In September 1862, readers of the short-lived Continental Monthly might have encountered the following prediction by prominent editor and sometime politician Horace Greeley: The United States of the future will be no constrained alliance of discordant and mutually repellant [sic] commonwealths, but a true exemplification of “many in one” – many stars blended in one common flag – many States combined in one homogeneous Nation. Our Union will be one of bodies not merely, but of souls.1

This chapter reads Frederick Douglass’s writings from the 1840s and 1850s in light of the Irish Famine. In addition to providing a fresh perspective on Douglass’s writings and situating the theme of hunger at the center of his work, Finseth offers an elegant example of how environmental history intersects with African American literature.

The day after the Battle of Chancellorsville, a soldier on the losing side, William L. Aughinbaugh of the 5th Ohio Infantry, reflected on the spectacle of violence he had just survived:

What makes this passage remarkable – especially in the context of Aughinbaugh's growing disillusionment with the war effort – is not only the self-consciousness with which it both invokes and rejects the linkage of beauty and violence but also that it implicates, in its allusion to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” one of the iconic texts of American cultural identity. In his own way, Aughinbaugh recognizes here the ways in which myth and aesthetics, those handmaidens of war, can derange both our perceptual and emotional responses to the real world around us. The soldier, predisposed to see the battle in romantic and nationalist terms, is finally liberated, conceptually, by the actual bloodshed he witnesses: bloodshed that measures the cost of his disenthrallment.

In this one moment, in one man's private journal, we can discern some of the seeds of a complex literary history that would unfold in the late-nineteenth-century as American writers sought to come to terms with the meaning of the Civil War. Making generalizations about how they did so is a hazardous business – because many different strategies were brought to bear, from many different perspectives – but one of the signal impulses of the era was to move beyond the constrictions of Romance and to go, as Aughinbaugh puts it, “behind the curtain.” This desire to get at the “reality” of the war (however that reality was conceived) helped generate a distinctive strain of literary realism that took its place within a broad, evolving, many-faceted, and at times controversial artistic movement in the United States.