“Painted for Posterity”: Guerilla Violence and Irregular Warfare in Rebecca Harding Davis’ Civil War Writing

“Painted for Posterity”: Guerilla Violence and Irregular Warfare in Rebecca Harding Davis’ Civil War Writing Vanessa Steinroetter (bio) In 1904, Rebecca Harding Davis published Bits of Gossip, which she intended not as a traditional autobiography but rather as a cultural memoir portraying her life as well as the people and events that influenced and shaped it. Davis was then seventy-three years old and could look back on a full life and an accomplished career as a journalist and writer. As she notes in her preface to Bits of Gossip, she set out to leave behind “not the story of [her] own life, but of the time in which [s]he lived,—as [s]he saw it,—its creed, its purpose, its queer habits, and the work which it did or left undone in the world. . . . Taken singly, these accounts might be weak and trivial, but together, they would make history live and breathe.”1 The memoir she compiled consists of eight chapters spanning different periods of her life from childhood through adulthood and is filled with memorable scenes and vivid language making this part of history “live and breathe”—and none more so than “Chapter V. The Civil War.” It is in this chapter of her memoir that Davis found the most evocative language to put into words how the Civil War, especially as she experienced it in the border region of western Virginia, shaped her own life as well as those of many others, civilians and soldiers alike. Written [End Page 73] almost forty years after the end of the war, Chapter V offers Davis’ starkest and most explicit depiction of the traumatic violence and destruction visited on the Virginia borderlands by guerrilla attacks and irregular warfare. Since the start of the war, Davis had been drawn to documenting the brutality and chaos that such aggression brought to bear on the land and its people. It was clear that the viciousness of guerrilla fighters and other armed groups had deeply impressed Davis as the worst aspect of the war in the borderlands. In a letter to her friend and editor James T. Fields from October 31, 1861, she had written, “God grant the war may never be to you in Boston what it is to us here.”2 In the years that followed, she became only more outspoken in her depiction and condemnation of irregular warfare. She included references to this violence and its traumatic effects in many of her stories set during the Civil War, including “Ellen,” “John Lamar,” “David Gaunt,” and “Captain Jean” (the latter set in the Missouri/Kansas border region). Even after the war had ended, she returned to these themes again in her essay “The Mean Face of War” (1899), prompted by the reality of the Spanish-American War to remind readers of the viciousness, lawlessness, and moral lapses that transformed average Americans into “murderers” and “thieves” during the Civil War, even those serving in official armies.3 In this essay, I examine Davis’ literary portrayals of the death and destruction caused by guerrillas and irregular warfare in the border region of western Virginia during the Civil War. Through strikingly visual tableaux of human bodies or body parts that bear the material traces of the violence visited upon them, Davis creates fragmented, haunting images that involve the reader in her own repetitive revisiting of traumatic wartime experiences throughout her life. After a brief overview of how Davis’ wartime experience in the Virginia borderlands shaped her view of guerrilla violence and of the Civil War, I examine literary references [End Page 74] to such violence in Davis’ Civil War stories “Ellen,” “John Lamar,” and “David Gaunt” as well as in her memoir. Speaking more eloquently about the lived reality of the Civil War than whole essays on the topic ever could, these strikingly visual scenes are Davis’ attempt to suggest what seems fundamentally impossible to convey in words: the true horror of what humans are capable of doing to one another in a state of lawlessness and chaos. While the Civil War is a mainstay of Davis scholarship and has generated many insightful interpretations of her work, my essay marks the first sustained investigation...