To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861–1876

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Daily Emergency: Civil War Stories of the War Generation Time Line Prelude 1861 “The Cabin at Pharaoh’s Ford”, Overland Monthly (December 1874) / Henry King “Job and the Bug” Lippincott’s (May 1871) / Chauncey Hickox “A True and Simple Tale of ‘61,” Southern Monthly (December 1861) / Izilda “Ellen,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1865) / Rebecca Harding Davis 1862 “Hopeful Tackett-His Mark,” Continental Monthly (September 1862) / Richmond Wolcott “Thomas Elliott’s Speculations,” Harper’s Monthly (February 1863) / Fred B. Perkins “Mrs. F.’s Waiting Maid,” Harper’s Monthly (June 1867) / Nora Perry “Believe in Ghosts!” New National Era (November 1870) “The Sergeant’s Little Story”, Southern Magazine (October 1873) / William H. Kemper “On the Antietam,” Harper’s Weekly (3 January 1863) “A Letter from the Country,” Harper’s Weekly (8 November 1862) / Charity Grimes “T. J.’s Cavalry Charge,” New Eclectic Monthly (April 1870) / Confederate Gray 1863 “Colonel Charley’s Wife,” Harper’s Weekly (8 October 1864) “The Fourteenth at Gettysburg,” Harper’s Weekly (21 November 1863) “Lee at Gettysburg,” Galaxy (April 1871) / J. D. Imboden “Three Days of Terror,” Harper’s Monthly (January 1867) / Ellen D. Larned (Ellen Leonard) “The Brothers,” Atlantic Monthly (November 1863) / Louisa May Alcott “The Case of George Dedlow,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1866) / Silas Weir Mitchell “Robbed of Half a Million,” Harper’s Monthly (October 1866) / J. O. Culver “In the ‘Libey’,” Harper’s Weekly (20 February 1864) “Mr. Williamson Slippey and His Salt,” New Eclectic Monthly (October 1870) / Richard Malcolm Johnston (Philemon Perch) 1864 “A Night on the Mississippi,” Putnam’s (April 1870) / Ross Guffin “Mrs. Spriggins, the Neutral,” Southern Magazine (February 1871) / G. J. A. Coulson (Alcibiades Jones) “Buried Alive,” Harper’s Weekly (7 May 1864) “A Night in the Wilderness,” Galaxy (May 1871) “The Freedman’s Story,” Harper’s Monthly (October 1866) / M. Shele de Vere “Road-Side Story,” Land We Love (August 1866) 1865 “The Skeleton in the Closet,” Galaxy (June 1866) / Edward Everett Hale (J. Thomas Darragh) “Sentenced and Shot,” Lakeside Monthly (November 1870) / Richard M. Sheppard “Wilhelmina,” Atlantic Monthly (January 1875) / Constance Fenimore Woolson Aftermath “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It,” Atlantic Monthly (November 1874) / Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) Author Sketches Illustration Sources Civil War Glossary Bibliographic Essay Index

About the Author :
Kathleen Diffley is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa and the author of Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861–1876.

Review :
"This splendid collection reveals a great deal about the 'real war' that Walt Whitman predicted would never get into the books. Written between 1861 and 1875, the stories illuminate myriad facets of our defining national crisis. The range of scenes and voices from the battlefield and the homefront, from men and women, from North and South, remind us of the almost infinite variety of ways in which the war touched Americans."-Gary W. Gallagher, author of Lee and His Army in Confederate History "Kathleen Diffley has unearthed, assembled, and contextualized a fascinating collection of stories, most completely unknown until now. This volume will bring renewed attention to Civil War fiction as a viable and interesting genre."-Elizabeth Young, author of Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War "This anthology of short stories offers fascinating glimpses of the Civil War as most Americans at the time experienced it-by reading about incidents on the battlefront and elsewhere in popular magazines. Modern readers can project themselves back to that heroic and sentimental time more effectively through this medium of popular literature than in any other way."-James M. McPherson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era "Language shines in many of these tales, revealing >them as part of the 19th century's colloquial verve. Daily >emergencies sometimes rise to comic levels or take on an >extraordinary bleakness in battles, prison camps, and hospitals. A >valuable collection, most especially for Civil War aficionados." Kirkus >Reviews "a fascinating collection." Library Journal