Chivers: Love, Joy, and Grief

Thomas Holley Chivers knew about love, joy, and grief. The Georgian poet had experienced a troubled life but took great joy in his family, including his parents and siblings, as well as his children. His children, however, all died young, and his first marriage proved disastrous. By October 10, 1839, he knew enough about love, joy, and grief to write a poem appropriately called "The Poetry of Love, Joy, and Grief":

To hang upon his breast by day.
   To lie close by his side by night;
To heed whatever he may say,
   And do it with as fond delight;
To make each thought of him thy sigh,
   To love him more than God above,
And think that he can never die—
   This is the Poetry of Love.

To think him, absent, by thy side-
   Whatever he may do is right;
To love him as when first his bride,
   And think each one thy bridal night;
To live through life unchanged in years.
   With love that time cannot destroy,
And have each thought expressed in tears—
   This is the Poetry of Joy.

To sit down by his dying bed,
   To count each pulse—to feel each pain—
To love him after he is dead,
   And nevermore to smile again;
To love him after as before—
   To find his grave thy sole relief—.
And weep for him forever more—
   This is the Poetry of Grief. 

The poem, written in the perspective of a woman, may also have been a somewhat passive-aggressive reference to his first wife, who had left him not long after their marriage. Or, perhaps, it was more referential to his second wife, who he had married not long before writing the poem. The theme of death or dying was fairly typical for Chivers's poetry. "The Poetry of Love, Joy, and Grief" was included in his self-published collection The Lost Pleiad in 1845.

Death of Tucker: not the worst

Nathaniel Beverley Tucker lived a varied life before his death on August 26, 1851, just shy of his 67th birthday. He was born in Chesterfield County, Virginia, where several men in his family rose to prominence in politics, education, and the law. He served during the War of 1812 before moving to the Missouri Territory and earning the rank of judge. He outlived two of his three wives by the time he began working at his alma mater, the College of William and Mary. By the 1830s and 1840s, he was already espousing a form of secession that allowed state sovereignty.

Tucker was also a published author who published three novels and contributed to periodicals, particularly several essays in the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger. One of his works, The Partisan Leader: A Tale of the Future, was set in the "future" of 1849 when it was published in 1836 and, according to some, correctly predicted the birth of the Confederacy. Certainly, Tucker had been advocating for secession for years: "Disunion is not the worst of possible evils," he once claimed, and suggested breaking up the states be an open discussion.

From the dialogue of a character in his novel George Balcombe (1836):

"...It is only by blunders that we learn wisdom. You are too young to have made many as yet. God forbid, that when you shall have made as many as I have, you should have profited as little by them. But it will not be so. You take the right plan to get the full benefit of all you make. I am not sure," continued he, " that we do not purchase all our good qualities by the exercise of their opposites. How else does experience of danger make men brave? If they were not scared at first, then they were brave at first. If they were scared, then the effect of fear upon the mind has been to engender courage. Virtue, indeed, may be formed by habit. But who has a habit of virtue? very few. The rest have to arrive at virtue by the roundabout road of crime and repentance; as if a man should follow the sun around the earth to reach a point but a few degrees east of that from which he started. But it is God's plan of accomplishing his greatest end, and must be the best plan."

Meek and Americanism: brilliant with the stars

Alexander Beaufort Meek was 15 years old when he enrolled at the University of Georgia, though he transferred to the new University of Alabama in 1831. He had just turned 30 when he returned to the University of Georgia to give an address to the Phi Betta Kappa and Demosthenian Societies. By then, he was fairly accomplished in the legal world, having been named a probate judge in Alabama. "You have called me back," Meek said in his speech on August 8, 1844, "from a distant home, over a wide interval of years, to the scene of my earliest collegiate life."

Meek took the opportunity to consider the reactions to revisiting a once familiar place: lament for things now gone, excitement over positive change. For Meek, who worked by then both in literature and government, change was important in his native South. Literature and government could be improved and, in turn, could improve the character of the region, as well as the nation as a whole. Writing and the law are not the end goal for mankind, they are the path to follow "to accomplish the great design for which man was created". To grow as a people is to improve constantly over time, always spiraling upward with great deeds and accomplishments, but never satisfied at attaining an end result:

Mankind have learned that governments are somewhat more than games or machines kept in curious motion for the amusement and edification of rulers; and literatures are beginning to be regarded, not as the phantasmagoria of poets and dreamers, the sunset scaffoldings of fancy, but as something very far beyond that. The old secret has come out, that man's immortality has already begun, and, by these things, you are moulding and fashioning him in his destinies forever.

In literature, Meek says, the goal is to focus on "Americanism" (the speech was named "Americanism in Literature"). We must grow in our letters just as we have been experiencing massive population growth. Among his suggestions to improve American writing, he emphasizes it must have national purpose and, more than that, that writing must be as representative as the diversity of the landscape of the entire nation:

Our country has extended her jurisdiction over the fairest and most fertile regions. The rich bounty is poured into her lap, and breathes its influence upon her population. Their capacities are not pent and thwarted by the narrow limits which restrict the citizens of other countries... Such are some of the physical aspects of our country, and such the influence they are destined to have upon our national mind. Very evidently they constitute noble sources of inspiration, illustration and description.

Not just the diversity of the landscape, Meek emphasizes, but the country also has a diversity of people, with ancestry all over the world. Further, the unique version of democracy practiced in the United States offers opportunities of inspiration. Though we have already succeeded with a few great writers, particularly Washington Irving and historian George Bancroft, we continue to look to the future, Meek says, and strive to grow. Meek, of course, will contribute to that Americanism as a poet, historian, and essayist. He concludes:

Let us then abide in the faith that this country of ours, as she is destined to present to the world, the proudest spectacle of political greatness ever beheld, will not be neglectful of the other, the highest interest of humanity, its intellectual ascension ; but that both shall flourish here, in unexampled splendor, with reciprocal benefit, beneath the ample folds of that banner, which shall then float out, in its blue beauty, like a tropical night, brilliant with the stars of a whole hemisphere!

Death of Murfree: the sun had gone down

When Mary Noailles Murfree died on July 31, 1922, the author Charles Egbert Craddock died with her. Born and raised in Tennessee, she moved to St. Louis with her family after the Civil War. Some sort of childhood illness (usually reported as "lameness") inspired her interest in reading and literature. Nostalgia for her home state likely inspired her to begin writing "local color" stories about Tennessee. These tales and sketches portrayed a frontier, rural south, a mountainous and wild region made up of tough and rugged characters. Murfree made a good marketing decision, then, to write under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock. She maintained her ruse for several years before surprising, if not shocking, New England's literary elite when her true identity was revealed.

In reality, Murfree/Craddock had little contact with the Appalachian mountain men and women that she featured in her work. She came from a well-known and aristocratic family (her home town of Murfreesboro was name after her ancestor, a veteran of the American Revolution) in central Tennessee. She spent her summers with her family in the mountainous regions in the eastern part of the state, among the Appalachian folks. Her family rank, however, as well as her "lameness" prevented her from much direct interaction with those people. She instead relied on those who made their way to do business to the resort hotel where she stayed.

In other words, though Murfree/Craddock presented herself as someone who knew the ins and outs of this cultural group, she was really an outsider. She certainly was sympathetic to that group of people, though her stories are more sentimental than reality. A sample from her chapter "Drifting Down Lost Creek" from In the Tennessee Mountains shows both her commitment to showing the "color" of Tennessee, her romanticism of the mountains, and her use of local dialect:

The sun had gone down, but the light yet lingered. The evening star trembled above Pine Mountain. Massive and darkling it stood against the red west. How far, ah, how far, stretched that mellow crimson glow, all adown Lost Creek Valley, and over the vast mountain solitudes on either hand! Even the eastern ranges were rich with this legacy of the dead and gone day, and purple and splendid they lay beneath the rising moon. She looked at it with full and shining eyes.
 "I dunno how he kin make out ter furgit the mountings," she said; and then she went on, hearing the crisp leaves rustling beneath her tread, and the sharp bark of a fox in the silence of the night-shadowed valley.

*I am indebted for information in this post to Wingless Flights: Appalachian Women in Fiction (1996) by Danny L. Miller

Warfield: Such was Destiny's decree!

Catherine Anne Warfield, born in Missisippi in 1816, was popular in her native South as both a poet and writer of fiction. After her marriage, she moved to Kentucky and there lived through the Civil War. From her home of Beechmore, she wrote her poem "Drowned, Drowned" on June 15, 1867 (the title references a line in Shakespeare's Hamlet). The poem compares the struggle of the Confederate Army with diving for pearls and, like much of the Southern poetry of the period, elevates these veterans to angelic status in sentimental, patriotic verse:

In the dark Confederate sea
Rest the heroes of our race;
O'er them waves are sweeping free,
And the pearls of ocean trace
Temples, where the helm should be,
Worn with high heroic grace.
'Twas a desperate strife at best,
And they perished—let them rest
In their silent burial place!—

When our divers, dreading nought,
Plunged to depths, through ocean whirls,
It was all their hope and thought,
To bear back those precious pearls,
Passion freighted, Beauty fraught,
Such as gleam 'mid glowing curls,
Or on baldrick and on banner,
In the old heroic manner,
Broidered all, by high-born girls.

But the divers came no more
From that dark Confederate sea,
With its ceaseless muffled roar,
And its billows sweeping free,
And the pearls were never gathered,
And the storms were never weathered.
Such was Destiny's decree!—
Quench the tear, and stay the sigh,
Nothing now can these avail;

They who nobly strive and die,
Over Fate itself prevail.
Give to those, who on the shore
Wait for sires who come no more,
Shelter from the surf and gale.
Spread the board and trim the hearth,
For the orphans of our race,
Lift from weariness and dearth,
Each young drooping form and face,
Light anew the olden fires
Won from high heroic sires,
And may God bestow his grace!

Chivers's nightingale: sweet, mournful plaint

I hear the soft, Lethéan song
   Of many falling streams,
Winding oblivious, as they roll along,
   Beneath the moonlight's rain of beams.
I hear the plaintive Nightingale
   Singing with all his might,
Until the music seems to flood the vale
   Afar with deluge-like delight.

A rose-bud, in his song's sweet rain,
   Now bathes her drooping head,
Which so dissolves her beating heart of pain,
   That she seems languishing as dead.
A cascade of sweet, mournful plaint,
   He pours out through the grove,
As if his over-burthened heart would faint
   With the sweet summer-heat of love.

But now the Nightingale is still—
   A Spirit from above
Has drowned to silence each pellucid rill,
   With the soft music of her love.
Her soft breath, like an odorous breeze,
   Whispers to me to-night;
I am the soul of all such sounds as these—
   It was the Voice of my Delight. 

The above poem, "The Voice of My Delight," was dated June 8, 1840, by its author, Thomas Holley Chivers. The Georgia poet included it in his collection The Lost Pleiad (1845). Chivers often wrote on themes of love and of death (the latter particularly after the death of several of his children in their infancy). This poem, perhaps, combines the two. The theme of death is not the major one, however, but it is referenced in the first line with the "Lethéan song" — a reference to a river that flows in Hades, the Greek underworld.

Within the natural nocturnal landscape he describes, Chivers introduces us to a nightingale. This songbird in the poem is singing at night so strongly that it "floods" the scene. In fact, nightingales only sing at night when in search of a mate. The song is "plaintive," or sorrowful, perhaps because his love is dead. By the end of the poem, the nightingale has given up the search, presumably due to a lack of success. Further, the rose-bud hears the song as a "mournful plaint" (or "complaint"), and languishes near death because of it. In a foot-note, Chivers makes it known that he is referencing a work by the Persian poet Jami.

The poem, then, seems to be about an overburdened lover with no one to love, yet whose song of devotion impacts the world around it enough that it summons a spirit from the afterlife to the scene. That final image, the titular voice of delight, comes from a spirit representing the soul of the sounds heard throughout the poem, particularly the nightingale. The voice of Chivers's delight, then, might be (somewhat oddly) the spirit that recognizes those whose love is not returned.

Death of O'Hara: free from anguish now

Born and raised in Kentucky, Theodore O'Hara had a varied career as a lawyer, journalist, soldier, and poet. The Civil War broke out while he was the editor of a newspaper in Mobile, Alabama, and he immediately enlisted in the Confederate Army. Though his exemplary service was recognized, particularly with his previous stint in the Army in his 20s, he was refused promotions for being too outspoken and, particularly, for his criticism of President Jefferson Davis. After the war, he settled again in Alabama, where he died on June 6, 1867. He was originally buried in that state, before being re-interred in his native Kentucky.

O'Hara's greatest claim to fame is a poem about death, written during the Mexican-American War. "Bivouac of the Dead" has since been quoted in memorial markers and plaques in over a dozen cemeteries, including Arlington National Cemetery. Originally written to honor Kentuckians who died, it has since been read as a general lament for those who are killed in battle. From that poem:

The muffled drum's sad roll has beat
The soldier's last tattoo;
No more on life's parade shall meet
The brave and daring few.
On Fame's eternal camping-ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And Glory guards with solemn round
The bivouac of the dead.

No rumour of the foe's advance
Now swells upon the wind;
No troubled thought at midnight haunts
Of loved ones left behind;
No vision of the morrow's strife
The warrior's dream alarms;
No braying horn nor screaming fife
At dawn shall call to arms.

Their shivered swords are red with rust,
Their plumed heads are bowed;
Their haughty banner trailed in dust
Is now their martial shroud,
And plenteous funeral tears have washed
The red stains from each brow,
And their proud forms in battle gashed
Are free from anguish now.

...
Rest on, embalmed and sainted dead!
Dear as the blood you gave,
No impious footsteps here shall tread
The herbage of your grave;
Nor shall your glory be forgot
While Fame her record keeps,
Or Honor points the hallowed spot
Where Valor proudly sleeps.

Yon marble minstrel's voiceless stone
In deathless songs shall tell,
When many a vanished age hath flown,
The story how ye fell;
Nor wreck, nor change, or winter's blight
Not Time's remorseless doom,
Shall dim one ray of holy light
That gilds your glorious tomb.

Cable, Old Creole Days, heart of New Orleans

Jadis, Hammock and Fan, and Spanish Moss were among the titles suggested but, ultimately, George Washington Cable and his publisher Scribner's Sons chose to title the book Under the Cypress Orange. Then, likely at the last moment, it was renamed Old Creole Days when it was published on May 17, 1879. The book had been some seven years in the making in that it compiled stories he had published in Scribner's Monthly beginning in 1873.

The book proved successful, particularly in the author's native state of Louisiana and he was soon hailed as one of the most important writers in the region. This was in no small part due to Cable himself, who promoted the book personally. A review in the New Orleans Times noted, "The writings of Mr. Cable may be ranked with those of any American prose writer, not excepting those of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which they in many respects resemble, and in some respects excel." Unsurprisingly, local reviewers were particularly impressed with Cable's use of local vernacular and dialect among the Creoles (much like the work of Kate Chopin).

Indeed, the setting and people of New Orleans are an important element of the book. The opening story in the first edition,* "'Sieur George," begins "in the heart of New Orleans." As Cable often does, he also spends the first few paragraphs describing the architecture of the building where the story takes place: a majestic but decaying structure, with pride amid decay not unlike the Creole culture itself. The landlord, the elderly and mixed race man named Kookoo (who "smokes cascarilla, wears velveteen, and is as punctual as an executioner") becomes obsessed with a certain tenant, who arrived with only a single trunk. He intended to live there only 50 days, but stayed for 50 years.

As the story progresses, we learn more about George, an outsider who apparently made his money gambling, though an air of mystery surrounds him. His real name, for example, is unknown, but people take to calling him "Monsieur George" (unsure if it is a first or last name), which is eventually shortened. The crux of the story is really if a white American can cope with having a role in the unique Creole culture of New Orleans. Without revealing the plot, it might be best to summarize that George fails.

*When the book was reissued four years later, Cable inserted a new work, a novella titled "Madame Delphine" as the first story; "'Sieur George" was also moved closer to the end of the book.

Death of Augusta Evans Wilson: at best a struggle

Augusta Jane Evans Wilson died of a heart attack in Mobile, Alabama on May 9, 1909. The author of multiple novels, she was best remembered for her book St. Elmo. Published in 1866, the novel was considered the Southern best-seller equal in popularity as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin was in the North. Various towns, hotels, and even steamboats were named in honor of the author or her characters.

Born in Georgia and raised partly in Texas, young Augusta showed an early interest in literature (despite no formal schooling) and began writing her first novel while still a teenager. Ultimately, she published some nine novels over about 50 years. Many of Wilson's books were popular because of perceived simplicity and domestic or sentimental themes. Immediately after her death, even her obituaries claimed her work already seemed like something from an different time — already old-fashioned, in other words. More modern scholars, however, have found that her female characters were a bit more modern and shared equal power, intellect, and agency as the male characters. In the political world, oddly enough, Wilson was a bit conservative and opposed women's suffrage in the growing movement.

An avid secessionist, Wilson (then still Miss Evans) volunteered to nurse Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. She used her experience as an inspiration for her 1864 book Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice. From that book, here is a scene in which a character named Russell witnesses the death of his elder mother:

"If I could look upon your face once more, my son, it would not be hard to die. Let me see you in heaven, my dear, dear boy." These were the last words, and soon after a stupor fell upon her. Hour after hour passed; Mrs. Campbell came and sat beside the bed, and the three remained silent, now and then lifting bowed heads to look at the sleeper. Not a sound broke the stillness save the occasional chirp of a cricket, and a shy mouse crept twice across the floor, wondering at the silence, fixing its twinkling bright eyes on the motionless figures. The autumn day died slowly as the widow, and when the clock dirged out the sunset hour Russell rose, and, putting back the window-curtains, stooped and laid his face close to his mother's. Life is at best a struggle, and such perfect repose as greeted him is found only when the marble hands of Death transfer the soul to its guardian angel. No pulsation stirred the folds over the heart, or the soft bands of hair on the blue-veined temples; the still mouth had breathed its last sigh, and the meek brown eyes had opened in eternity. The long, fierce ordeal had ended, the flames died out, and from smouldering ashes the purified spirit that had toiled and fainted not, that had been faithful to the end, patiently bearing many crosses, heard the voice of the Great Shepherd, and soared joyfully to the pearly gates of the Everlasting Home. The day bore her away on its wings, and as Russell touched the icy cheek a despairing cry rolled through the silent cottage.

Fort Pillow: dabbled clots of brain and gore

The Battle at Fort Pillow in April 1864 was immediately controversial. The Confederate Army, led by General Nathan Bedford Forrest, attempted to regain the Tennessee fort which was protected by some 600 Union soldiers. About half of those Union solders were black. Forrest and his troops easily stormed the fort.  Union troops were slaughtered by the Confederates, despite offers of surrender, and reports claimed that Confederates more heavily targeted black soldiers who were killed in cold blood.

James Ryder Randall, a Maryland-born poet who had come to hate the "Northern scum," published a poem about the controversial battle/massacre, responding to criticism from Union supporters against Confederate savagery. His poem, "At Fort Pillow,"was published in the Wilmington (North Carolina) Journal on April 25, 1864:

You shudder as you think upon
    The carnage of the grim report —
The desolation when we won
    The inner trenches of the fort.

But there are deeds you may not know
    That scourge the pulses into strife;
Dark memories of deathless woe
    Pointing the bayonet and knife.

Randall instead points to the merciless and savage acts of Union soldiers, who had previously encamped at a church in Point Coupee, Louisiana. Randall had lived in that town while teaching at Poydras College. The church was desecrated by these troops, as was the graveyard surrounding it, including the grave of Randall's mother (or, perhaps, a less literal and more generic mother).

The house is ashes, where I dwelt
    Beyond the mighty inland sea;
The tombstones shattered where I knelt
    By that old Church in Pointe Coupee.

The Yankee fiend! that came with fire,
    Camped on the consecrated sod,
And trampled in the dust and mire
    The Holy Eucharist of God!

The spot where darling mother sleeps,
    Beneath the glimpse of yon sad moon,
Is crushed with splintered marble heaps
    To stall the horse of some dragoon!

Recalling that story, Randall writes, makes his "frantic spirit wince." But, worse is an implied crime against his sister. Without saying it outright, Randall refers to his sister being raped by a Union soldier

The tears are hot upon my face
    When thinking what bleak fate befell
The only sister of our race —
    A thing too horrible to tell.

They say that, ere her senses fled,
    She rescue of her brothers cried;
Then feebly bowed her stricken head,
    Too pure to live thus — so she died.

Though he was not present, Randall claims he continues to hear his sisters screams for help, "as perpetual as the air." It leads him to wrath and he claims he has killed Union soldiers for revenge. Here, Randall (or, more accurately, the narrator of the poem) comes to represent the entire Confederacy, and that revenge for the above atrocities inspired the massacre at Fort Pillow. He happily celebrates his "deadly rifle, sharpened brand," that causes the enemy to "writhe and bleed." Randall's poem, then, justifies responding to violence with more violence. More than that, Randall's poem highlights the fury of war as well as its gore, even while claiming he particularly targeted not the black soldiers, as was believed of Fort Pillow, but whites, though both races are dehumanized as demon targets:

The Southern yell rang loud and high
    The moment that we thundered in,
Smiting the demons hip and thigh,
    Cleaving them to the very chin.

My right arm bared for fiercer play,
    The left one held the rein in slack;
In all the fury of the fray
    I sought the white man, not the black.

The dabbled clots of brain and gore
    Across the swirling sabres ran;
To me each brutal visage bore
    The front of one accursed man.

Throbbing along the frenzied vein,
    My blood seemed kindled into song —
The death-dirge of the sacred slain,
    The slogan of immortal wrong.

It glared athwart the dripping glaives,
    It blazed in each avenging eye —
The thought of desecrated graves
    And some lone sister's desperate cry. 

Mulligan: Sing a song of the long ago

Judge James H. Mulligan was born in Lexington, Kentucky, almost literally just on the other side of the hill from the town of Hustonville. As a poet who almost exclusively celebrated his home state in his writing, it was likely only a matter of time before he wrote about that small central Kentucky town nicknamed "The Crossroads." His poem "Over the Hill to Hustonville" was published in the Lexington Leader on April 4, 1909. Some have called it his first widely read poem:

Over the hill to Hustonville,
   Past mead and vale and waving grain
With fleecy clouds and glad sunshine
   And the balm of the coming rain;
On where hidden beneath the hill,
In the widening vale below —
Chime and smith and distant herd
   Sing a song of the long ago.

Over the hill to Hustonville
   Where silent fields are sad and brown,
And the crow's lone call is blended
   With the anvil beat of the town;
Where sweet the hamlet life flows on,
And the doors ever open wide,
Welcome the worn and wandering
   To the ingle and cheer inside.

Over the hill to Hustonville
   I knew and loved as a child,
A scene that yet lights up to me
   With a radiant glow and mild;
With drowsy lane and quiet street,
Gables quaint and the houses gray,
Ancient inn with battered sign,
   And an air of the far-away.

Over the hill to Hustonville
   Where men are yet sturdy and strong
As were their sires in days long past —
   As true as their flint-locks long.
And maids are shy and soft of speech —
As the wild-rose, lithsome and true,
Eyes alight as the coming dawn,
   Softly blue, as their skies are blue.

Some — sometime — in the bye and bye,
   With all my life-won riches rare —
Dead hopes and faded memories —
   A silken floss of baby hair;
Fast locked close within my heart —
Worn of strife and the empty quest —
I'll over the hill to Hustonville,
   To dream ever — and rest — and rest.

Despite those final thoughts, Mulligan did not rest in Hustonville, but died and was buried in his home town of Lexington, only about six years after this poem was published. Poetry for him was a sort of second career, started after many years in politics and the law. For a time, he served as consul-general to Samoa (where he befriended Robert Louis Stephenson).

Death of Randall: I slumber soon

Though he was born in Baltimore and started his career in Louisiana for much of his career, it was in August, Georgia that James Ryder Randall died on January 15, 1908. He had just turned 69 years old only two weeks earlier. He is mostly known for "Maryland, My Maryland," a now-controversial poem written to his native state urging them to join the Confederacy during the Civil War.

As that war began, Randall was teaching at Poydras College in Louisiana; he could not enlist due to health problems. He became an editor and journalist, publishing various poems here and there, though none achieved the fame of "Maryland, My Maryland." That song was frequently included on lists of "most patriotic songs" alongside the most famous writings of Julia Ward Howe and Francis Scott Key (apparently intended without irony).

After the war, he moved to Georgia and Randall's anti-Union sentiments abated somewhat. He hoped the Northerners (whom he had previously referred to as "scum") would accept the "rebels" back into the fold. Still, the majority of his known verses glorify the South and the Southern cause, which is said to have inspired many people in those states. Even after the War ended, he viewed Confederate soldiers as more honorable and more worthy of adoration (even to the detriment of Union soldiers, as is both the literal and metaphorical case with his poem "At Arlington"). These themes earned him the nickname "The Poet of the Lost Cause." For this post, here is his poem "After a Little While":

              After a little while,
When all the glories of the night and day
              Have fled for aye,
From Friendship's glance and Beauty's winsome smile,
              I pass away,
              After a little while.

              After a little while,
The snow will fall from time and trial shocks
              Down these dark locks;
Then gliding onward to the Golden Isle,
              I pass the rocks,
              After a little while

              After a little while,
Perchance, when youth is blazoned on my brow,
              As Hope is now,
I fade and quiver in this dim defile,
              A fruitless bough,
              After a little while.

              After a little while,
And clouds that shimmer on the robes of June
              And vestal moon,
No more my vagrant fancies can beguile—
              I slumber soon,
              After a little while.

              After a little while,
The birds will serenade in bush and tree,
              But not for me;
On billows duskier than the gloomy Nile
              My barque must be—
              After a little while.

              After a little while,
The cross will glisten and the thistles wave
              Above my grave,
              And planets smile;
Sweet Lord! then pillowed on Thy gentle breast,
              I fain would rest,
              After a little while.

Shortly after Randall's death, friends gathered his various scraps of poetry (which he had given to them when he was last in Baltimore) and published them in a compilation. Much of poetry from his 20s, amid the background of Civil War, are unsurprisingly focused on that conflict. His later poetry became more deeply religious, as in "Resurgam," the final entry in his posthumous collection. In 1936, a monument to Randall was placed in Augusta, the city where he died.

Guest post: Salt! Salt!: The Death of Edward Vernon Sparhawk

1837 wasn't a good year for Edward Vernon Sparhawk. He had likely contracted tuberculosis while caring for his wife, Julia, who lost a long, painful battle with the disease the previous summer. Writing as "Pertinax Placid" in the May 1835 issue of The Southern Literary Messenger — the first of three issues he edited before Edgar Allan Poe took over in August — Sparhawk addressed his young son and foretold an untimely end:

The dreaming pauses 'midst thy play, as if of sudden thought,
The speaking glances of thine eye, when with hope and gladness fraught—
These tell a tale of after times, when I no more shall guide
The wand'rings of thy youthful feet, or lead thee by my side—
When the fondness of a father's love thou never more canst know,
And I shall in an early grave sleep tranquilly and low.

Virginia Capitol, c. 1831

In June, a robber bludgeoned Sparhawk from behind as he walked home from work. The assailant broke both his jaws and left him unconscious, in exchange for a few coins and a pen knife. A frail man to begin with, by winter Sparhawk was no longer strong enough to continue his job as a reporter at the state Capitol in Richmond.

Still, the year had bright spots. In July, Sparhawk purchased and became editor of the Petersburg, Virginia, Intelligencer. Then, in August, his marriage to Eloise Warrell relieved any fear that when his disease took its final turn, there would be no one to take care of his children. By the start of 1838, he was well enough to go back to work. He arrived at the House of Delegates on the morning of January 6, where his colleagues noticed his mood was much improved.

Crossing the grounds of the Capitol after the House had adjourned, Sparhawk was stricken and called out for help. Passers by rushed to catch him as he crumpled to the ground. He cried for "Salt! Salt!", but any relief for the hemorrhage arrived too late. His body was carried to his mother-in-law's house, and he was buried the next day at Shockoe Hill.

An accomplished poet, prose writer, reporter, printer, editor, and a persistent instigator, Edward Vernon Sparhawk died a week shy of his 37th birthday. In a life marked with tragedies, he strived to be the person neither his father nor brother had the chance to become. Years earlier, coping with his brother's death at sea, he summarized the human journey:

So o'er the ocean of life as we're sailing,
    Wild waves our peace annoy;
Seeming, each blast of the tempest prevailing,
    Hope in our breast to destroy:
The calm of tranquility, softly returning,
    Quells the storms of the breast;
The rainbow of hope, in our bosom still burning,
    Points to eternal rest.

*Chris Hoffman is writing the first full biography of Edward Vernon Sparhawk. A member of the Boston Biographers Group, Chris lives with his wife, their cat, and their dog, and can be found on Twitter @xprhoff.

Birth of Helper: stupid and sequacious masses

Hinton Rowan Helper was born outside of Mocksville, North Carolina on December 27, 1829. He went on to become a published author and infuriate most of his fellow Southerners. His perspective may have come, in part, from living outside of the South. After graduating from Mocksville Academy, he moved to New York then went west to join the hunt for gold in California. His lack of success there inspired his book California Land of Gold: Reality vs. Fiction. He was none too pleased with the experience as, in the book's preface, he notes it was in that state that he met "its rottenness and its corruption, its squalor and its misery, its crime and its shame, its gold and its dross." The book was not particularly popular.

Back in North Carolina, however, he published the book that made him infamous in 1857. The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It was a scornful indictment of slavery in the South — but not for the moral reasons typically presented by abolitionists, as in the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe's book five years earlier. Hinton did not engage in the sentimentalism of other anti-slavery writers and instead offered an economic point of view (and, certainly, he did not call for racial equality). He particularly denounced the oligarchy established by rich, slave-holding whites, who held social and economic superiority over poorer whites who did not have enslaved people:

It is expected that the stupid and sequacious masses, the white victims of slavery, will believe, and, as a general thing, they do believe, whatever the slaveholders tell them; and thus it is that they are cajoled into the notion that they are the freest, happiest and most intelligent people in the world, and are taught to look with prejudice and disapprobation upon every new principle or progressive movement. Thus it is that the South, woefully inert and inventionless, has lagged behind the North, and is now weltering in the cesspool of ignorance and degradation.

Helper called slaveholders "more criminal than common murderers" and, further, warned that Southerners should fear the enslaved population: "in nine cases out of ten, [they would] be delighted with an opportunity to cut their masters' throats." Without slavery, he argued, poor whites could improve their cultural literacy without the suppression from this oligarchy.

Helper almost certainly did not expect the reaction he got. The book inflamed many of those Southern power-holders whom he had criticized, leading to the legal banning of the book in various Southern states. One account suggests three men in Arkansas were hanged for owning copies. Other writers wrote responses dissecting and denouncing his ideas. Even so, some credited Helper's book as the second most influential anti-slavery work of the century, influencing even Abraham Lincoln himself, who appointed the author as consul to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

He returned to the United States after the Civil War, but was surprised to see the emancipation of slaves did not lead to a renaissance among poor Southern whites (at least by his standards). He wandered from city to city for a bit and wrote a few more books, often focused on his belief in the inferiority of the African race. He lived the next decades in relative obscurity before taking his own life.

Chivers: Why should I mourn?

Thomas Holley Chivers led a difficult life. Born to a wealthy family in Georgia,  he earned a medical degree but did not practice medicine and felt compelled to be a poet. His first wife left him (with his first child) and the four children he had with his second wife all died young. He also had difficulty dealing with the death of his mother and his favorite sister. As such, his poetry is riddled with melancholy and reflections on death. He frequently used the name "Isa" as a reference to a beloved daughter. His "Song to Isa" (one of a couple with that title) is dated December 4, 1841:

Why should I mourn, or weep, or sigh,
    For that Bright World to be,
Where all my tears shall be wiped dry—
When here on earth, before I die,
    I see that Heaven in thee?

If Heaven be here on earth with me,
    Then I can never die;
Or, having died, as it may be,
I am to dwell, henceforth, with thee
    In immortality.

Then let thy pensive head recline
    Upon this peaceful breast;
For, being absorbed in thine,
My soul now seems in Heaven to shine
    A saint among the blest.

The poem was printed in 1845 in Chivers's self-published book The Lost Pleiad. It is one of seven poems in the 33-page collection with "Isa" in the title.

Peck's 'Rings and Love-Knots: so unpretentious

The Critic called Samuel Minturn Peck's second book of poems, Rings and Love-Knots, a book of "seventy-five dainty love-lyrics and vers-de-société in a prettily bound volume." This review, published in the November 26, 1892 issue, continued Peck's reputation as a good but simple poet. In fact, the review recommended the collection for those who like "light verse" and observed that the Alabama poet had not tried to make his poems more serious than his previous work.

The critic goes on with faint praise: "He also has a command of rhymes and metres, and his work exhibits much technical skill; it is accurate, finished and perfectly straightforward." Without irony, the critic finds Peck likable precisely because "all the songs he has here collected... are so unpretentious, so musical and so finished." Of the 75 poems in the book, the critic highlighted "An Alabama Garden" as one of his favorites:

Along a pine-clad hill it lies,
O'erlooked by limpid Southern skies,
A spot to feast a fairy's eyes,
       A nook for happy fancies.
The wild bee's mellow monotone
Here blends with bird-notes zephyr-blown,
And many an insect voice unknown
       The harmony enhances.

The rose's shattered splendor flees
With lavish grace on every breeze,
And lilies sway with flexile ease
       Like dryads snowy-breasted;
And where gardenias drowse between
Rich curving leaves of glossy green,
The cricket strikes his tambourine,
       Amid the mosses nested.

Here dawn-flushed myrtles interlace,
And sifted sunbeams shyly trace
Frail arabesques whose shifting grace
       Is wrought of shade and shimmer;
At eventide scents quaint and rare
Go straying through my garden fair,
As if they sought with wildered air
       The fireflies' fitful glimmer.

Oh, could some painter's facile brush,
On canvas limn my garden's blush,
The fevered world its din would hush
       To crown the high endeavor;
Or could a poet snare in rhyme
The breathings of this balmy clime,
His fame might dare the dart of Time
       And soar undimmed forever!

In the 20th century, Peck was named the first Poet Laureate of Alabama, a position he earned in part because of his accessibility as a poet and in part because of how frequently his poetry celebrated his native state, as in the poem above. Similarly, many of his poems were set to music because of their song-like quality and their generally positive themes. Peck also apparently appreciated the praise he received for what the above critic called "vers-de-société" as a later book had an entire section with that label.

Had I a thousand lives to give: Memorializing the Boy Hero of the Confederacy

Sam Davis became a courier for the Confederacy after his time as a soldier ended in injury. In November 1863, he was found by the Union Army secreting Union battle plans. He refused to name his accomplice, and his alleged response to his captors became legendary: "If I had a thousand lives to live, I would give them all rather than to betray a friend." Supposedly, even as they were about to hang him as a spy, they offered him another opportunity to save his own life by giving them information. He refused and was hanged. He was 21 years old.

The incident and Davis's commitment to his beliefs inspired many in the South, even after the Civil War. His youth and resiliency inspired his nickname as the "Boy Hero of the Confederacy." On October 11, 1906, nearly 43 years after Davis's capture and execution, local citizens led mainly by women unveiled a statue of Davis in Pulaski, Tennessee near the spot of his death (pictured above shortly after its unveiling; incidentally, the same town has infamous notoriety as the founding place of the Ku Klux Klan). Read at that ceremony was a poem by Alabama-born poet John Trotwood Moore. In fact, Moore's poem, "Sam Davis," had already been published and its popularity helped spread support for the monument and increased Davis's status in collective memory of Tennessee.

"Tell me his name and you are free,"
The General said, while from the tree
The grim rope dangled threat'ningly.

The birds ceased singing—happy birds.
That sang of home and mother-words.
The sunshine kissed his cheek—dear sun:
It loves a life that's just begun!
The very breezes held their breath
To watch the fight twixt life and death.
And O, how calm and sweet and free.
Smiled back the hills of Tennessee!
Smiled back the hills, as if to say,
"O, save your life for us to-day."

"Tell me his name and you are free,"
The General said, " and I shall see
You safe within the rebel line—
I'd love to save such life as thine."

A tear gleamed down the ranks of blue—
(The bayonets were tipped with dew).
Across the rugged cheek of war
God's angels rolled a teary star.
The boy looked up—'twas this they heard:
"And would you have me break my word?"

A tear stood in the General's eye!
"My boy, I hate to see thee die
Give me the traitor's name and fly!"

Young Davis smiled, as calm and free
As he who walked on Galilee:
"Had I a thousand lives to live.
Had I a thousand lives to give,
I'd lose them, nay, I'd gladly die
Before I'd live one life, a lie!"
He turned—for not a soldier stirred—
"Your duty, men—I gave my word."

The hills smiled back a farewell smile.
The breeze sobbed o'er his hair awhile,
The birds broke out in glad refrain,
The sunbeams kissed his cheek again—
Then, gathering up their blazing bars.
They shook his name among the stars.

O Stars, that now his brothers are,
O Sun, his sire in truth and light.
Go tell the list'ning worlds afar
Of him who died for truth and right!
For martyr of all martyrs he
Who dies to save an enemy!

The poem obviously romanticizes the event, showing that the very landscape of Tennessee supported his actions and his decisions. Even the enemy regrets such a strong, young hero should die. The monument of Davis equally romanticizes the subject, showing him with arms crossed defiantly and fearlessly. Whether or not these depictions are entirely accurate is irrelevant; Sam Davis was one of many examples of Southerners creating larger-than-life legends about the Confederacy to give it a positive image.

Death of Cooke: the writer of the South

John Esten Cooke died of typhoid fever at his Virginia home on September 27, 1886. He was 55 years old. Cooke, like his brother of Philip Pendleton Cooke, became a lawyer but also pursued writing as a hobby. Eventually, shortly after his father's death, he abandoned his law practice entirely to focus on writing. His literary work paused during the Civil War, however. "I can't compose," he admitted, "I can't think of anything but Virginia's degradation." He served as a militia man and, soon, an officer, working with major Confederate names like J. E. B. Stuart and others. He didn't stop writing entirely, however, and occasionally offered dispatches from the war front.

After the war, Cooke resumed his fiction writing, often focused on detailing the Southern experience. Before the war, many of his writings were set in colonial times; after the war, they were almost exclusively set in war time. Perhaps more importantly, he had been somewhat liberal and reform-minded before the war. After, he conformed to certain standards for Southern writers in the hopes of achieving significant commercial success. As he admitted, his intention was "to become the writer of the South yet!" To that end, his version of the Southern experience was bucolic, full of myth, and sometimes antagonistic to the north.

By the end of his life, he had published more than 30 books. Among those books are historical romances, biography (including one of Robert E. Lee and another of "Stonewall" Jackson, and collections of short stories. In more recent years, an organization has named a fiction prize in Cooke's honor; it is granted to books on the Civil War or Southern heritage. From Cooke's 1867 novel Wearing the Gray:

Of all human faculties, surely the most curious is the memory. Capricious, whimsical, illogical, acting ever in accordance with its own wild will, it loses so many "important events" to retain the veriest trifles in its deathless clutch. Ask a soldier who has fought all day long in some world-losing battle, what he remembers most vividly, and he will tell you that he has well-nigh forgotten the most desperate charges, but recalls with perfect distinctness the joy he experienced in swallowing a mouthful of water from the canteen on the body of a dead enemy.

War Poetry of the South: favorable or inverse

William Gilmore Simms dated his preface to the anthology War Poetry of the South as September 8, 1866. Written in Brooklyn, the introduction to the book explains the editor's reason for collecting such a book: the South's sufferings have prompted a high degree of mental and artistic development. Further, Simms writes, though the sentiments seem sectional and anti-Union, the Confederate states' re-assimilation into the fold means the rest of the country assumes these writings as part of their history. He continues:

The emotional literature of a people is as necessary to the philosophical historian as the mere details of events in the progress of a nation. This is essential to the reputation of the Southern people, as illustrating their feelings, sentiments, ideas, and opinions — the motives which influenced their actions, and the objects which they had in contemplation, and which seemed to them to justify the struggle in which they were engaged. It shows with what spirit the popular mind regarded the course of events, whether favorable or adverse; and, in this aspect, it is even of more importance to the writer of history than any mere chronicle of facts.

Facts, says Simms, do not show the emotion which poetry and song allow. These works are without reservation and, therefore, "gush freely and freshly from the heart." His hope is that these poems will be recognized, "not only as highly creditable to the Southern mind," but also as a sincere expression of Southerners — people whose rich sentiments sustained them through war. The book opens with Henry Timrod's "Ethnogenesis" (a poem announcing the birth of a new people) and ends with a few post-war verses. The most emotional are the poems which express grief, as in "Only a Soldier's Grave," credited to "S. A. Jones of Aberdeen, Mississippi":

Only a soldier's grave! Pass by,
For soldiers, like other mortals, die.
Parents he had — they are far away;
No sister weeps o'er the soldier's clay;
No brother comes, with a tearful eye:
It's only a soldier's grave — pass by.

True, he was loving, and young, and brave,
Though no glowing epitaph honors his grave;
No proud recital of virtues known,
Of griefs endured, or of triumphs won;
No tablet of marble, or obelisk high;—
Only a soldier's grave — pass by.

Yet bravely he wielded his sword in fight,
And he gave his life in the cause of right!
When his hope was high, and his youthful dream
As warm as the sunlight on yonder stream;
His heart unvexed by sorrow or sigh;—
Yet, 'tis only a soldier's grave: — pass by.

Yet, should we mark it--the soldier's grave,
Some one may seek him in hope to save!
Some of the dear ones, far away,
Would bear him home to his native clay:
'Twere sad, indeed, should they wander nigh,
Find not the hillock, and pass him by.

Death of Kennedy: not worth a debate

John Pendleton Kennedy was 74 years old when he died in Rhode Island on August 18, 1870, so the Baltimore newspaper was rounding up when it asked, "Where is the young man of to-day who is so young as John P. Kennedy at seventy-five?" This tribute considered the man's life a model for all Americans who wished to live good lives, calling him: "A man of wealth, he did not labor to acquire untold riches; a man of leisure, he was not an idler, but dedicated his energies to politics and literature."

Kennedy had served under President Millard Fillmore as Secretary of the Navy after time in Congress for his home state of Maryland (and a stint as Speaker of the House of Delegates there). Earlier than that, however, Kennedy was one of the first American writers of note. His novel, Swallow Barn, or A Sojourn in the Old Dominion was published in 1832, and Horse-Shoe Robinson in 1835. The latter, a historical novel, was compared with the works of his contemporary James Fenimore Cooper; one reviewer called the title character "another Leather Stocking." 

Kennedy sent an early draft of Horse-Shoe Robinson to Washington Irving who, despite being asked to keep it secret, was so "tickled with some parts of it" that he read it aloud to friends. The novel is set during the American Revolution and, as the author noted in a preface, was an attempt "to furnish a picture, and embody the feelings of a period of great excitement and difficulty." Set in the Southern provinces, unlike many contemporary histories which focuses on northern battles, the title character makes his way through the Carolinas and Virginia. Much of the novel depicts the difficulty and uncertainty of this contentious time (especially when the main character meets a traitor to the cause).

Kennedy was mostly retired by the mid 1850s and wrote little other than his early novels. In 1870, he was directed by a physician to go north for his health. After a few weeks in Saratoga, he went on to Newport. In a letter from that summer, he wrote to a friend: "The doubt is, whether my trouble is organic or functional, to which i say that at seventy-five or thereabouts, the difference is not worth a debate." At his death, he was buried in Baltimore's Green Mount Cemetery, the same graveyard where lies Southern poets Sidney Lanier and Edward Coote Pinkney.