The MagazineSword and PenLiterary culture after the Civil WarMar 14, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 25
• By EDWIN M. YODER JR.
 From Battlefields Rising How the Civil War Transformed by Randall Fuller Oxford, 272 pp., $29.95
The South and America Since World War II by James C. Cobb Oxford, 392 pp., $24.95
When Emily Dickinson, reclusive and wren-like by her own description, wrote those lines, abolitionism was the passion of the hour among her New England contemporaries. But most of them would probably have been baffled by her advice that truth, especially political or social truth, must be “slant”—shaded, indirect, or subtle—if it is not to blind. Dickinson punctuated her hundreds of wartime poems with dashes that underscored the gnomic urgency of her diction, often composing several a day during the Civil War. Many were about death: an indirect barometer of the toll of bloodshed that her angry and prophetic contemporaries courted. But the eminent writers examined in Randall Fuller’s fine book were intoxicated by the certainties of the era, and heedless. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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