Enough of Your Yankee Bloodshed

Sources: 

[1] Dickinson, Emily. The Letters of Emily Dickinson: Volume II. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Assoc. Ed. Theodora Ward. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958. 399-400. The poem as it appears in this article is taken from American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2. Ed. John Hollander. New York: Library of America, 1993. 286. I prefer how Victory Comes Late— is edited in the latter volume, which is why I have chosen to use it over the version of the poem that appears in the volume of letters.

[2] Legal slavery succeeded in the southern United States, of course, by its little brother, share-cropping.

[3] Thomas, Emory M. Robert E. Lee: A Biography. New York: Norton, 1995. 271.

[4] For a general consideration of the sort of discourse available to both Lincoln and Dickinson, see, for example, Gary Wills’ Under God: “The idea that America should serve as God’s pattern for the rest of the world has been given less overtly theological expression in later versions of America’s mission.  But when wartime calls for sacrifice, American duty becomes again a divine imperative.  The military note returns. That was true even in the skeptical eighteenth century.  It would be more fiercely evident in the Civil War.

[…]

“As the crisis over slavery raveled out normal party politics, Abraham Lincoln, who regularly used biblical language, turned to Revelation.  That book speaks, in one of its psychedelic images, of robes washed white in the blood of the Lamb (7.14). Lincoln, in 1854, told an audience in Springfield:

“Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revelation.

“Lincoln was already dispensed to see the nation’s ordeal as a purification rite. Earlier yet, in 1838, he had written:

“Let it [federal law] become the political religion of the nation, and let the old and young, the rich and poor, the grave and gay, of all senses and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.

“When war actually began, there was an outbreak of apocalyptic imagery that gave Union rhetoric the accents of John Brown.  The best-known example of this eruption is Ohlia Ward Howe’s biblical paean, written hastily in an army encampment, that actually used the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” but set it to verse drawn from Revelation.  Though Mrs. Howe was descended from Cromwellian warriors, her evangelical background had not mattered to her much until war renewed her childhood memories of biblical crisis:

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored…”

Wills, Gary. Under God. Reissue edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. 208-09. [Brackets and emphasis in original.] On the “variety of stances [Dickinson assumed] in responding to the war” and her use of this pool of discourse available for her to draw upon, consider Faith Barrett’s essay, Drums Off the Phantom Battlements: Dickinson’s War Poems in Discursive Context, especially its opening sentences:

“‘War feels to me an oblique place,’ Emily Dickinson writes in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in February of 1863, three months after Higginson traveled to South Carolina to take command of a black regiment (JL 280). Scholars who examine Dickinson’s poetry often cite this passage as an example of Dickinson’s vexed and ambivalent writerly relationship towards the Civil War in particular and towards expressing political commitments more generally. The assumption is that Dickinson, one of the first American modernists, positions herself at a skeptical and oblique angle in relation to the war and its ideologies. In this same letter, however, Dickinson also offers a far more conventional statement about the war and its risks: echoing the concerns of many on the homefront writing to friends and relatives in the military, she worries aloud about Higginson’s safety and says that she prays for him and for other soldiers in church: ‘though not reared to prayer – when service is had in Church, for Our Arms, I include yourself’ (JL 280). In her Civil War writing, Dickinson offers both skeptical commentary on the war and expressions of concern or grief about friends who are in peril or who have lost their lives, expressions that sometimes echo popular depictions of soldiers as Christian heroes or of young soldiers rejoining their dead mothers in the afterlife.”  Barret, Faith. “Drums off the Phantom Battlements: Dickinson’s War Poems in Discursive Context.”  A Companion to Emily Dickinson.  Smith, Martha Nell and Mary Loeffelholz, eds.  Boston: Wiley-Blackwell.  Forthcoming. [My emphasis]

[5] Too late on a human level, then. But, also, importantly, and obversely, rarely too late for those who are “fond of war”; rarely too late for the designers of war who are also, most often, the least directly affected by war. Rarely too late for the unhuman, god-like Eagle at his Golden Breakfast.

[6] All Biblical quotations are from the King James version.

[7] It has been pointed out to me that the eagle as God is also associatively evocative of Jove’s eagle, in which case the national God who inverts Christian theology further displaces the New Testament’s God by also making him share the stage not only with the national deity but also with an image from pagan mythology. It was, of course, pagan mythology against which incipient Christianity partially defined itself.

[8] Reproduced in Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. 580.

[9] See note 5.

[10] Grossman, David. “The Poetics of Union in Whitman and Lincoln,” in Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: Norton, 2002. 874.

[11] See Barrett section of note 4.

[12] As Katherine A. Monteiro, who sees in Victory comes late— Dickinson “show[ing] her vision on the tragedy of war and of the revivalist religion,” writes: “In a country at war, the word [‘victory’] carries profound emotion. When the people believe the war necessary, not only to secure the nation and her principles, but to further the cause of Christ and morality, victory is charged with even more intensity.  Dickinson quickly shatters the intense joy with the rest of line one [‘comes late.’].  The hoped for victory comes too late and only after great suffering, so late in fact that it means nothing to the victor.  Victory comes to those who cannot even taste its sweetness through ‘freezing lips,’ just as it comes too late for soldiers who give their lives on the battlefield. No matter who wins the battle or the war, the victory means nothing to the dead.”  Monteiro, Katherine A.  “Dickinson’s ‘Victory Comes Late’.” The Explicator 44:2 (1986): 30-32.

[13] Bush, George W. “President Bush Commemorates Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery.” 28 May 2007. The White House. http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070528.html.