The Ethnic Civil War: Minority Voices and Life-Writing of the Civil War Era.

摘要

The war between North and South, Yankee and Rebel, generally emerges in the critical and popular imaginations as one of the most bifurcated conflicts in American history, structured by an equally polarized racial landscape that defined subjects according to the categories of black and white. My dissertation argues, however, that more complexly fragmented categories of difference defined the Civil War era and its literary output and were vital to understanding the conflict in its fullest terms: namely, as a series of American civil wars including but not limited to the struggle between Union and Confederacy. Whether one considers religious prejudice faced by Catholics and Jews, ethnic tensions among immigrants, or the efforts of Native Americans to reclaim their sovereign lands, the Civil War emerges as a palimpsest: a complex overlay of events in which the battle between North and South was not the only struggle in which the nation's inhabitants were engaged.;This dissertation analyzes a neglected set of memoirs, diaries, and letters from that era, including texts by a Native American on Grant's staff, a Jewish nurse in Richmond, an Irish American soldier, and a British abolitionist. Through a literary analysis of these life-writings, I consider how various "outsiders" responded to the war on a personal and political level. My writers adamantly reflect on their position within the Union or the Confederacy, challenging traditional notions of the war and the racial struggles that defined it. The chapters of my dissertation thus question the very terms by which scholars portray the issue of race in America, not to mention how they understand the Civil War.;For, if the great Secession War was not simply a battle between North and South over the issues of slavery and secession, it necessarily became a more variegated conflict reflective of the diverse peoples involved in the war. This project does not so much dismantle the divides between North and South, rich and poor, black and white, as it expands the range of possibilities of who counted on either side. This deconstructive act, in turn, speaks to the fragmented nature of the conflict that supposedly tore the nation in half.