Anonymity, Authorship, and Recirculation: A Civil War Episode

Anonymity, Authorship, and Recirculation:A Civil War Episode Ellen Gruber Garvey (bio) Consider anonymous and pseudonymous publication. Pseudonymous publication allows a writer to authoritatively claim to have been a pickpocket, a nun, a Chicano farm worker, or a Cherokee orphan, without his or her name clashing too harshly with the assertion that the narrator speaks from the author's experience. Yet anonymity also permits squatters to claim authorship, or enables attribution to a person or type of person that readers and distributors would prefer to hear from. Publishers, reprinters and other sorts of distributors, and readers collaborate to create attribution and an understanding of who the author is. Although writers may not be the ones who decide that their works will cross dress, or travel in borrowed clothes or even uniforms, the tradition that grows around a work's authorship can have an intense effect on how the work is read and understood. The first section of this article considers some uses that the presumed authenticity of experience and gender of one writer allowed her poems to be put to, within what Meredith McGill has called the "culture of reprinting": the world of mid-nineteenth-century publishing in which exchanges and reprinting severed original names from works and reattached new ones. In this case it created a persona for the author in question.1 The second section analyzes one reader's use of that [End Page 159] author's poems and other Civil War poems in his scrapbook, as he mourned his dead son and reinforced his support for the Union. A case study such as this shows the power of readers' desire to hear the right voice speak the words they want to hear. Reprinting and free recirculation were facts of life of mid-nineteenth-century publishing in the United States. Newspapers and magazines picked up and reprinted one another's articles, poetry, and fiction, not always crediting the source publication, sometimes dropping the author's name, and sometimes altering the work. The process might be formalized through exchanges: newspapers that swapped subscriptions with one another and allowed free reprinting, with credit. Being reprinted was sometimes welcomed as a sign of an author's popularity; at other times authors resented their work being taken without pay or saw it as an even more hostile act, as Melissa Homestead's work on Fanny Fern has shown. Reprinting was sometimes at least partially controlled by an author.2 From newspapers, readers added a layer of domestic circulation by clipping and saving items for their scrapbooks to create home-made anthologies.3 Scholars have begun to look at the role of reprinting in shaping the reputation of well-known writers, but the circulation and recirculation of work through the press also tells much about how anonymity allowed publishers and readers to participate in, or even take over, some of the functions that authorship with a name attached occupies. A poet's name attached to a work, for example, suggests that a reader will find commonalities among that poet's works, and that the works will bear some relationship to the poet's self; while anonymity allows poems to blend into a general field of other poems that readers can see as similar, and permits readers to group them with war poems, say, rather than religious poems.4 Recirculation compounds the possibilities as in the case of this study, in which a poem moves from general newspapers to religious papers to anthologies and back again, gathering authority for its attributions. In wartime, people at home especially want to hear news of the front, and also to hear about the subjective experience of soldiers, to stay connected with them. So during the Civil War, newspaper reading assumed a prominent new role in the lives of many Americans, who scanned morning, afternoon, and evening papers to keep abreast of the war's progress; they were called out to buy the paper "at unusual hours … by the divine right of its telegraphic dispatches," as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. observed.5 Newspapers included stories about the war, poetry, and letters from local regiments. People at home seemed especially eager to hear stories of soldiers maintaining the values...

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