Foreword

With few exceptions, the Pieces in this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond. They were composed without reference to collective arrangement, but, being brought together in review, naturally fall into the order assumed.
The events and incidents of the conflict—making up a whole, in varied amplitude, corresponding with the geographical area covered by the war—from these but a few themes have been taken, such as for any cause chanced to imprint themselves upon the mind.
The aspects which the strife as a memory assumes are as manifold as are the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance. Yielding instinctively, one after another, to feelings not inspired from any one source exclusively, and unmindful, without purposing to be, of consistency, I seem, in most of these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the contrasted airs which wayward winds have played upon the strings.
—Collected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Chicago, 1947), p. 446. (Hereafter cited as Poems.)

The above passage is Herman Melville’s preface to Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, his first volume of poetry. The first impression is that Melville’s muse came to him fitfully and that the whole process of creating the seventy-two poems in Battle-Pieces was a somewhat casual one, the result of “contrasted airs” from “wayward winds.” Many of the poems, however, describe events of the war in terms so specific that one is prompted to wonder what Melville’s sources were and if he did not use these sources rather conscientiously, painstakingly exploiting them for details. In a note appended to his “Rebel Color-Bearers at Shiloh” Melville provides a clue to his sources by stating: “The incident on which this piece is based is narrated in a newspaper account of the battle to be found in the Rebellion Record” (Poems, p. 457). He then quotes in illustration a paragraph from one of the many newspaper accounts and official records given in the Rebellion Record.

Willard Thorp was the first to comment in print on Melville’s use of the Rebellion Record. In his “Introduction” to Herman Melville: Representative Selections (New York, 1938), Thorp pointed out that “Lyon” was composed partly of details drawn from Volume II and asserted that the Record was “exploited extensively” by Melville and that “Either he turned at once to its pages when the impulse to write verse again was imparted to him or he happened to be going through them when Richmond fell” (p. lxxxviii). Thorp offered no details, however, but in his edition of the Collected Poems Vincent identified the Record as a source for “Dupont’s Round Fight,” “The Stone Fleet,” and “Donelson.” When I wrote my M.A. thesis in 1959, these were the only comments in print on Melville and the Rebellion Record, and the topic was suggested to me by Professor Nathalia Wright at The University of Tennessee, and I have been grateful to her ever since for this and many other kindnesses. Subsequent discussions of the poems have acknowledged my thesis, but its discoveries—just which poems relied on what source and how—have never been spelled out, and my intention here is to give details of verbal borrowings.

Melville drew on the Record for twenty of the seventy-two poems in Battle-Pieces and for two others included in his later volume of poems, John Marr and Other Sailors. His indebtedness to the Record, moreover, is greater in one sense than is suggested by the total of twenty poems out of seventy-two, for most of the fifty-two poems not indebted to the Record are largely philosophical, eulogistic, or inscriptive. Of the lines actually describing war events and giving details of battles, an estimated eighty percent have probable sources in the Record. One poem, “The March to the Sea,” was inspired by Brevet Major George Ward Nichols’s The Story of the Great March.

The Rebellion Record comprises eleven volumes and a supplement to the first volume. The full title is The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, with Documents, Narratives, Illustrative Incidents, Poetry, Etc. It was published in New York, from 1861 to 1868, by Putnam’s. In a “Preface” to the first volume, the editor, Frank Moore, announced that the Rebellion Record proposed to furnish “in a digested and systematic shape, a comprehensive history of this struggle; sifting fact from fiction and rumor; presenting the poetical and picturesque aspects, the noble and characteristic incidents, separated from the graver and more important documents.” The usual arrangement was to divide each volume into three parts, each with separate pagination. The first part, generally seventy-five to one hundred pages, is a “Diary of Events,” usually brief extracts of such newspaper items as announcements of troop movements and changes in command. The second part, “Documents and Narratives,” constitutes the bulk of each volume and averages over five hundred pages. The documents, some of considerable length, include important proclamations by military and political figures, correspondence between officials, newspaper accounts of battles and other events, and official reports written by participating officers. With the exception of the newspaper accounts, which sometimes attempt a poetic style, the language is usually prosaic and not what one might expect to be a source of inspiration for a poet. The fifty or so pages of the third section, “Poetry, Rumors, and Incidents,” include poems by Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Edward S. Ellis, and other lights much lesser. Humorous and sentimental anecdotes fill out this section.

Since Battle-Pieces was published in 1866, Melville could not have plundered Volume X (1867) or Volume XI (1868), and there is no evidence that he used Volume IX (1866). The first eight volumes, however, as well as the supplement to Volume I, were in print by 1865 and available to him, although there is no evidence that he owned copies himself. In this study, the poems which owe something to the Record will be discussed below in the order in which they appear in Battle-Pieces and John Marr.

Frank Day
Clemson, South Carolina