426
JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
documented; yet it was Alexander Stephens who when the Confederacy
was fonned proposed openly and frankly to base it on slavery.)
It
is "unfinished" too in the sense that one feels that the author, only
too aware of the complexities of the subject, purposely left the book
"open." On that unanswerable but quite legitimate question: should
it all have happened anyway? Mr. Wilson poses a series of rhetorical
questions:
Could this nasty situation have been averted? Should the war
not have been earlier brought to an end? Could it not, in fact, have
been prevented? Should Fort Sumter have been relieved? Would it
not have been a good deal less disastrous
if
the South had been al–
lowed to secede?
As a states-rights man Mr. Wilson's answer to all that
IS
implied
here is "yes," but still the question marks remain. Further even if the
answer is "yes," the other, more terrible problem and curse, slavery,
remains unsolved.
It
is then the kind of a book that the author could
take up again in a few years and by a few changes here and there give
to it a quite different emphasis and direction, so delicately poised-in
the book as a whole, not in the introduction-is it on the edges of so
many abysses and intolerable problems.
It
has been said that no
civil
conflict ever ends, no matter who wins. Even where the issues are no
longer relevant to contemporary society, as in the English civil wars,
the historians
go
marching on.
In
such civil convulsions as the French
Revolution and the American Civil War the consequences are still
working themselves out, and the agony of the initial and actual con–
flict stretches itself out over the decades and into another century. To
this "agony," past and present,
Patriotic Gore
is a literary testament.
Patriotic Gore
is composed of two complementary strands: it is
part literary history and criticism; and part history-protest-dirge.
One of the theses about the literature of the Civil War is that such
was the stress of the period that the pain and the problems enforced
themselves on people, diarists as well as creative writers, so powerfully
that it almost seemed as if an unseen hand were dictating the composi–
tion.
.i
The prime example of course of this hennetic aspect of the
culture of the war period is Mrs. Stowe, who said that "God" wrote
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
A less obvious example is Francis Grierson's
The
Valley of Shadows
(1909), one of Mr. Wilson's many discoveries.
Grierson was an incredible character, a poor Mid-Western boy who
became a rather celebrated
fin de siecle
cosmopolite, pianist, essayist,
mystic, and also celebrator of the great Americans like Lincoln and
