distrust for the fanaticism of some abolitionists in the North, though he was also skeptical of "fire-eating" Southerners promoting secession. Even so, Strother sided with the North during the war and became a topographer for the Union Army. In his private diary, however, he often criticized decisions made by President Abraham Lincoln. He later joined a cavalry and was eventually promoted to brevet brigadier general. His Union loyalty strained his relationship with most of his extended family, all of whom were steadfastly in support of the Confederacy. Years after the war, he served in the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes (as did poet James Russell Lowell).

Strother/Crayon created engravings mostly for magazines, but he also illustrated full-length books (including his own, The Adventures of Porte Crayon and His Cousins, in 1871). Much of his work, both in his art and in his writing, focuses on geography, travel, or landscapes. Over 800 published illustrations are credited to him before his death in 1888.

*I owe some of this information to Jonathan M. Berkey, whose essay on Strother is included in Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South (2004, edited by John C. Inscoe and Robert C. Kenzer)

Birth of Wilde: like the summer rose

Richard Henry Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland on September 24, 1789, though he moved to the United States when he was a boy. He grew up in Baltimore and was frequently ill throughout his childhood — a fact which, his earliest biographers suggested, drove him to books. At age 11, he was pulled from school to work in a store. After his father's death, Wilde's mother relocated the family to Augusta, Georgia. His mother further inspired his interest in reading. Trying to overcome his family's poverty, he studied for the bar and became a lawyer. By 1814, he was elected to Congress. Eventually, he moved to New Orleans, where he died in 1847, just short of his 58th birthday.

Throughout it all, he dabbled in his own writings and published translations of or articles on Old World authors like Tasso and Dante. Among his own original works is the poem "Stanzas," also known by its first line, "My Life is Like the Summer Rose":

My life is like the summer rose
    That opens to the morning sky,
But ere the shades of evening close,
    Is scatter'd on the ground — to die!
    Yet on the rose's humble bed
The sweetest dews of night are shed,
As if she wept the waste to see—
But none shall weep a tear for me!

My life is like the autumn life
    That trembles in the moon's pale ray,
Its hold is frail — its date is brief,
    Restless — and soon to pass away!
Yet, ere that leaf shall fall and fade,
The parent tree will mourn its shade,
The winds bewail the leafless tree,
But none shall breathe a sigh for me!

My life is like the prints, which feet
    Have left on Tampa's desert strand;
Soon as the rising tide shall beat,
    All trace will vanish from the sand;
Yet, as if grieving to efface
All vestige of the human race,
On that lone shore loud moans the sea,
But, none, alas! shall mourn for me!

Boker: A living force, a shaping will

September 1862 turned out to be an important month in the American Civil War. After a record-breakingly bloody day at Antietam, the Union Army was able to emerge victorious. Days after the battle, on September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. That same day, Republican and Union supporter George Henry Boker wrote his poem "The Flag" (one of several poems chronicling the progress of the war):

Spirits of patriots, hail in heaven again
   The flag for which ye fought and died,
Now that its field, washed clear of every stain,
   Floats out in honest pride!

Free blood flows through its scarlet veins once more,
   And brighter shine its silver bars;
A deeper blue God's ether never wore
   Amongst the golden stars.

See how our earthly constellation gleams;
   And backward, flash for flash, returns
Its heavenly sisters their immortal beams
   With light that fires and burns, —

That burns because a moving soul is there,
   A living force, a shaping will,
Whose law the fate-forecasting powers of air
   Acknowledge and fulfil.

At length the day, by prophets seen of old,
   Flames on the crimsoned battle-blade;
Henceforth, O flag, no mortal bought and sold,
   Shall crouch beneath thy shade.

That shame has vanished in the darkened past,
   With all the wild chaotic wrongs
That held the struggling centuries shackled fast
   With fear's accursed thongs.

Therefore, O patriot fathers, in your eyes
   I brandish thus our banner pure:
Watch o'er us, bless us, from your peaceful skies,
   And make the issue sure!

The poem seems to reflect both an acknowledgment of the bloodshed at Antietam and the hopeful promise of freeing enslaved people. Boker invokes the Founding Fathers ("O patriot fathers") using the symbolism of the flag and implies that the contemporary generation had finished the charge of the previous one to expand freedom ("Henceforth, O flag, no mortal bought and sold"). Or, perhaps, he implies that those Founding Fathers had guided them in fulfilling that challenge.

Birth of Rebecca Harrington Smith

Born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh) as Rebecca Harrington Smith on September 20, 1831, she often published under the name Kate Harrington. Her life and career brought her to Ohio and Kentucky before settling in Iowa. There, she published her most well-known book, a novel titled Emma Bartlett (1856), which one critic called "the first [book] of a purely literary character" published in Iowa.

Subtitled "Prejudice and Fanaticism," the book was meant as a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin published a few years earlier. Credited "by an American Lady" and copyrighted to R. H. Smith, the book was dedicated to "the True Upholders of the Constitution." Smith argued in her preface that "there is neither reason, religion nor justice in crushing the white man, in order to liberate the blacks" from a situation that could not have been prevented.  In nearly 500 pages, Smith complicates the "prejudice" against blacks as well as the "fanaticism" of abolitionists. In one scene, for example, the title character Emma Bartlett asks her father what he thinks of slavery:

"It would take more time than I can spare, to-night, to tell you, dear. I have always looked upon it as a great necessary evil; one that cannot be swept from our land at once, and never will, while compulsory means are resorted to. I have seen too much of Southern life to believe my brethren there will be forced to submit."

One scene features a character denying that there were many cruel slaveholders like Stowe's character Simon Legree ("But are such individuals confined to the South?"). Smith intended the work to expose the hypocrisy of Know-Nothingism (an anti-intellectual, radically patriotic group which expressed a stance against foreigners and certain religious groups) and abolitionism. Smith lived until 1917. Throughout her long life, she published several other books, collections of short stories and poems, and even textbooks.

Fell asleep, September 18, 1874

The gravestone of a woman named Mary Pond in Dresden, Germany, reads "Fell asleep, September 18, 1874." This simple sentiment inspired a poem by Samuel Francis Smith, who remains best remembered for his poem "My Country 'Tis of Thee." It was about a year after her death that Smith, a Baptist minister, read those words and wrote, "Mary Pond":

Yes, "fell asleep," — but sleep implies two wakings
One in the weary past, one, yet to be;
One in this life of labor and heart-breakings,
One in the bliss of immortality.

Yes, "fell asleep," — tired watch no longer keeping,
With ever restless hands and busy brain;
All sorrow past, — no grief, no sigh, no weeping,
Like a sweet summer evening, after rain.

Yes, "fell asleep," — no more with dim surmising,
Questioning what may be the life to come;
She feels, in the freed spirit's glad uprising,
Joy, peace, rest, grandeur, glory, heaven, home.

Yes, "fell asleep," — we watch for her low breathing,
Like fragrant night-winds floating gently by;
Like noiseless clouds of incense, upward wreathing,
Her spirit, silent, points us to the sky.

Yes, "fell asleep," — the touch of those dear fingers
Created life and beauty where it fell;
Around her cherished works her spirit lingers,
Like strains of music o'er the quivering shell.

Yes, "fell asleep," — so early quenched life's fever,
So brilliant promise clouded o'er so soon;
Faith, be thou strong; God's purpose faileth never;
Earth had the radiant morning; heaven, the noon.

Man gathers heaps of ore, a grasping miner,
Toiling and burdened through the scorching day,
But sleeps at last; and God, the great Refiner,
Saves all the gold, and melts the dross away.

Yes, " fell asleep," —just as the curious kernel
Of flower-life hides within the rigid grain;
But, with the. warm breath of the season vernal,
It waves luxuriant o'er the fields again.

Yes, "fell asleep," — resting in God's safe keeping.
So hides the worm within his narrow cell,
But bursts his chrysalis, and, heavenward leaping,
Shining, proclaims that God does all things well.

Yes, "fell asleep," — O rest divine, immortal!
Knowing nor pain, nor grief, nor death, nor sin;
Rest that conveys the soul to heaven's high portal,
And bids the weary wanderer enter in.

Yes, "fell asleep," — O mystery past our knowing!
Beyond thick clouds we cannot see the sun;
But patient, trustingly, we wait Heaven's showing,
'Tis God's own hand, — thy will, O Lord, be done.

Attention! it's his way

The Baltimore-born John Williamson Palmer had lived in California, Hawaii, and even China before becoming a travel writer and journalist in New York. He was working for the New York Times when the Civil War broke out. He eventually signed on as a soldier for the Confederacy. His poem, "Stonewall Jackson's Way," was completed on September 17, 1862 as he overheard the sounds from the bloody Battle of Antietam:

Come, stack arms, men! Pile on the rails,
   Stir up the camp-fire bright;
No matter if the canteen fails,
   We'll make a roaring night.
Here Shenandoah brawls along,
There burly Blue Ridge echoes strong,
To swell the brigade's rousing song
   Of "Stonewall Jackson's Say."

We see him now, — the old slouched hat
   Cocked o'er his eye askew;
The shrewd, dry smile, the speech so pat,
   So calm, so blunt, so true.
The "Blue-Light Elder" knows 'em well;
Says he, "That's Banks, — he's fond of shell;
Lord save his soul! we'll give him" — well,
   That's "Stonewall Jackson's way."

Silence! ground arms! kneel all! caps off!
   Old Blue-Light's going to pray.
Strangle the fool that dares to scoff!
   Attention! it's his way.
Appealing from his native sod,
In forma pauperis to God,—
"Lay bare Thine arm; stretch forth Thy rod!
   Amen!" That's "Stonewall's way."

He's in the saddle now. Fall in!
   Steady! the whole brigade!
Hill's at the ford cut off — we'll win
   His way out, ball and blade!
What matter if our shoes are worn?
What matter if our feet are torn?
"Quick-step! we're with him before morn!"
   That's "Stonewall Jackson's way."

The sun's bright lances rout the mists
   Of morning, and, by George!
Here's Longstreet struggling in the lists,
   Hemmed in an ugly gorge.
Pope and his Yankees, whipped before,
"Bay'nets and grape!" hear Stonewall roar;
"Charge, Stuart! Pay off Ashby's score!"
   In "Stonewall Jackson's way."

Ah! Maiden, wait and watch and yearn
   For news of Stonewall's band!
Ah! Widow, read, with eyes that burn,
   That ring upon thy hand.
Ah! Wife, sew on, pray on, hope on;
Thy life shall not be all forlorn;
The foe had better ne'er been born
   That gets in "Stonewall's way."

The origins of the poem are under some dispute. Upon its publication, it was credited not to Palmer but as a note found in the coat of a dead and unidentified Confederate soldier. The poet himself did not settle the question until 1891.

Birth of Whitney: part of the infinite plan

Adeline D. T. Whitney was born in Boston on September 15, 1824. She eventually settled in Milton, Massachusetts, and lived in that town for over sixty years. Though she wrote primarily for children, even critics and editors of the day admitted that adults were reading her work just as much. Perhaps her most obvious attempt at connecting both audience demographics was in one of her earliest books, the 1857 collection Mother Goose for Grown-Ups.

In the book, she offers her take on a few time-honored favorites as well as more obscure tales. Her version of Humpty Dumpty expands on the original four-line poem by generalizing a moral:

Full many a project that never was hatched
Falls down, and gets shattered beyond being patched;
And luckily, too! for if all came to chickens,
The things without feathers might go to the dickens...

Suppose every aspirant writing a book
Contrived to get published, by hook or by crook;
Geologists then of a later creation
Would be startled, I fancy, to find a formation
Proving how the poor world did most wofully sink
Beneath mountains of paper, and oceans of ink!

Indeed, she says, not everything can reach its full potential and dreams can be shattered as easily as eggs. But, Whitney surmises, good can come of those incidents as well. For example, women who do not marry (apparently considered an ultimate goal in achieving perfection) can be come "the good aunts" who knit stockings for their nieces and nephews, or perhaps nurses to sing and rock the young babies. Of course, even unmarried spinsters play their roles "to look after orphans, and primary schools." She concludes:

No! Failure's a part of the infinite plan;
Who finds that he can't, must give way to who can;
And as one and another drops out of the race,
Each stumbles at last to his suitable place.

So the great scheme works on, — though, like eggs from the wall,
Little designs to such ruin may fall,
That not all the world's might, of its horses or men,
Could set their crushed hopes at the summit again.

Utterly disgusted with authorship

In 1822, James Gates Percival admitted, "I am utterly disgusted with authorship." He vowed never to write another line of poetry and instead began teaching chemistry and practicing as an occasional medical doctor. Nevertheless, he agreed to present a poem for the Phi Beta Kappa Society at his alma mater Yale College that fall. Soon, he felt he had made a mistake and instead presented an oration — not a poem.

But, three years later, Percival announced to a friend, "I have been appointed to deliver a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa at New Haven, and am resolved to appear there." Their meeting that year was on September 13, 1825. For it, he prepared a long poem which he titled "The Mind." The poem begins with his statement of purpose:

Of Mind, and its mysterious agencies,
And most of all, its high creative Power,
In fashioning the elements of things
To loftier images, than have on earth
Or in the sky their home — that come to us
In the still visitation of a dream,
Or rise in light before us when we muse;
Or at the bidding of the mightier take
Fixed residence in fitly sounding verse,
Or on the glowing canvass, or in shapes
Hewn from the living rock: — of these, and all
That wake us in our better thoughts, and lead
The spirit to the enduring and sublime,
It is my purpose now to hold awhile
Seemly discourse, and with befitting words
Cloth the conceptions, I have sought to frame.

The poem is a strange, rambling, unrhymed, and meterless mesh of abstract thoughts. In a sense, "The Mind" was more like another oration than a poem. One account says he stopped reading halfway through and sat down, declining to finish. Another says he asked not to read it at the ceremony and, when pressed, rushed through it so quickly that his reading was referred to as a "laughable one." Perhaps Percival's reticence to present a poem in 1822 was justified; his 1825 poem went without a publisher for months. Instead, a group of friends paid him for his manuscript and had it printed. Though they offered it to bookstores, very few copies were sold.

After this disastrous period of authorship attempts in the 1820s, Percival turned to something more practical and less imaginative: assisting Noah Webster in the creation of a dictionary of the English language.

Birth of Warner: To own a bit of ground

Born in Plainfield, Massachusetts on September 12, 1829, Charles Dudley Warner's early life was marked by instability. His father died when the boy was only 5 years old (but not before inspiring in him a love of books) and he was taken in by a guardian until 1842. That year, he was retrieved by his mother and relocated to Cazenovia, New York. While a student at Hamilton College, Warner began contributing articles to The Knickerbocker and other journals.

After college, he found himself in Missouri, then Pennsylvania, then Illinois as he attempted to find a career suited to his nature. He finally took an editorial position in Connecticut just as the Civil War was beginning. Finally settled, he worked in that role until his death in 1900. On the side, he had published eleven essay collections, four novels (one in collaboration with his friend Mark Twain), eight travel books, and even a couple biographies.

He first drew national attention in 1870-1871 with his book My Summer in a Garden (published with an introduction by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, it includes several chapters on Calvin, the cat owned by Harriet Beecher Stowe). The book is presented as a weekly chronicle of a summer spent tending a garden. Throughout, Warner offers a wry wit full of tongue-in-cheek humor.

"Love of dirt is among the earliest of passions," he begins in his preliminary chapter, "as it is the latest." Playing in the dirt is, he says, a basic instinct:

So long as we are dirty, we are pure. Fondness for the ground comes back to a man after he has run the round of pleasure and business, eaten dirt, and sown wild-oats, drifted about the world, and taken the wind of all its moods. The love of digging in the ground (or of looking on while he pays another to dig) is as sure to come back to him as he is sure, at last, to go under the ground, and stay there. To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch their renewal of life, — this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.

Warner's most important advice to all gardeners holds true today: "Fertilize! Fertilize! Fertilize!"

Waking up in the future and 'Looking Backward'

Imagine going to sleep way back in 1887, and waking up on September 10, 2000. That's exactly what happened to the fictitious Julian West in the 1887 novel Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. The young West, who comes from an affluent and privileged Boston family, had trouble sleeping in 1887 and turned to the aid of mesmerism. While in this unusually deep trance, his house burns down, though he is safely hidden away in an underground room:

There was a rustle of garments and I opened my eyes. A fine looking man of perhaps sixty was bending over me, an expression of much benevolence mingled with great curiosity upon his features. He was an utter stranger. I raised myself on an elbow and looked around. The room was empty. I certainly had never been in it before, or one furnished like it. I looked back at my companion. He smiled.

"How do you feel?" he inquired.

"Where am I?" I demanded.

"You are in my house," was the reply.

West is in the home of Dr. Leete, who discovered the underground room on his property in the year 2000. Over the next few days, Leete tells West of how the United States has changed in the intervening 113 years. The world he describes is, in fact, a form of socialism.

Bellamy has carefully considered every aspect of this Utopian future. There is no crime, or any need for it, as all people are paid exactly the same amount of money regardless of their job. In fact, all occupations are considered equal, from a waiter to a medical doctor (the more difficult jobs are rewarded with fewer hours on the clock, but still equal the same salary of all others). As a result, there are no social classes, and even the mentally challenged or physically disabled are cared for with dignity. Artists and authors are patronized by subsidies from supporters who choose to pay them in anticipation of their work. Even a reader of the real 21st century will have a hard time finding any "plotholes" in Bellamy's structure of government and society; he considered everything (by 1887 standards, anyway).

Looking Backward became hugely popular; it is consistently listed as the third highest-selling novel of the century (after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur). The achievement is odd: the book has virtually no plot and is framed merely as several days of conversations, with drama artificially inserted (along with a terribly superficial love story).

There was no club in the strict sense

It all began on September 8, 1836, in Cambridge, Massachusetts: Four men — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederic Henry Hedge, George Putnam, and George Ripley — discussed the formation of a new club which would meet officially for the first time 11 days later. It was initially known as "Hedge's Club," because they met only when Hedge could make the trip all the way from Maine to Massachusetts; it soon came to be known as the "Transcendental Club."

The beginnings of transcendentalism were rooted in this meeting (as well as Emerson's essay "Nature" published in the same month). Hedge himself admitted, "there was no club in the strict sense... only occasional meetings of like-minded men and women." Their like-mindedness, however, was equally questionable. These men and women gathered to discuss important issues of the day as well as more metaphysical or theological questions. The four original meeting participants each played their own role:
Emerson became the figurehead of the group and a sort of spokesperson. He became well-known as a public lecturer, traveling around the country promoting his ideas (and his questions). Though not all became followers of the philosophy, Emerson would count hundreds in attendance at his public readings. He also assisted in the creation of The Dial, the official journal of the movement.

Frederic Henry Hedge (who only occasionally used a "k" in his first name and is pictured above) used his scholarship and knowledge of German writings to influence the group's thinking. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School (like Emerson), he feared the slow development of American theology but joined the movement because he felt "there was a promise in the air of a new era of intellectual life." Even so, he drifted away from the group by the end of the 1840s, and refused to contribute to the The Dial for fearing of being associated with them in print.

George Ripley, who hosted the group's first official meeting, took their philosophical ideas and put them into practice as the founder of the communal living experiment Brook Farm. He also edited a collection of translations called Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature meant to show the breadth of interest in the group. After Brook Farm's dissolution, he led a more mundane life as a quiet literary critic in New York.

George Putnam, a Unitarian minister in Roxbury, Massachusetts, did not last long as a Transcendentalist. In fact, nearly a half a century later, Hedge dismissed him in a letter outlining the group's origins as someone "who so soon withdrew from the connection that 'tis not worth the while to mention his name."

What's most important about understanding Transcendentalism (an admittedly nebulous concept and movement) is that it began as a theological group — not as a literary movement. Most of its members were or had been religious leaders or religious thinkers (though there were exceptions).

Confederate flag: Flag of the Free?

The same day that Edmund Clarence Stedman made his appeal to Abraham Lincoln, a Southern poet celebrated the Confederacy. Abram Joseph Ryan, a Catholic priest sometimes referred to as the "Poet-Priest of the Confederacy," penned his lines "To the Confederate Flag Over the State House" on September 6, 1862. In it, he celebrates the flag flying over Kentucky's capitol building. Just a year earlier, the legislature had ordered the United States flag to fly over the building in recognition of their allegiance to the Union. A group of dissidents, however, secretly established a provisional government that appealed for acceptance into the Confederacy. Ryan's poem, including its ironic presentation of Southern whites as being in shackles, uses the the Confederate flag the represent the free, and the Union as oppressors:

Float proudly o'er Frankfort, thou flag of my heart!
The dread of oppressors and hirelings thou art;
Our eyes have grown weary of waiting for thee.
Too long have we waited, O Flag of the Free!
The men who were pledged not to make war on thee
Betrayed us, and laughed that we'd thought ourselves free.
They bound us with shackles, and ere we could rise,
The gleaming of bayonets answered our cries.

Lives only our own we could lay down in scorn,
But we could not, we dared not, leave women forlorn;
And so we have waited, have watched, and have prayed,
For sight of the Cross that so long was delayed.
But now we will rise up like new men and strong,
And praise of brave Smith be the theme of our song.
He has come! he has come! with Flag of the Free;
No more shall our State Yankees' head-quarters be.

When freed from our tyrants, our children we'll teach
To lisp Kirby Smith in first essays of speech.
The flag he has planted on our State House dome
Gives him in the heart of Kentucky a home.

Stedman: Give us a MAN!

As the Civil War raged, Edmund Clarence Stedman was serving as a field correspondent for the New York Tribune. Infused with a burst of patriotism, on September 6, 1862, he wrote his poem "Wanted—A Man." The poem, printed three days later in the Tribune, called for leadership in the time of crisis (and served as a decent inspiration for enlistment, as well). It is said that President Abraham Lincoln, who was directly addressed in the poem, read it to his cabinet.

Back from the trebly crimsoned field
   Terrible words are thunder-tost;
Full of the wrath that will not yield,
   Full of revenge for battles lost!
   Hark to their echo, as it crost
The Capital, making faces wan:
   End this murderous holocaust;
Abraham Lincoln, give us a MAN!

Give us a man of God's own mould,
   Born to marshal his fellow-men;
One whose fame is not bought and sold
   At the stroke of a politician's pen;
   Give us the man of thousands ten,
Fit to do as well as to plan;
   Give us a rallying-cry, and then,
Abraham Lincoln, give us a MAN!

Is there never one in all the land,
   One on whose might the Cause may lean?
Are all the common ones so grand,
   And all the titled ones so mean?
   What if your failure may have been
In trying to make good bread from bran,
   From worthless metal a weapon keen?—
Abraham Lincoln, find us a MAN!

The same day that pro-Unionist and abolitionist Stedman wrote this poem, a pro-Confederate wrote a poem advocating the other side.

Whittier: Woe to the priesthood!

People in Charleston, South Carolina staged a pro-slavery gathering on September 4, 1835.  The turnout was strong, and the local newspapers particularly reported that the local clergymen and religious leaders came out in full force to support the cause in question. Anti-slavery poet John Greenleaf Whittier was appalled and responded with a poem, "Clerical Oppressors":

     Just God! and these are they
Who minister at thine altar, God of Right!
Men who their hands with prayer and blessing lay
     On Israel's Ark of light!

     What! preach, and kidnap men?
Give thanks, and rob thy own afflicted poor?
Talk of thy glorious liberty, and then
     Bolt hard the captive's door?

     What! servants of thy own
Merciful Son, who came to seek and save
The homeless and the outcast, fettering down
     The tasked and plundered slave!

Whittier saw not only hypocrisy from those who should be morally sound, but also the frightening correlation between them and leaders from the Bible like Pontius Pilate and Herod who were equally in the wrong. If his words weren't already strong enough, Whittier also calls them "paid hypocrites," "locusts," and people who "barter truth" for "robbery and wrong." The poem continues:

     Woe, then, to all who grind
Their brethren of a common Father down!
To all who plunder from the immortal mind
     Its bright and glorious crown!

     Woe to the priesthood! woe
To those whose hire is with the price of blood;
Perverting, darkening, changing, as they go,
     The searching truths of God!

     Their glory and their might
Shall perish; and their very names shall be
Vile before all the people, in the light
     Of a world's liberty.

     Oh, speed the moment on
When Wrong shall cease, and Liberty and Love
And Truth and Right throughout the earth be known
     As in their home above.

Bierce: No trace of him was ever discovered

According to legend, a man named James Burne Worson of Warwickshire, England got a little tipsy one day and, in his usual bravado, accepted a strange bet in his drunken state: he agreed to run all the way to Coventry and back (a distance of some 40 miles). The race, however, was never finished.

In Ambrose Bierce's story "An Unfinished Race," Worson sets off on his run on on the third day of September  in 1873 along with a few witnesses following in a wagon. According to these witnesses, the man took off at a good pace and all seemed well — until he suddenly fell forward and disappeared: "the man seemed to stumble, pitched headlong forward, uttered a terrible cry and vanished! He did not fall to the earth — he vanished before touching it. No trace of him was ever discovered."

This tale was one of many very short articles Bierce collected in an updated edition of his 1893 book Can Such Things Be? The book included  several similar examples of local lore or legend, allegedly based on true stories. "An Unfinished Race" was the among the shortest at only three paragraphs. It was also at the very end of the book, filed under a heading of "Mysterious Disappearances" added specifically for the 1910 edition of his collected works.

That particular multi-volume complete edition of Bierce's writings was, ultimately, a failure. Even so, when the final volume of the 12-book set appeared in 1912, Bierce wrote: "The completion of my 'collected works' finishes (I hope) my life's work. I am definitely 'out of it,' unless some irresistible impulse comes to me, which is not likely." Ironically, Bierce would later become a mysterious disappearance story of his own.

*Some information from this post comes from Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company (1999) by Roy Morris, Jr.

Boker: Lay him low!

George Henry Boker recorded the Civil War from the poetic front lines. Though he was a published poet before and after the war, his lyrical tributes to battle remain his most well-known. One of his most moving, "Dirge for a Soldier," is dated September 1, 1862, and leaves the battle ground for the burial ground:

Close his eyes; his work is done!
   What to him is friend or foeman,
Rise of moon, or set of sun,
   Hand of man, or kiss of woman?
      Lay him low, lay him low,
      In the clover or the snow!
      What cares he? he cannot know:
            Lay him low!

As man may, he fought his fight.
   Proved his truth by his endeavor;
Let him sleep in solemn night,
   Sleep forever and forever.
      Lay him low, lay him low,
      In the clover or the snow!
      What cares he? he cannot know:
            Lay him low!

Fold him in his country's stars,
   Roll the drum and fire the volley!
What to him are all our wars,
   What but death-bemocking folly?
      Lay him low, lay him low,
      In the clover or the snow!
      What cares he? he cannot know:
            Lay him low!

Leave him to God's watching eye;
   Trust him to the hand that made him.
Mortal love weeps idly by:
   God alone has power to aid him.
      Lay him low, lay him low,
      In the clover or the snow!
      What cares he? he cannot know:
            Lay him low!