3 - The American Stephen Crane: The Context of The Red Badge of Courage

Summary

Culture, in its true sense, I take it, is a comprehension of the man at one's shoulder.

–Stephen Crane to Willis Brooks Hawkins, 1895

Writing in 1866, in the doomed, sad language of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, Herman Melville counseled his countrymen on how to think about the Civil War that had just ended: “Noble was the gesture into which patriotic passion surprised the people in a utilitarian time and country; yet the glory of the war falls short of its pathos – a pathos which now at last ought to disarm all animosity.” Melville wanted Americans to face what had happened to them, to recognize at what cost they had spent their blood and store – but he was not quite willing to say, in retrospective chastisement, that they had brought the catastrophe upon themselves. “Perhaps,” he conceded, “nothing could have averted the strife, and … to treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.” Into this sentence there crept the idea of necessity: the notion that all the Bible-thumping abolitionists, and Free Soilers, and Conscience Whigs, and Southern nullificationists, indeed all who had thought themselves self-motivated actors in the years that led to war – had been caught in a collective delusion about their freedom to act and to control the results of their actions. Behind the reasoning debators and the irrational mobs, the committed slave smugglers who brought fugitives north and the bounty hunters who returned them south, and finally, behind the two great armies that threw themselves at each other for four years, there lay – Melville was suggesting – an invisible First Cause.