Battle Lines. Eliza Richards

Donelson”: “They swear it, and swerve not, gazing on / A flag, deemed black, flying from Donelson.”⁶⁶ Thinking about the slaughter in this way, Melville suggests, is a survival strategy, and the soldiers themselves may well know that if they don’t keep swearing to themselves, they could give up and freeze even sooner. Their awareness of the pragmatic quality of their belief is suggested by the word “deem,” as if they know that imagining the enemy as an evil empire with a black flag will help them survive. Their practical self-deceit is further underscored by the immediately subsequent observation that the Confederate soldiers do what they can to help their freezing foes even though they too are “in shivering plight”:

       Some of the wounded in the wood

      Were cared for by the foe last night,

      Though he could do them little needed good,

      Himself being all in shivering plight.⁶⁷

      The Times notes this interlude as well, which is completely inconsistent with the reporter’s tendency to elevate the Union soldiers at the expense of the Confederate soldiers.

      Observation, it seems, exceeds the ideological power to contain it, but ideology is useful and necessary, not only for political reasons. The reporter’s romantically saturated simile—“our heedless boys / Were nipped like blossoms”—as well as his language of monumental sacrifice—“each one a stone / A sacrifice for Donelson”—are poignantly inadequate as well as ideologically motivated. Attempts at rationalizing the carnage in terms of the natural cruelty of frost, or of a higher moral power, reveal themselves to be fragile attempts at holding onto meaning in a circumstance that threatens to annihilate it. Romantic similes and patriotic rhetoric can’t account for the Northerners freezing to death in Tennessee, but nothing arrives to take its place. Melville thus foregrounds an urgent need for what Whitman calls “strange analogies” and “different combinations” and suggests in the process that all this talk about the weather might be an attempt to forge relations and correspondences that take the place of romantic modes of troping, which at that point are functioning as little more than dead metaphors that further dehumanize the soldiers rather than bring their suffering closer to home.

      Before the Northern listeners can feel something for distant strangers, they must feel for abstract representations in new media forms. The catastrophic situation as well as the sheer length of the battle finally allows the people on the home front to think about the plight of the Union soldiers. The fact that the Union experiences setbacks and momentarily appears to be losing allows room for meditation rather than formulaic expressions of patriotic support. Donelson was a river battle as well as a land battle; Union ironclads shelled the fort from the Cumberland River while land soldiers tried to breech the walls (fig. 6). The fervent belief in the inviolability of the ironclads led to premature reports of victory. But that report is quickly reversed as news arrives that one of the ships was actually disabled by Confederate fire. This setback, on top of the descriptions of the soldiers’ severe suffering, causes the listeners on the home front to meditate on the situation. They may not achieve total fusion with the suffering soldiers, but they do begin to think about how little they know. The listening throng turns inward, to “silent thought.” This brooding in the brooding storm—“whose black flag showed in heaven” over their heads, corresponds inscrutably with the flag deemed black at Donelson:

      Many an earnest heart was won,

      As broodingly he plodded on,

      To find in himself some bitter thing,

      Some hardness in his lot as harrowing

      As Donelson.⁶⁸

      Rather than expressing their own feelings about the war, the brooders try to make correspondences between private and public campaigns, finding in themselves something as bitter as the soldiers are experiencing. In this they are forging new kinds of relations, infusing technological innovation with human desires for connection with others:

      Flitting faces took the hue

      Of that washed bulletin board in view,

      And seemed to bear the public grief

      As private, and uncertain of relief.

      Their faces “every shade of streaky blue” the color of ink washed away by rain, the listeners have to feel with and through a sheet that has been transcribed from a telegraphic report that was submitted by an onlooker (or someone who poses as such; no one can be sure) far away in Tennessee. This isn’t easy. It requires different combinations, as Whitman said, “strange analogies,” new modes of verbal relation. For, Melville suggests, in order to find relation, we reach out beyond our bodies into our surroundings, and we relate to what we find.

      As soon as news of Northern victory arrives, the quest for understanding ends and is immediately forgotten. The uneven process Melville has arduously charted becomes abstracted into lines that resemble a drinking toast, which summons no pain or cost:

Figure 6. “Storming of Fort Donelson—decisive bayonet charge of the Iowa Second Regiment on the Rebel entrenchments at Fort Donelson, Saturday evening, February 15, resulting in the capture of the works on the following morning—From a Sketch by our Special Artist, H. Lovie,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 15, 1862, 264–265. The snow reported in the journalistic coverage is not visible in the sketch—the men themselves are the “storm.” Courtesy of HarpWeek.

      ……all is right: the fight is won,

      The winter-fight for Donelson.

      Hurrah!⁶⁹

      Victory dispels all musings and broodings; “eyes grew wet” but only with “happy triumph.” The erasure of the event is sealed with the drunken reverie that ensues and the warm houselights that block out the weather:

      O, to the punches brewed that night

      Went little water. Windows bright

      Beamed rosy on the sleet without.

      The last residues of the crowd’s memory are lodged in those with a personal loss, who, forgotten by the revelers, retain some knowledge at a painful cost. The poem’s final scene is of the dissolution of boundaries between person and environment required for partial understanding:

      But others who were wakeful laid

      In midnight beds, and early rose, And, feverish in the foggy snows

      Snatched the damp paper—wife and maid

      The death-list like a river flows

      Down the pale sheet

      And there the whelming waters meet.

      Tears, the rain, and the names of the dead dissolve into a single body of water that summons the specter of the Cumberland River, which still flows by the gutted Fort Donelson. What remains is a new figure, one that signifies the challenges to come in representing mass suffering in an age of mass media: the blank sheet of paper, like a bluish gray sky, like an expressionless face. Melville has returned us to Cowper’s earlier figure of the frozen, snowy universal face, transposed now onto the telegraphic bulletin.

      Critics have divided in their interpretations of the elaborate staging of Civil War news in “Donelson.” Hennig Cohen and Stanton Garner emphasize the pains Melville took to forge correspondences between soldiers and civilians, especially via the weather: while the Union soldiers freeze to death in an unanticipated cold snap and storm, the listeners also endure “rain and sleet,” which “takes them in spirit to the weather and the storm of battle that the soldiers at Donelson experience.” Cohen goes so far as to say that this results in a “total fusion” between the listeners and the soldiers, perfect solidarity in “universal suffering.”⁷⁰ On the other hand, Franny Nudelman and Faith Barrett stress the shortcomings and failures of these correspondences, arguing