Kathleen Diffley’s The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876 makes a vital contribution to the study of American literature and cultural history more broadly in the years during Reconstruction. Focusing on four regional magazines—Baltimore’s Southern Magazine (1866–75), Charlotte’s The Land We Love (1866–69), Chicago’s Lakeside Monthly (1869–74), and San Francisco’s Overland Monthly (1868–75)—Diffley persuasively “reveals unexpected commemorative practices and narrative upshots complicating the literary Civil War that many believe they know” (2). By challenging the “master narrative” of immediate postwar memory presented in elite northeastern periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Diffley provides a timely reminder that Americans took diverse and inconsistent approaches to grappling with the consequences of the Civil War (3).
Chapter 1 of The Fateful Lightning focuses on the Southern Magazine and Baltimore more broadly. Despite their geographic proximity to the northeastern power base of American publishing, both the city and Southern editor William Hand Browne displayed a general antipathy to northern culture, if not necessarily the Union war effort. Aided by the rise of international copyright law, which compelled American magazines to replace reprints of European literature with original work from regional authors, Browne worked to develop “a version of ‘the South’ [that] might arise from Reconstruction to reenter the national lexicon” (25). He dreaded “Yankeeisation” below the Mason-Dixon line, writing “I want the new South, so far as it may be new, to be distinctly and especially the South, and not a bastard New England” (34). Southern Magazine Civil War stories thereafter offered what Diffley calls “a literature of protest” featuring southern characters earning a “second chance” by “thwarting [Union] authority through artful dodging” (24, 29). These stories “echoed Baltimore’s border status by opening between places: at a window, on a ferry, in a harbor” populated with “Southerners and Northern fellow travelers … celebrated for rejecting Federal dictates” (35). These characters focused on escape more than on committing violence against emerging power structures: the primary goal was to survive to live another day.
Diffley next examines the shorter-lived The Land We Love and its role in generating a “postmemory” of the war among southern white elites. (80). She notes that scholars such as David Blight have presented this Charlotte-based magazine, published by the Confederate general Daniel Harvey Hill, as “ground zero for the Lost Cause” (77). She offers a corrective that Hill sought less to romanticize antebellum culture than to “build a native Southern literature [that] would help to sustain the Union and the Constitution” as well as a conservative postwar order through the Democratic Party (80).
Diffley’s third chapter focuses on the Lakeside Monthly and the sprawling urban growth of postwar Chicago. According to Diffley, “where Charlotte’s The Land We Love ducked that city’s postwar urban heterogeneity to foreground instead the nearby cotton fields, their enslaved labor force, and their barbed caste hierarchies, Chicago’s Lakeside Monthly radiated the muscle, networks, and contending classes of a hungry city with more steel than soil and more explicit social friction than apparent social ease” (114–15). On the other hand, the Chicago magazine, while “arguing stoutly for emancipation … rarely imagined those once enslaved with much dimension” (104). Instead, its war stories presented freed people literally following the paths of supportive white northerners. While honoring the “luxury and elegant leisure” of the old South, Lakeside Monthly showed “little reason to mourn a cankered past and reverse the millennium.” It sought instead to reinvent a vision of the southern past useful for an industrial postwar nation and for a western audience experiencing both national and (in the wake of the 1871 Chicago fire) local reconstructions.
In chapter 4, Diffley presents San Francisco’s Overland Monthly, edited by Bret Harte, as a metaphor for the stereoscopes and photographs that changed American visual and psychological perspectives during and just after the war. Though Diffley’s metaphors often appear too literal (Chicago as the hub of the railroad network) or oblique (the connection between postage stamps and The Land We Love escapes me), this one essentializes not only this most Western of her selected magazines but her entire project. Overland Monthly “challenged eastern priorities through … unusual witness, which intensified the competition of visual logics with a further dissonance in perspective that readers were left to resolve” (148). In particular, Diffley stresses that Overland Monthly presented “a fundamental shift from individual initiative to group dynamics, from personal liberty to public service, and from established consensus to social contention [that] defied Boston’s high-toned example and helped reorient the play of postwar storytelling” (160).
Diffley buttresses her chapters by incorporating a full published story from each of the magazines under discussion. This choice proves a particular strength of her volume because it foregrounds the diversity of regional literary styles and approaches to the war. Although these periodicals never achieved massive circulations, even if they catered to small and often fleeting local audiences they remind us of range of responses to the Civil War during and after the conflict that have generally become subsumed in scholarly literature under unified northern and southern narratives.
This welcome volume fits neatly within a growing literature reexamining the complexities of the Reconstruction era. The range of perspectives and breadth of interpretation that Diffley incorporates into her work recommends The Fateful Lightning to literary scholars and historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The stories reprinted in the book could additionally serve as valuable primary source content for undergraduate classes.
