Daneen Wardrop, “Off for the War / Home from the War”

As a student and scholar of American nineteenth-century literary history, I have always been aware of the profound presence of the Civil War, but not necessarily as a visual or even visceral presence. To fill in this gap in my experience of history, I started looking at art from the period—Thomas Hovenden, Currier and Ives, Homer Winslow, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others. I also started reading narratives of war service, concentrating particularly on the many women’s nursing narratives written soon after the war. In retrospect I confess I was also trying to find, in my sideways manner, an outlet for my grief and outrage surrounding the U.S. attack of Iraq.

“Off for the War” and “Home from the War” were two Currier and Ives prints both issued in the same year, 1861, indicating the widespread perception that the war would be over in a few months. (Interestingly, there is another Currier and Ives print of “Off for the War” made especially for officers, which features the exact same people in the exact same attitude of leavetaking, but with more opulent clothing and accoutrements, including even a horse.)

The research on Civil War materials, to my surprise, has generated a series of poems. I include here two poems based on the memoirs of Sarah Emma Edmonds and Susie King Taylor. Edmonds was infamous for her spy work, which she undertook sometimes while dressed as a nurse, sometimes as a “contraband,” as an Irish immigrant, and in other disguises. Susie King Taylor was an African American nurse serving in her husband’s regiment in South Carolina. (She and her husband also served under Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson’s “preceptor.) The titles and italicized portions of the poems are taken directly from Edmonds’ and King’s memoirs. The poems first appeared earlier this year in Michigan Quarterly Review: