The Eloquent War: Personal and Public Writings from the Civil WarISBN: 978-1-881089-31-5
Paperback
160 pages
October 2006, Wiley-Blackwell
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The Civil War confronted all Americans with the weightiest moral
and political issues since the American Revolution. In diaries and
journals they argued and agonized with themselves; in sermons and
speeches, in poems and love letters, they revealed to one another
their own interior war. As they sought with words to hold their
experiences steady for a moment, they sometimes achieved the
eloquence that may evoke extraordinary times.
The 59 selections in this volume, written between 1860 and 1865, include such well-known writers as Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Melville, and Whitman, as well as the lesser-known, whose experience of war is immediate, unfiltered by memory. It is a picture of America, a literature that crosses all social borders, an integrated portrait of the Civil War as a national experience.