To Live and Die

Even before the first cannonballs were lobbed at Fort Sumter, fiction writers were trying to make creative sense of the War Between the States. These thirty-one stories were culled from hundreds that circulated in popular magazines between 1861 and the celebration of the American centennial in 1876. Arranged to echo the sequence of the unfolding drama of the war and Reconstruction, together these short stories constitute an "inadvertent novel," a collective narrative about a domestic crisis that was still ongoing as the stories were being written and published. The authors, who include Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, depict the horrors of the battlefield, the suffering in prison camps and field hospitals, and the privations of the home front. In these pages, bushwackers carry the war to out-of-the-way homesteads, spies work households from the inside, journeying paymasters rely on the kindness of border women, and soldiers turn out to be girls. The stories are populated with nurses, soldiers, field surgeons, preachers, slaves, and former slaves, and they take place in the cities, on the frontier, and on battlefields from Gettysburg to Chickamauga. The book opens with a pre-war vigilante attack on the Underground Railroad and a Kansas parson in Henry King's "The Cabin at Pharoah's Ford" and concludes with an ex-slave's story of the loss of her remaining son in Twain's "A True Story." In between are stories written by both women and men that were published in magazines from the South and West as well as the culturally dominant Northeast. Original illustrations from these same publications highlight the text. Kathleen Diffley's introduction provides literary and historical background, and her headnotes introduce readers to the authors and the publications for which they wrote. Just as they did for nineteenth-century readers, these stories will bring the war home to contemporary readers, giving shape to a crisis that rocked America then and continues to haunt it now.