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In 2012, the A merican Civil War sesquicentennial continued. We were prepared for the panels on secession, Sumter, and Shiloh, and of course the books in preparation for the 2013 salute to the Emancipation Proclamation. Perhaps the film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer caught a few off guard, but it too had precedent: in the centennial, moviegoers watched Two Thousand Maniacs (1964), a horror-filled Confederate revival where Yankees were "gruesomely stained in gushing blood color." In April 2012, though, an important anniversary passed nearly unnoticed: Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Litera- ture of the American Civil War turned fifty. Since 1962, scholars have grappled with this epic. Wilson put a question mark where, today, few believe there is a question—Was the Civil War a mistake? When Patriotic Gore first appeared, the shape and tenor of Civil War re- search was in the midst of a decade's-long shift. Many scholars had seen the North as unjust, brutish, and mean and the war as a fight over nationhood. But by the 1960s, in the wake of World War II, the abolition of slavery started to emerge in the work of white American historians as a fateful event. Wilson published Patriotic Gore at a key moment—the Civil Rights Movement had turned a sharply focused lens on American race relations and, soon, the conflict in Vietnam did the same for American militarism. Through 816 pages, Wilson spoke to both of these concerns—his grand American opus was progressive in its certainty that the war was a mistake and was reactionary in its belief that, though slavery was wrong, it had little to do with the conflict. He accomplished this in a bombastic introduction that spoke to the causes and consequences of the Civil War, and with an inspirational catalogue of nineteenth-century American authors. In the twenty-first century, Patriotic Gore serves as a weigh station to inspect war, peace, freedom, and slavery in Civil War scholarship and celebration. Upon publication, however, the work, which Wilson wrestled with for fifteen years, helped to revive his reputation as one of the great twentieth-century Ameri- can intellectuals—a broad-minded commentator who approached subjects as |
