Patriotic Gore

Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War is a 1962 book of historical and literary criticism written by Edmund Wilson. It consists of 16 chapters about the works and lives of almost 30 writers, including Ambrose Bierce, George Washington Cable, Mary Boykin Chesnut, Kate Chopin, John William De Forest (who, as American historian Henry Steele Commager put it, "surprisingly gets more space than any other writer, North or South"), Charlotte Forten, Ulysses Grant, Francis Grierson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hinton Rowan Helper, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Henry James, Sidney Lanier, Abraham Lincoln, John S. Mosby, Frederick Law Olmsted, Thomas Nelson Page, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albion W. Tourgée John Townsend Trowbridge, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman. In addition to De Forest, Wilson pays particular attention to Cable, Grant, Grierson, Holmes, and Stowe, choices considered "catholic and unexpected" at the time of its publication. The "patriotic gore" of the book's title was taken from Maryland's former (until 2021) pro-Confederate state song, "Maryland, My Maryland," "wrenched rather violently" from a line about the Baltimore riot of 1861. Commager described the book as a "series of reflections on [Civil War] literature and on the men and women, and the societies, that produced it"; he characterized it as "original, skeptical, allusive, penetrating. It is discursive, ranging widely from North to South, and even more widely in time." Most of the essays in the book originally appeared during the 1950s in The New Yorker. The critic R.W.B. Lewis observed that "the book does have a certain somber and durable magnificence. But for me it is damaged by Wilson's strenuous demythicizing of the war itself—his rejection as irrelevant of such matters as the fate of the Union and of the institution of slavery." Writing during the Cold War, Wilson viewed the Civil War through the lens of imperialism: “Having myself lived through a couple of world wars and having read a certain amount of history, I am no longer disposed to take very seriously the professions of ‘war aims’ that nations make.” This included the Union's "moral" rationale for going to war. As such, Wilson's analysis of the Civil War, intentionally or not, echoes the now-discredited Lost Cause ideology. Historian David W.