Legal Realisms: The American Novel

Under Reconstruction Christine Holbo

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Legal Realisms
 Legal Realisms
The American Novel under Reconstruction

C H R I S T I N E HO L B O

1
 3
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Preliminary portions of Chapter 2 were previously published. “ ‘Industrial & Picturesque Narrative’:
Helen Hunt Jackson’s California Travel Writing for the Century,” appeared in American Literary Realism
© 2010, University of Illinois Press, and is reprinted with permission. “Moral Suspension and Aesthetic
Perspectivalism in ‘Venice in Venice’ ” was printed in The Howellsian, 2011, © Christine Holbo
This book is for Eric, in voller Freiheit.
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. The Novel in the Era of Plessy 15
1. When Is a Novelist Not a Novelist? The Case
of Harriet Beecher Stowe 15
2. Realism and Realisms in Nineteenth-​Century
American Literature 24
3. The Sentimental Public, Social Despair, and the Problem
of “Concealment” 31
4. William James between the Rationality of Sentiment and
the Sentiment of Rationality: Knowing and Feeling in
a Residual Formation 41
5. What Henry James Knew: Concealment as the
Novel’s Knowledge 49
6. Plessy v. Ferguson and the Limits of the Law’s Knowledge 61
7. Albion Tourgée among the Sentimental Fools: The Cruel
Humor of de jure Equality 70
8. From Sympathy to Society: Realism in an Age
of Incomplete Emancipation 80
2. Perfect Knowledge: Sympathetic Realism between the Rational
and the Real 87
1. A Bleeding Heart Reads Ramona Straight 87
2. Helen Hunt Jackson’s Will to Believe 93
3. The Poncas, Public Sentiment, and the Right to Have Rights 100
4. The Legal Realism of A Century of Dishonor 107
5. The Hope for Scandal Proves a Stumbling Block 119
6. Traveling Saleswoman for Native Rights 124
7. Realism in the Venice of Prodigal Sons: Twain, James,
and Howells 129
8. Mugwump Aestheticism: The Relativism of Virtue 146
9. The Picturesque of Genocide in the Century 158
10. Ramona and the Fracturing of Sentimental Universalism 171
11. Failures 190
viii Contents

3. Imperfect Knowledge: William Dean Howells, Perspectival

Realism, and Social Politics 196
1. Howells, Sentimental and Modern 196
2. Howells’s West: Arcadia, Utopia, Exile 208
3. Sentimental Alienation and the Zeitschriftsteller 217
4. “Andenken”: Speaking in Code from Heinrich Heine
to John Brown 223
5. Venice: The Patriot in Exile, the Tourist in Everyday Life 227
6. From The Liberator to The Nation: Minor Topics and
Phosphorescent Heresies 237
7. The Politics of Representational Inclusion, 1872: De Forest’s
Alligatorville 247
8. The Politics of Representational Inclusion, 1874: Twain’s
Sentimental Revelations 254
9. Between the Polis and the Police: Man and Brother
in the Suburbs, 1871–​72 259
10. Studies in Incomplete Emancipation: “A Day’s Pleasure” 268
11. Mrs. Johnson and the Problem of Social Recognition, 1868 272
12. Realisms Legal and Literary, and the Black Maria 282
13. Romances and Divorces of the Republic: Hayes,
Mugwumpery, and the Novel 293
14. A Modern Instance: On the Corrupting Power of Sympathy 301
15. Juridical Representation and the Fragmentation of Social
Knowledge 306
16. Equal Protection and the Conflict between Community and
Society 315
4. A Double-​Barreled Novel: Huckleberry Finn and the Great
American Novel as Perspectival Realism 323
1. Howells, Twain, and Politics: “The Canvasser’s Tale” 327
2. The Perspectival Instability of Huckleberry Finn 331
3. Where Does Huckleberry Finn Go Wrong? Tragedy,
Comedy, and the Fine Art of “Cheating” 338
4. Reading for the Plot; or, The Phenomenology of the Canoe 344
5. The Law’s Perspectives: Child and Slave between
Community and Society 355
6. Equality Before (and After) the Law: Emancipatory
Storytelling 369
7. Immanence and Evasion, Literary Quality and
Literary Seriousness 378

Notes 387
Bibliography 423
Index 439
 Acknowledgments

Writing is the most sociable of solitary activities. One of the pleasures of

bringing a big book to completion is the opportunity to step back and con-
sider how many people have contributed to its imagination, how intellec-
tual debts only compound with the passage of time. My doctoral advisors
at Stanford University, Albert Gelpi, Jay Fliegelman, and George Dekker,
each contributed in unique and transformative ways to the research out
of which this book eventually grew. Al set a model for intellectual breadth
and generosity, encouraged me to think big about American literature,
and never lost faith as the project grew and grew. Jay drew me deep into
the strangeness of the American sentimental tradition. Without George
I would not have become a scholar of the novel. His thoughtful readings
of every draft and patience with ever-​expanding exploration of interdisci-
plinary frameworks allowed me to return freely to the novel as a genre and
ask meaningful questions about the content of form. I am sorry that Jay and
George are no longer here to see where this led, but I would like to believe
that they would find this book appropriately uncompromising. Many other
friends, teachers, and colleagues from Stanford also inspired this project, in
ways more profound than they might know. A seminar with Priscilla Wald
diverted my interests toward the cultures of domesticity in the American
novel; a seminar with Felicity Nussbaum embarked me on years of reading
in eighteenth-​century emotions; Tim Lenoir mentored me through a first
publication exploring the relationship between rationality and domesticity;
Regenia Gagnier and Kurt Mueller-​Vollmer helped me deprovincialize my
thinking about American social thought. An Americanist reading group
with David Cantrell, John González, Eric Schocket, and Carrie Tirado
Bramen sponsored my first sparring with Helen Hunt Jackson and William
Dean Howells. A year at the Stanford Humanities Center brought invaluable
time for writing and conversation. Sepp Gumbrecht and Jennifer Summit
provided crucial support in the transition beyond dissertation writing;
Denise Gigante and Gavin Jones offered much-​needed advice on reframing
the project. Meanwhile, time spent in Frankfurt allowed me to see American
traditions with other eyes. I am grateful to Susanne Opfermann for allowing
x Acknowledgments

me to play the visiting American at the American Studies colloquium; to

Axel Honneth for letting me join in discussions of American Pragmatism at
the philosophical colloquium; and to Cornelia Dziedzioch, Pia Neumann,
and Babette Tischleder for adventurous conversations across the Atlantic.
Detlev Claussen’s generosity and dialectical imagination provided inspira-
tion for rethinking American Reconstruction from the standpoint of incom-
plete emancipation. Teaching at Arizona State University has offered me rich
opportunities for further thoughts on the American West. I am grateful for
the advice of my colleagues Deb Clarke, Elizabeth Horan, Neal Lester, Joe
Lockard, Keith Miller, and Eric Wertheimer as well as for a semester of junior
leave generously granted by the ASU Department of English. My thanks
go out to my University of Arizona compatriots in English and Gender
and Women’s Studies, especially Nathan Tenneyson and Judy Temple and
their students, for the opportunity to present material on Jackson. The
Lavy Colloquium and the programs in Africana and Jewish Studies at the
Krieger Graduate School, both at Johns Hopkins University, provided cru-
cial fora for developing work on citizenship and emancipation within and
beyond the nation. The readers and reviewers for the William Dean Howells
Society Essay Prize, the Research Society of American Periodicals Article
Prize, ALR, and Oxford University Press were more than generous with their
comments and support. Betsy Duquette, Brad Evans, and Melissa Ganz were
ideal interlocutors and collaborators in assembling panels for the Modern
Language Association; Simon Stern offered insightful feedback and terrific
suggestions for reading. Elizabeth Meloy’s careful reading improved the
text in countless ways. I am indebted to Bradin Cormack for so many indul-
gent and insightful conversations about law and poetry. After all these years,
Ken Moss and Anne Eakin Moss, true scholars and perfect hosts, continue
to teach me the meaning of friendship. And Eric, der Gedankenarchitekt,
continues to discover new moons. Finally, I would like to thank the editors
and the literature delegate at Oxford University Press: Sarah Humphreville
and Brendan O’Neill, Abigail Johnson and Steven Bradley, Richa Jobin and
Richard Isomaki supported, encouraged, and helped me navigate this book
to completion.
 Introduction

The first self-​consciously modern sketch of the American literary land-

scape was executed in Boston in 1886. In the inaugural installment of his
“Editor’s Study” column, the series with which William Dean Howells estab-
lished the novel as a topic of household discussion and himself as the nation’s
most prominent literary critic, Howells began by describing the prospect
of American literature as it appeared from the editor’s chair at Harper’s
Monthly. Though Howells has largely been remembered for his earnestness,
for his advocacy of a realism of the ordinary and the natural, the image with
which this programmatic column opened hardly attested to either serious-
ness or simplicity. The editor looked out, Howells boasted, from a building
designed by Ariosto and adapted by an American architect—​“originally in
the Spanish taste,” with “touches of the new Renaissance . . . [and a] . . . co-
lonial flavor.” The study was a derivative jumble, an imitation of an imita-
tion. And the landscape the editor surveyed was a fantastic one, a scene in
which the Hudson flowed into the Charles, the Mississippi and the Golden
Gate occupied the middle distance, and the Seine and the Tiber appeared in
the background, while the “peaks of the Apennines, dreamily blending with
those of the Sierras, form the vanishing-​point of the delicious perspective.”1
As is the case with much of Howells’s theoretical writing, this commentary
upon the pleasures of mimesis requires decoding. At once a parody of the
grand vistas of the Romantic imagination and an appeal for an expansion of
the horizons of American representation, Howells’s jokey trompe-​l’oeil fu-
sion of continental landscapes implied three distinct claims about the past
and future of the American novel. The first claim was about representation,
the novel’s orientation toward the world. Howells suggested that realism, the
dominant mode of the mid-​nineteenth-​century novel, had failed to be true to
the plurality of experience: American literature needed to reject the idea of a
unitary national identity, a single origin or vanishing point, and to recognize
that literature must emerge from multiple imaginative as well as cartographic
horizons. The second claim was that the novel had overinvested in trans-
parency and forgotten that art was artifice. An imposed unity of perspective
2 Legal Realisms

brought art to life: but literature needed to break with the notion that unity
was natural, that beauty escorted truth into a world of harmony. The third
claim was political. Communicated in code—​to those capable of reading
American geographies in the light of global history—​was an argument for
why Americans must cultivate a more broadly cosmopolitan understanding
of power in order to understand America’s place among what Howells later
in the column called the “federal nationalities.”2 Invoking the old Sibyl of the
Apennines, meditating on a site whose Greek etymology and foundational
position in Roman history bore witness to the intertwinements of republic
and empire, virtue and violence, identity and hybridity, Howells’s imag-
inary landscape hinted at something delusional in the dream of American
exceptionalism. However much it might wish to evade this fact, literary re-
alism must start from the recognition that America, which imagines itself
so far from Europe, is not immune to the problems of domination rooted in
Aeneas’s soil.
Howells’s “delicious perspective” presented the novel as a form of art, as
a mirror of national self-​representation, and as a bearer and decipherer of
the logic of domination. In articulating the connection among these three
moments of the novel’s representation, he spoke to the aspirations of his gen-
eration, a collective conviction that the historical moment of the late nine-
teenth century required a new openness to the world and a departure from
rigid theories of unified knowledge and self-​knowledge. Legal Realisms
examines the writers of this generation in terms of the three concerns
exposed by Howells’s refractive image. It asserts, broadly, that the idea of a
literary “realism” was transformed in the years after the American Civil War,
and that this transformation was rooted in the ways in which Reconstruction
and its failures reshaped possibilities of knowing and imagining commu-
nity and society, citizenship and alterity. This reorientation at once expanded
the novel’s subjects and redefined its claim to provide knowledge about the
world. In the decades between the Civil War and the First World War, the
increasing social prestige of the novel—​its claim to be autonomous art—​was
bound up with its forms of knowing, with the problem of what it meant to
write realistically about a divided nation.
The late nineteenth century marked the first moment in which the
ambitions of an American literature were explicitly defined in terms of
the ideal of inclusive diversity. In the years after the Civil War, a cohort of
American writers went out to explore a nation which, newly reunited, was
also newly expansive in scope, extending for the first time across an entire
 Introduction 3

continent. They defined the novel’s work to be that of addressing the whole of
modern life by bringing this new wealth of “material” into the novel’s repre-
sentation. They went looking for diversity, and they found it: the literature of
the era is characterized by the exuberant representation of regional, cultural,
social, gendered, and ethnic and racial difference. They did not, however,
produce unified vistas commensurate with a celebratory sense of restored
national Union. Rather, their work is distinguished by what Nancy Bentley
has called “frantic panoramas”: fractured literary landscapes which, like
Howells’s, attested at once to the memory of violence and to the necessities
of art.3
The idea that the essential work of the novel was to expand represen-
tation to new social groups was not a new one in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. It did, however, crystallize an older set of expectations, and in this
sense it constituted a distinctive interpretation of the rise of the novel. Mid-​
nineteenth-​century readers and writers assumed that the expansion of rep-
resentation in the mimetic sense accompanied expanding representation in
a political sense. That the novel had grown from a popular mode of enter-
tainment, a purveyor of “novelty,” into the most prestigious literary genre of
the later nineteenth century, had everything to do with its increasing associ-
ation with bourgeois seriousness and Enlightenment knowledge during an
age of democratic revolution. Realist truth claims were linked, in nineteenth-​
century novels, with the impulse to believe that the empirical world is, or
should be, knowable, and with a sense of the agency, on the part of the reader,
corresponding to a world that is potentially masterable. Accordingly, the
novel’s epistemological claim was inextricable from a political vision, the
nineteenth century’s faith in universality and in a history moving toward
the telos of human freedom and equality. Presenting readers with a world
that they could know and in which they could act meaningfully, the realist
novel thought of itself as contributing to the progress of emancipation by
extending sympathy to the socially marginal and the oppressed. It claimed to
extend recognition by bringing the dominated into representation: to make
the abject subjects, in the strong sense of the word.4
To begin writing in the postbellum moment was to feel oneself an inheritor
of a triumphal moment in this literary-​political history. The Reconstruction
Amendments had inaugurated a new era of formal liberty. Citizenship was
now universal: this fact appeared to sponsor the possibility of a panoramic
representation whose unity of perspective would be grounded in the equality
of all subjects before the law. Yet American writers’ assumptions concerning
4 Legal Realisms

the emancipatory nature of novelistic representation ran into difficulty at

the very moment at which writers set out to bring all of America’s subjects
into representation. The first source of these difficulties lay in the unresolved
legacies of slavery and its defeat. The postwar Amendments had ended slavery
de jure, but they left the fact of domination largely unchanged. The problems
of equality and recognition that had seemed simple to the antislavery imag-
ination of the antebellum moment now appeared fraught with implications
extending out into all areas of life. But the challenge also grew out of the
changes in the material that American writers had set out to depict. The end
of the Civil War ushered in a period of western expansion. Wartime meas-
ures intended to strengthen the Union in the West, including the Homestead
Act, the Morrill Act, and the Pacific Railway Act, contributed to rapid con-
tinental consolidation after the war—​with effects rather different than the
Republican authors of these measures had contemplated. Differences of
civilization—​or, as Americans were learning to say, “culture”—​persisted be-
tween North and South, and appeared in the West; social conflicts in the East
were increasingly expressed in the languages of ethnicity and class. As the
axes of American difference shifted from the binary oppositions of the an-
tebellum imagination to more heterogeneous populations and more com-
plex geographies of domination and oppression, writers encountered an
increasing number of situations that did not conform to their expectations
of how a knowledge that could produce identity across difference would nat-
urally lead to justice. America was no longer divided into two worlds of slave
and free, but riven by the uneven logics of race and ethnicity, gender and
class, by partial and overlapping modes of legal and cultural citizenship, by
the distorting optics of continental distance and local particularity.
In encountering the world of incomplete emancipation, American writers
found themselves in a situation that was the inverse of the one they his-
torically expected. The rise of the novel, as they understood it, had allied
the novel’s knowledge to a conception of Higher Law: the novel made vis-
ible, through sympathetic representation, the universal humanity that the
law should acknowledge but did not. In the wake of Reconstruction and
its failures, equality was formally affirmed by positive law but nowhere to
be seen in reality. This fact—​of real difference within an empty equality—​
complicated the idea of inclusion, and confronted American writers with a
puzzle. Many agreed with Howells’s hopeful observation that “equality is such
a beautiful thing that I wonder how people can ever have any other ideal. It
is the only social joy, the only comfort.”5 But if equality was so powerful as
 Introduction 5

an ideal, why was it so weak in practice? The postwar generation responded

to this admission of weakness with a strategy they themselves recognized
as highly risky: that of orienting the novel’s realism toward difference in the
hopes of discovering real equality within it.
This book will present this transformation of the realist novel, and the
debates it engendered, as literary history in intellectual-​historical context.
The following chapters explore a number of writers who represent a spectrum
of different stances vis-​à-​vis the reorientation of realism toward difference,
ranging from enthusiastic embrace to outright rejection. These chapters will
approach these writers’ shifting conception of the novel biographically, in
terms of the lived process by which epistemological particularism became an
option that American writers could not ignore. The literary debates in which
they engaged were shaped by cultural and political forces; the categories of
reasoning writers asserted, the ways they thought about justice and knowl­
edge, were cognate with that of the philosophy and legal thought of their day.
But these literary debates were not reducible to transcriptions of the history
of ideas. This book will approach the epistemological shift in the novel, thus,
neither in the pure realm of the novel’s theory, nor in the pure realm of dis-
course, but in terms of the density of experience, the shifting decisions and
revisions that characterize the intersections of concept, history, and genre.
The fraught nature of the novelists’ project may be briefly comprehended
through an extraliterary comparison to the transformation of legal thought
that occurred during the same years. The title of this book invokes an impor-
tant tradition in the jurisprudence of the United States. “Legal realism” was
initiated with the doctrine, articulated on the first page of Oliver Wendell
Holmes Jr.’s 1881 The Common Law, that “the life of the law has not been
logic: it has been experience.” Holmes’s appeal to “realism” had a great deal in
common with that of the novelists of his generation: both rejected philosoph-
ical idealism; both asserted that values emerged from historical societies;
both recognized, as Holmes put it, that “the substance of the law at any given
time pretty nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then considered
to be convenient”;6 and both acknowledged that this meant that justice was
necessarily articulated not as the absence of domination, but in terms of
domination. Yet literary and legal realists did not draw identical conclusions
from these common perceptions. While early legal realism turned away from
claims about rights or about justice, condoning the postwar decades’ in-
creasingly circumscribed readings of the Reconstruction Amendments, lit-
erary realists repeatedly sought to work through epistemological and moral
6 Legal Realisms

relativism to imagine broader forms of emancipation and to affirm the rights

of the socially dominated.
That American literary realism could share philosophical assumptions
with legal realism points to some of the strange alliances characteristic of the
postwar world; that the literary realists nonetheless oriented themselves to-
ward quite different ends reminds us that political and literary history do not
move in lockstep, and that the logic of literary representation, while it may
reproduce and sometimes reinforce the logics of social domination, also, by
the nature of mimesis, stands opposed to it. If, indeed, the possibilities of the
late nineteenth-​century novel were framed by the increasing circumscrip-
tion of the emancipatory imagination, this very fact played into one of the
most important literary developments of the late century, the assertion of the
novel’s autonomy as literature. As the novel became the preeminent form of
literature and the categories of fiction organized around it supplanted older
conceptions of literature as “letters,” literary realists increasingly believed
in the freedom of the novel from direct political responsibilities, increas-
ingly argued that the novel was the bearer of its own kinds of knowledge.
They hoped, at the same time, that the novel’s unique capacity to mobilize
perspectives, to address the relativity of truth and value, could itself be a
source of political emancipation. A new sense of the novel’s status as auton-
omous literature emerged simultaneously with its orientation toward new
ways of thinking about politics, law, and social power.
This book tells the story of how concepts of knowledge and of literariness
associated with the novel were transformed as American writers began to
write in the light of incomplete emancipation. Accordingly, it tells a story
of collective bafflement and individual failures, of the extended self-​doubt
of a generation. The more the novel’s literary prestige came to rest on its
claim to produce knowledge out of alterity, the more writers came to ques-
tion what this knowledge meant. They asked what the ethical implications
were of trying to understand others’ experience, and whether—​as they had
once assumed—​this knowledge could not only register but also bridge differ-
ence, creating the kinds of social solidarity that readers in an age of emanci-
patory idealism could recognize as progress. They asked, in other words, how
the true and the good were supposed to be united in a literature defined by
nonidentity.
Legal Realisms is not a comprehensive history of multicultural literature
in late nineteenth-​century America, nor is it a history of socioliterary “diver-
sity” more broadly conceived. This book is instead interested in how diversity
 Introduction 7

came to be understood as important: as a definiens of the literary. A history

of transformations in conceptions of the novel’s knowledge, it seeks to tell
a series of interconnected stories: first, how the representation of diverse
perspectives moved to the center of the literary enterprise; second, how this
defined the moment in which literary “realism” came to occupy the most
prestigious position in American letters; third, how the realist project became
occupied with questions of the connection between the novel’s epistemology
and its ethics; fourth, how the realist response to these questions changed the
way that realists, and later generations, would imagine the novel’s ethics and
its engagement in “politics.”
At the heart of this study is a transition between two paradigms of literary
knowledge that part company across the problem of universality and differ-
ence. I will argue that the transition that has traditionally been understood
in terms of the passage from the sentimental novel to literary realism can be
better explained in terms of the crisis of one form of realism and the artic-
ulation of another: the failure of a sympathetic realism oriented toward an
ideal equality, and the emergence of a realism grounded in a pluralist episte-
mology and concerned with the exploration of real inequality. As sympathy,
which was conceived in the eighteenth century as an epistemological cate-
gory, was demoted in the late nineteenth century to being a mere affect, a
matter of individual psychology, so the novel of sympathy, which equated the
work of literary realism with its capacity to communicate human universals,
was replaced by a new kind of realism that insisted upon the perspectival
quality of all knowledge. Promoting the idea of limited or partial knowledge
to a virtue, the writers who embraced realism in the years after the Civil War
asserted that not presuming to know the feelings and experience of another
was a form of recognition. Even as they struggled to uphold the ethics and
politics of the sympathetic paradigm’s notion of universalism, these newly
self-​defined “realists” ceased to associate the novel’s highest values with the
ideal of transparency, and they began to explore the idea that the novel’s
distinctive contribution—​in terms of both the novel’s epistemology and its
ethics—​involved the possibilities of concealment. This dynamic tension be-
tween transparency and concealment, perspective as recognized difference
and perspective as a limit on knowledge, bore implications for how the novel’s
realism might relate to the political tradition of emancipatory struggle. Late
nineteenth-​century novelists explored the possibility that the novel’s knowl­
edge might be qualitatively different than the law’s knowledge: that the novel
could recognize forms of particularity and cultivate modes of blindness
8 Legal Realisms

that the law could not. Revising the emancipatory history of the novel, they
came to argue that political representation and literary representation were
connected but different in nature, that they stood in different relations to the
ideal of universal human liberation. In this sense, late nineteenth-​century
American writers at once acknowledged limits to the novel’s agency and
staked out a claim for its autonomy.

* * *
Central to the transformation of realism surveyed in this book stands
Howells’s work as a novelist, editor, and cultural commentator. The foremost
man of letters of his generation, Howells shaped the field of literature from
the 1860s onward by bringing his interlocutors into an extended conversa-
tion about the status of the novel as art and about its capacity to produce
social knowledge. While Howells has long been considered the leading (and
in some accounts, the only) proponent of realism in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, the way he thought about the novel’s art as a mode of “social” politics
has been largely misunderstood. The third chapter of this study addresses
the first half of Howells’s long and eventful career, up through the moment
in the early 1880s when he fully embraced the form of the novel, and when
his model of perspectival realism became a recognized standard for lit-
erary prestige. Howells, I will argue, remained committed throughout his
life to conceptions of emancipation as human equality that were rooted in
the antislavery struggles of the antebellum period. This continuity of polit-
ical and ethical commitment led Howells, however, to articulate a strikingly
new conception of the novel’s knowledge and of the novel’s role as a form
of political discourse. Howells challenged his contemporaries to expand the
field of literary “politics” to imagine society as a space suffused with polit-
ical power, and by doing so to confront the barriers to equal social recog-
nition that remained in an era of de jure universal citizenship. Calling into
question the idea that writers could simply assume the universal position as
either a moral given or as an ideal, he insisted that the novel’s essential con-
tribution rested in a perspectivalist epistemology, its capacity to confront
readers with the irreducible particularities of a world shaped by incomplete
emancipation. The novel’s “delicious perspective”—​its aesthetic freedom
to explore the nonidentity of the true and the good—​became a model for a
more expansive conception of the enjoyment of human freedom. Building
on this understanding of the novel’s epistemology, Howells advanced a pro-
gram for his generation that paired a mandate of completeness with a new
 Introduction 9

ethics of nescience centering on the limits of expression and the incom-

mensurability of moral experience. Under Howells’s inspiration, writers of
the postwar period confronted alterity in a double sense. They sought to in-
clude all American “subjects” in the novel’s field of representation, but they
also asked, with increasing urgency, what it meant to try to represent others’
experiences, and what Americans could not understand about each other.
Arrayed around this book’s central reconsideration of Howells are
explorations of a range of figures whose differing views on the novel and
its politics map out a geography of the postwar novel. Albion Tourgée and
Helen Hunt Jackson have largely been remembered in the canon as “minor
writers.” Their political and legal commitments to the rights of African
Americans and Native Americans have at once justified their ongoing inclu-
sion in the canon and warranted the lack of scholarly attention directed to
their aesthetic concerns, their self-​understanding as novelists. This study, by
contrast, attends to the connections between their conceptions of jurispru-
dence and their conceptions of the novel, arguing that neither was the naive
or merely instrumental practitioner of the novel they have been remembered
as. They cultivated, rather, a different conception of the novel, imagining the
configuration of the novel’s aesthetics, its epistemology, and its commitment
to the socially marginalized in different ways than did Howells. The world of
incomplete emancipation made for strange alliances; it also produced what
appear, retrospectively, to be inexplicable antipathies. Recovering Tourgée as
a stalwart defender of sympathetic, universalistic realism against Howells’s
perspectival realism, and Jackson as a reluctant recruit into perspectivalism,
these chapters explore at once what Howells’s conception of the novel defined
itself against and why novelists who shared many of his political values might
oppose his project for the novel. If we can understand the philosophical
grounds for Tourgée’s rejection of a perspectivalist realism, we gain insight
into the literary and intellectual aspirations of two generations of writers.
Politically and morally, Howells and Tourgée had a great deal in common.
A jurist, novelist, and civil rights campaigner, Tourgée shared Howells’s be-
lief in social equality as the highest human good. Both, moreover, began
their careers as writers with similar conceptions of the way the creative artist
contributed to the sphere of republican letters. But where Howells saw the
end of universalist, sympathetic realism in the antebellum mode as po-
tentially emancipatory for individuals and for the form of the novel itself,
Tourgée believed that relativism undercut the very ability of Americans to
speak, think, or write about freedom. For Tourgée, the great achievement
10 Legal Realisms

of the nineteenth century, as embodied in the nineteenth-​century novel,

had been its combination of the cultivation of republican virtue with an ex-
pansion of the scope of human sympathy. And he felt that contemporary
Americans were losing their grasp on this foundational idea.
The opening chapter presents the conflict between these two visions of re-
alism by looking ahead to the end of Tourgée’s career, exploring the story of
how Tourgée, who, in his role as the lawyer for Homer Plessy, had in 1896
just suffered a crushing seven-​to-​one Supreme Court rejection of the idea of
“color-​blind justice,” reacted to this defeat by writing an essay memorializing
Harriet Beecher Stowe and defending the “literary quality” of her sympa-
thetic realism against Howells’s perspectivalism. Reading Tourgée’s de-
fense of Stowe in relation to his arguments in Plessy v. Ferguson, the opening
chapter reconsiders why Tourgée and his generation considered Stowe’s work
to be a mode of realism, why Tourgée associated the rise of a perspectivalist
epistemology with the majority decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, and
why he saw the defense of civil rights as intertwined with the problem of de-
fining the novel as a literary genre.
The second chapter examines Helen Hunt Jackson as an exemplary figure
for the way the Reconstruction generation of American writers found them-
selves turning toward a perspectivalist understanding of the novel. Nurtured
on the sympathetic universalism animating the antebellum realism of Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jackson, like many writers who came
of age in the wake of the Civil War, witnessed the collapse of this model at the
moment of its triumph. The defeat of Radical Reconstruction amid rapid ter-
ritorial expansion and the rampant growth of both state and corporate power
had underscored how little vignettes of “life among the lowly” could over-
come deep-​rooted social antagonisms. The novel, a form which in Stowe’s
hands appeared capable of having “caused” the Civil War, seemed powerless
to do anything but witness the decay of the traditional alliance between lit-
erary conventions of imaginative sympathy and what Howells would later
dub the “emotional tradition in politics.”7 If the Reconstruction generation
felt that their writings could no longer achieve what the antebellum novel
had, they registered this sense of lost agency as an aesthetic-​epistemological
rift: a new tension within the novel, impassable, imponderable, between
the need for individual feeling and the structures of legitimate public sen-
timent. Nowhere were these dilemmas more evident than in the making
and unmaking of Jackson’s Ramona, a work of carefully researched so-
cial engagement that has generally been received as a historical romance
 Introduction 11

devoid of either political or intellectual ambition. Chapter 2 examines the

divide between conception and reception not as a mere product of changing
attitudes toward the melodramatic in fiction, but in terms of a shift in the
epistemology of social sympathy, reading Jackson’s investigation of interna-
tional and human rights law in A Century of Dishonor against the way her
travel writing engaged her in a generational rebellion against the high polit-
ical moralism of the prewar generation. Tracing out Jackson’s affiliation with
other writers of the 1870s and 1880s, this portion of the book offers an over-
view of the varying ways in which the “sentimental tourists” and “mugwump
aesthetes” of postbellum literature transformed the sentimental tradition,
and it suggests how the 1870s and 1880s prepared the ground for a literary
field defined by the paired ideals of autonomous literary experimentalism
and authentic, pluralistic cultural expression. This chapter uses Ramona to
consider the role of the American West in structuring the literary and po-
litical imagination of the late nineteenth century, and it argues that Ramona
must be read as an allegory of public agency in an age of violent territorial
expansion and divided fields of discourse. The novel’s subject, rightly under-
stood, is the bewilderment of the thinking citizen among the forces of domi-
nation; its romance the transformation of universal human rights claims into
picturesque heritage.
While Tourgée and Jackson can be better understood as literary art-
ists through an understanding of their opposition to perspectival realism,
Mark Twain and Henry James, recognized already by many in their time
as the greatest literary artists of their generation, have also been seen from
the first as representing opposing impulses. Strange alliances, strange
antipathies: that the “Turn West and the Turn East American” should dislike
each other has not been hard to understand.8 The fact, however, that they
should have in common an enduring friendship with Howells has remained
as underexamined as it is well known. Scholars of both James and Twain have
assigned Howells the same role: that of the cheerleader, the helpful editor—​
and the straight man whose more modest achievements highlight the genius
of his friends. This study does not seek to overturn these relative judgments
any more than it expects a restructuring of the canon with Tourgée or Jackson
at the center. Yet we may learn from the exercise in imagining a different
canon. By inverting the organizational logic of canonization—​by taking the
paired achievements of Twain and James as a frame within which to consider
the literary biographies of lesser-​known writers, and by approaching James’s
and Twain’s work through their relationship with Howells—​this study seeks
12 Legal Realisms

to accomplish three ends: to make visible the common ground these two
writers occupied with Howells, the new ways of thinking about the novel’s
knowledge and its freedom these writers shared; to make evident what it was
about Howells’s style that could make him a model, inspiration, and inter-
locutor for these two apparently very different writers; and to understand
what was at stake when other writers resisted the approach represented by
this triumvirate.

* * *
Legal Realisms is part of a two-​volume project that explores the transfor-
mation of the novel that occurred when the genre’s concept of literary value
became bound up with its commitment to difference. The story of this trans-
formation, which has both a literary-​historical and a more broadly legal, po-
litical, and cultural dimension, involves a revision of our understanding of
literary realism, and it necessitates reimagining realism’s position within the
chronologies of the nineteenth-​century novel. Specifically, the two volumes
consider realism within three time frames: a long history of realisms in the
nineteenth century; a long history of modern novelistic aesthetics, with its
dual commitment to modernism and multiculturalism; and the period be-
tween the 1860s and the 1890s that has traditionally been considered the mo-
ment of “American literary realism.”
The present volume argues that the history of literary “realism” can be
better understood if explored across a long chronology extending back across
the nineteenth century. In the course of this book it will become clear that
American literary realism cannot be understood in terms of the single mo-
ment in the postwar period to which this movement has often been assigned.
The “realists” of the 1870s and 1880s took the antebellum models of Stowe
and Hugo, Dickens and Thackeray as the achieved form of a genre that had
attained international prominence and currency in the antebellum period,
even though they felt the need to reinvent the epistemological, aesthetic,
social, and legal foundations of “the real.” This book follows their lead and
describes American literary realism not in terms of a single moment (oddly
belated in relation to the global history of the genre) but as part of a progres-
sion of “realisms” oriented toward an ever-​receding telos of emancipation.
At stake in this first volume is thus the transition between two different kinds
of realism, two different ways of thinking about mimesis, literary value, and
political commitment. The fact that the realists of Howells’s generation de-
fined their perspectivalism in terms of its modernity and its fragmentation of
 Introduction 13

perspective, however, opens a different horizon on the history of the novel.

In the second volume I will thus consider American literary realism as a
founding moment in a long history of modernism, taking its commitment
to difference—​temporal as well as cultural—​as a way of understanding the
common origins of avant-​gardistic modernism and what we have come to
call multicultural literature. Taken together, these two volumes argue for a
link between the long history of realism and that of the sentimentalist con-
ception of universal human rights; but they also suggest that realism was not
simply modernism’s precursor, but served as its incubator and interlocutor.
The space defined by the overlap between these two chronologies points to
the social content of aesthetic form and makes it possible to achieve a clearer
sense of what was at stake in realism as a literary mode that became—​and
remained, despite some critical discomfiture—​the “normal” form of the
novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.9
Legally and politically speaking, these two long histories pivot around
the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Telling the story of the failure of sympathetic
realism involves following it forward to the moment when, with the Plessy
decision, sympathetic realism’s universalistic ethics and its claims to literary
prestige appeared to collapse simultaneously. Telling the story of a multicul-
tural modernism involves understanding how the kinds of emancipation
to which literature aspired changed when Plessy inscribed divided citizen-
ship on the American landscape. Together the two volumes grapple with the
literary field’s response to the advent of formal equality and its limitations
between the Civil War and the early twentieth century. This analysis turns
around legal transformations that took decades to unfold, including the
changing definition of citizenship provoked by the wartime amendments and
Reconstruction, and around a comparably complex set of transformations
in concepts of the literary. Though novelists did not always directly engage
with technical legal concerns, their understanding of the national litera-
ture they sought to create was informed by ideas of citizenship: questions of
who is included in a nation, whose rights are protected, whose concerns are
the object of moral seriousness, laughter, or derision. This volume, though
it looks forward to the Plessy decision as an endpoint, therefore focuses on
the decades of the 1860s through the early 1880s, when the writers of the
Reconstruction generation sought to develop new modes of social, legal, and
moral perception. In the second volume, I will examine how, once the idea of
universal equality was defeated, perspectival realism’s embrace of diversity
as a central source of literary value promoted the rise of both multicultural
14 Legal Realisms

literatures and a modernist avant-​garde. Collectively, the two volumes seek

to interrogate the implications of placing difference at the heart of the literary
endeavor. Recognizing that the turn to difference was not inevitable, they ex-
plore both what was gained and what was lost when “modern” literature was
defined on these terms.
 1
The Novel in the Era of Plessy

You know I am a realist, in a much broader sense than those who

claim the name.
—​Albion Tourgée1

1. When Is a Novelist Not a Novelist? The Case of Harriet

Beecher Stowe

In 1868, the former Union soldier and carpetbagger John William De Forest,
most recently the author of Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to
Loyalty, made what would turn out to be his most influential contribution to
American literature. Writing for the recently founded journal The Nation, he
issued a call for a new kind of literary production, and in the process coined
the phrase “the Great American Novel.” The first writer to set out after this
fantastic object, De Forest was also the first to be disappointed in his search.
The nation had yet to produce any such “tableaux of . . . society”2 as England
enjoyed in the works of Thackeray or France in the works of Balzac or George
Sand. Hawthorne was too narrow, Cooper too dull. “The nearest approach to
the desired phenomenon,” he concluded, was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. De Forest had his reservations about whether Stowe’s perfor-
mance could be imitated by other writers, or even repeated by Stowe herself:

It was a picture of American life, drawn with a few strong and passionate
strokes, not filled in thoroughly, but still a portrait. It seemed, then, when
that book was published, easy to have more American novels. But in
[Stowe’s 1856 novel] Dred it became clear that the soul which a throb of
emotion had enabled to grasp this whole people was losing its hold on the
vast subject which had so stirred us.3
16 Legal Realisms

But if Stowe had ceased to live up to the hope of American readers for an ex-
pansive portrait of the whole of American society, other writers had failed as
well. Aside from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, De Forest concluded, there existed not “a
single tale which paints American life so broadly, truly, and sympathetically
that every American of feeling and culture is forced to acknowledge the pic-
ture as a likeness of something which he knows.”4
De Forest’s analysis struck a chord with American readers in a way his
own fiction never really did and set an agenda for a generation of American
novelists. Challenging his contemporaries to produce a novel adequate to the
continental society being reconstructed in the wake of the Civil War, the essay
marked a high point in the social authority of fiction in the United States.
As Lawrence Buell observes, De Forest’s call for an expansively “American”
novel converged with “a rising tide of cultural nationalist theory”5 around the
world, a moment in which the increased status of the novel as a genre became
linked to the idea of the nation itself. The fact that De Forest looked to Stowe
for his model of a national novel is often forgotten. Yet the choice of Stowe is
far from incidental. There was a politics to De Forest’s dream of a new novel,
but also a call to knowledge. At a political level, Uncle Tom’s Cabin stood for
the idea of a national literature centering on a single American readership
and community of rights.6 Epistemologically—​in terms of how De Forest
thought novels could help readers know the world—​the invocation of Stowe
affirmed what he considered the essence of the novel’s knowledge: a “fervent
emotional sympathy” linking writer and reader in moral commitment to
their world.7 Between these dimensions of his argument stood a concern for
particular experience, for local and regional literatures, that might be termed
“federal,” and was certainly also universalist. The representation of a wider
range of American experiences would not come from the self-​assertion of
particular localities but from the capacity to make the sections intelligible to
each other. The view would be panoramic, the gaze sympathetic.
If one looks ahead thirty years, to an 1898 essay by the Southern writer
Maurice Thompson, we find a very different assessment of the novel’s knowl­
edge and its relation to postwar America. Stowe had passed away in 1896.
While her work had been much in the literary news in the two years there-
after, most of the coverage had been superficial. As Barbara Hochman has
shown, the elevation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the status of a “classic” in the
late nineteenth century was accompanied by a slackening of the seriousness
with which Stowe’s work was read.8 The eulogies for Stowe tended to pre-
sent anodyne remembrances of the home life of a “beloved authoress” and to
 The Novel in the Era of Plessy 17

soft-​pedal questions of political or aesthetic influence. Everyone praised her,

few engaged meaningfully with her work. Thompson, writing on Southern
humor in The Independent, was an exception to this rule, producing a strange
tribute to Stowe that was half serious reflection and half political provoca-
tion. Notable about Thompson’s appreciation is the degree to which his re-
view followed the form of De Forest’s and confirmed the status of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin as the model for American fiction. Like De Forest, Thompson praised
Stowe in order to characterize the failings of an entire cohort, in this case
lamenting the quality of humor writing in the South. Like De Forest, he called
upon American writers to go beyond Stowe. But where De Forest effectively
imagined the Great American Novel to be an extension of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
Thompson wished for a literature of a categorically different nature. While
conceding that Stowe was America’s greatest writer to date and—​indeed—​a
better comic writer on the South than any Southerner, Thompson suggested
that Stowe should not be considered a novelist. For novels, in Thompson’s
view, must be centrally occupied with the task of expressing the particular,
internal worldview of a civilization. At this task Stowe had failed.
To illustrate his point, Thompson compared Stowe’s work with contem-
porary statements by Confederate vice president Alexander Hamilton
Stephens, concluding with a suggestion that Stowe was no model for later
writers because she was “a prophetess, not a novelist”:

The politician was wrong in his prophecy, the sentimental woman was right
in hers. Yet Stephens voiced accurately the spirit of Southern civilization; he
expressed it in its own terms, while Mrs. Stowe extracted from it a romance
as terrible as it was untrue to life.9

No one would have missed the insult here. Thompson rated the racial su-
premacist politician the better artist while demoting Stowe to the status of
a Cassandra and consigning Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the limbo of the sui ge-
neris. However accurate Stowe’s political predictions had turned out to be,
in Thompson’s view, the fact that she did not understand the life of the South
from the inside meant that her work was not only untrue but also unliterary.
Thompson’s criticisms pointed to the erosion of Stowe’s reputation in the pre-
vious decades. They suggest, moreover, a transformation of the project of the
American novel in the years since De Forest’s manifesto. That Stowe had not
“voiced accurately the spirit of Southern civilization” meant that the search
for the Great American Novel had been a thirty-​year mirage.10 Novelists who
18 Legal Realisms

wished to remain literary should stay closer to home. The project of a na-
tional literature must be abandoned in favor of true, authentic regional ones.
The late nineteenth century was the age of the Great American Novel. What
Warner Berthoff would later call the “ferment of realism” had everything to
do with the expectation that the dawning postwar era would naturally pro-
duce a novel fit for an expansive Union.11 There is nothing surprising about
this fact: it conforms to the most traditional categories and chronologies of
U.S. literary history. The contrast between De Forest’s and Thompson’s views
reminds us, however, that the same decades also saw the emergence of a vig-
orous critique of everything the Great American Novel stood for, the asser-
tion of a diametrically opposed conception of the novel’s knowledge and its
literary value. Facing off across thirty years, the two writers represent op-
posing sides of a rich debate concerning the social function of the novel and
the sources of the novel’s knowledge—​the grounds on which the novel could
claim to be “true.” This debate would shape the articulation of literary re-
alism as the most ambitious mode of novel writing in the last decades of the
nineteenth century, the mode most centrally associated with the increasing
prestige of the novel as a form of art, and it would define the relationship be-
tween the novel’s claim to be an “art” and its deep engagement with regional
and local color traditions.
In the case of De Forest and Thompson, the debate hardly appears a com-
plex one: its terms can be quickly reduced to the sectional simplicities of
biography and politics, postwar and post-​Reconstruction. De Forest and
Thompson grew up on opposite sides of the Mason-​Dixon line and fought
on opposite sides of the war, and their assumptions about literature reflected
these commitments. De Forest had fought as a Unionist and served for fif-
teen months during Reconstruction in the Freedmen’s Bureau. De Forest’s
literary epistemology was, like Stowe’s, universalist. Though De Forest
was never a convinced abolitionist or a strong ally of African Americans,
witnessing the freedmen’s belief that “the work of emancipation was in-
complete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery had been
reunited” pointed toward the way the novel could serve the reconstruction of
the nation.12 If a novel such as Stowe’s could lead to the overcoming of slavery
and the reuniting of slave families, the novel could also unite the broken
family which was the Union. And like Stowe, De Forest associated family
and freedom: his vision of the nation was not only expansive but emancipa-
tory. Abolitionists and Radical Republicans had, before and during the war,
argued that freedom, in the United States, could only be national: that the
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 1. Skirmish at Farmington, Mo. A large body of rebels routed by 50
Home Guards, under Capt. Cooke.
2. Rebels driven from Martinsburgh, Va., by Abercrombie’s
brigade, Gen. Patterson’s division. Union loss, 3 killed and 10
wounded; rebel loss, 30 killed and wounded, 20 prisoners.
2. Organization of Virginia Legislature, at Wheeling.
3. Gen. Lyon, with 2,000 Federal troops, left Booneville, Mo., for
the south-west.
3. Arkansas Military Board called out 10,000 men to repel
invasion.
4. U. S. Congress met in special session.
4. Passenger trains on Louisville and Nashville railway seized by
rebels.
4. Skirmish at Harper’s Ferry between N.Y. 9th and rebels. Federal
loss, 2 killed and 3 wounded.
4. Rebel battery erected at Mathias Point, Va.
4. Great Union meeting at San Francisco.
5. Battle at Carthage, Mo. Union forces, under Col. Sigel, 1,500;
rebels, 4,000. Union loss, 13 killed and 31 wounded; rebel loss, 250
killed and wounded. Successful retreat of Sigel.
5. Skirmish at Newport News, Va., between a detachment of
Hawkins’ Zouaves and rebels.
4–7. U. S. steamer South Carolina captured or destroyed 11 vessels
off Galveston.
6. Western Military Department constituted: Illinois, and the
States and Territories west of the Mississippi to the Rocky
Mountains, including New Mexico. Maj.-Gen. Fremont commanding.
6. Skirmish of 45 men, 3d Ohio, at Middle Fork Bridge, 12 miles
east of Buckhannon, Va. 1 killed and 3 wounded of the Federals, and
7 rebels killed and wounded.
7. “Infernal” machines detected floating in the Potomac.
7. Skirmish at Great Falls, Va. Major Gerhardt’s 8th German
battalion have 2 men killed. Several rebels killed.
7. Congressman Vallandigham assaulted in the camp of 2d Ohio
regiment.
 8. Telegraphic dispatches of military operations placed under
censorship.
8. Skirmish at Bealington, Western Va., 14th Ohio, and 7th and 9th
Indiana, and Col. Barnett’s 1st Ohio battery. Rebels defeated with
loss of 20 killed, 40 wounded; Union loss, 2 killed, 6 wounded.
10. Loan bill passed by House of Representatives, authorizing the
Secretary of the Treasury to borrow $250,000,000, redeemable in
20 years.
10. Postal service discontinued in Middle and West Tennessee.
10. Bill authorizing $500,000,000 and 500,000 volunteers, to
suppress the rebellion passed the Senate.
10. Gen. Banks appointed George R. Dodge police marshal of
Baltimore, vice Col. Kenly, and removed all the military to positions
in the suburbs.
10. House of Representatives empowered the President to close the
ports of seceded States.
10. Skirmish at Monroe Station, Mo., between Federal troops,
under Col. Smith, and rebels, commanded by Gen. Harris. Rebels
routed on the following day, after they had burned 25 railway cars
and station house, by Union forces sent to relieve Col. Smith. Several
Federals wounded; rebel loss, 30 killed and wounded, and 70
prisoners.
10. Rebel General Wise issued a proclamation to citizens of
Western Va., calling for volunteers, and offering pardon for past
offences.
10. Skirmish at Laurel Hill, Va. Federal troops under Cols. McCook
and Andrews, rebels under Col. Pegram. Rebels defeated. Union loss
1 killed, 3 wounded.
11. Alex. H. Stephens’ speech, at Augusta, Ga., defending secession,
and soliciting contributions to aid the Confederacy.
11. The State Journal, at St. Louis, Mo., suppressed by Gen. Lyon
for disloyal sentiments.
11. Battle of Rich Mountain, Va. Defeat of the rebels under Col.
Pegram, 60 killed, 150 wounded, and 150 prisoners. Capture of 200
tents, 60 wagons, 6 cannon, and other stores. Union loss 11 killed
and 35 wounded.
 12. Fight at Barboursville, Va. Six companies of Col. Woodruff’s 2d
Kentucky attack and defeat 600 rebels. 1 Kentuckian and 10 or 12
rebels killed.
12. 600 rebels, under Col. Pegram, surrendered to Gen. McClellan,
at Beverly, Va.
12. Twelve of Col. Bendix’s N. Y. regiment captured at Newport
News.
13. John B. Clark, of Mo., expelled from the House of
Representatives, having been found in arms against the Government.
13. Great Union speech of Joseph Holt, at Louisville, Ky.
13. Battle of Carrick’s Ford, Va., and death of Gen. Garnett, rebel
commander. Defeat and rout of the rebels, with a loss of 150 killed
and wounded, and 800 prisoners. Federal loss 13 killed, 40
wounded.
15. Skirmish at Bunker Hill, Va. Rout of rebel cavalry by fire of R. I.
battery. The rebels pursued by 2d U.S. cavalry.
15. Peace meeting at Nyack, N. Y.
16. Railway cars, containing Union troops, fired into at Millsville,
Mo. 3 soldiers killed, 7 wounded; 7 rebels killed.
16. Federal army under Gen. McDowell marched toward
Manassas.
16. Bill authorizing the President to call out militia to suppress the
rebellion, passed the House of Representatives, and the bill to accept
services of 500,000 volunteers.
16. Speech of J. C. Breckinridge in the Senate in opposition to the
Union Defence Bill.
16. Tilghman, a negro, killed 3 of a rebel prize crew on the
schooner S. J. Waring, and brought the vessel into N. York on the
22d.
17. Advance column of national army occupied Fairfax Court
House, Va.
17. Battle at Scarytown, Va. Repulse of Federate with loss of 9
killed, 38 wounded, 9 missing. Rebel loss less. 3 Federal colonels and
2 captains captured.
 17. Gen. Patterson’s army marched from Bunker Hill, Va., to
Charlestown.
17. Skirmish at Fulton, Mo. Rebels driven back with loss.
18. Kansas City, Mo., Home Guards, under Major Van Horn,
attacked near Harrisonville by a superior force of rebels, whom they
defeated, killing and wounding 20. Union loss 1 killed.
18. Battle at Blackburn’s Ford. Attack on the rebel entrenchments
at Bull Run by a portion of Gen. Tyler’s Division, who were repulsed
with a loss of 83 men killed, wounded and missing. Rebel loss 68
killed and wounded.
19. Six Federal officers, near Hampton, Va., fired on by rebels in
ambush. Major Rawlings killed, and Lieut. Johnson and Mr.
Shurtliffe wounded and captured.
19. By Gen. Order No. 46 of War Department, Maj.-Gen. Patterson
was honorably discharged, and Maj.-Gen. Banks appointed his
successor in the Department of the “Shenandoah,” and Gen. Dix
appointed to succeed Gen. Banks in the Department of Maryland.
19. The Captain-General of Cuba liberated all the vessels brought
into Cuban ports by privateer Sumter as prizes.
20. Rebel Congress met at Richmond, Va.
21. Battle of Bull Run.
22. Brig.-Gen. Beauregard promoted to the rank of “General” in
the rebel army, the highest grade.
22. Rebel Congress appointed a day of thanksgiving for the victory
at Manassas.
22. Maj. Gen. McClellan assigned to command the Department of
the Potomac.
22. Missouri State Convention met at Jefferson City.
22. Rebels attacked and dispersed at Forsythe, Mo., by Federal
troops under Gen. Sweeny, with loss of two wounded. Rebel loss, 5
killed, 10 wounded.
24. Naval expedition from Fortress Monroe to Black river, by
Lieut. Crosby and 300 men. Nine sloops and schooners of the rebels
burnt, and one schooner with bacon and corn captured.
 25. U. S. steamer Resolute, Lieut. Budd, brought two schooners
and one sloop prizes to Washington.
25. Gen. McClellan arrived at Washington, and Gen. Fremont at
St. Louis, and Gen. Banks at Harper’s Ferry, to take charge of their
respective departments.
25. Robert Toombs resigned the Secretaryship of State of the
Confederacy, to take office in the army, and R. M. T. Hunter, of Va.,
was appointed to succeed him.
26. Fifteen Home Guards from Rolla, Mo., were attacked at Lane’s
Prairie by a superior force of rebels, who were repulsed with the loss
of 1 lieutenant killed and 3 men wounded. Two guards were slightly
wounded.
26. Three rebels captured by Col. McLeod Murphy, of New York, in
Virginia, scouting alone.
28. Flight of Gen. Wise’s army from Gauley Bridge, Va., pursued
by Gen. Cox, who captured 1000 muskets and a quantity of powder.
28. A detachment of Col. Mulligan’s Chicago regiment, aided by
Home Guards, captured 28 rebels, 40 horses and 2 teams, at Hickory
Hill, Mo.
29. A rebel battery at Aquia Creek, Va., engaged by four U. S.
steamers for three hours, with slight damage.
30. Six Government clerks at Washington resigned, owing to a
Virginia ordinance of disfranchisement.
30. Three hundred kegs of powder and 6 cannon were captured
from the rebels near Warsaw, Mo.
30. The Confederate forces occupied and fortified New Madrid,
Mo.
30–31. Missouri State Convention abolished the State Legislature,
declared the offices of Governor, Lieut.-Gov. and Sec.-of-State
vacant, appointed special State officers, and provided for a special
election by the people in Aug. 1862.
Aug. 1. Rebel privateer Petrel, formerly U. S. revenue cutter
Aiken, sunk by U. S. frigate St. Lawrence, near Charleston. Thirty-six
out of 40 of her crew were rescued by the frigate’s boats.
1. Gov. Gamble, of Mo., delivered his inaugural to the State
Convention.
 1. Departure of Gen. Fremont’s expedition from St. Louis to Cairo
and Bird’s Point.
2. Fort Fillmore, New Mexico, with 750 men, traitorously
surrendered by Major Lynde, U. S. A.
2. Schooner Enchantress, with a valuable cargo, recaptured by U.
S. steamer Albatross, Capt. Prentiss, off Charleston, S. C.
2. Defeat of rebel forces at Dug Spring, Mo., by Gen. Lyon. Federal
loss, 9 killed, 30 wounded. Rebel loss, 40 killed, 80 wounded.
3. Lieut.-Col. Baylor, commanding the rebel forces in Arizona,
issued a proclamation taking possession of New Mexico, in the name
of the Confederate States, declaring all Federal offices vacant, and
appointing a secretary, attorney general and other officers.
3. Engagement at Mesila, N. M., between Federal troops and 700
rebels. Capt. McNeely and Lieut. Brooks, of Federal army, were
wounded, and 12 rebels killed.
5. The bark Alvarado, having a rebel prize crew, chased ashore
near Fernandina, Fla., and burned by sailors from U. S. ship
Vincennes.
5. Skirmish at Point of Rocks, Md. Sixty men of New York 28th
attacked rebel cavalry, killing 3, wounding 2 and capturing 7 men
and 20 horses, without loss themselves.
5. Skirmish at Athens, Mo. 300 Home Guards, under Col. Moore,
defeated a force of 1000 rebels, killing 23 and wounding 50. 10
Federals killed and 10 wounded. 5 wagon loads of supplies and 40
horses were captured by the Guards.
5. Election in Kentucky for members of the Legislature, the returns
showing a large Union majority.
6. Adjournment sine die of Special Congress at Washington.
7. The village of Hampton, Va., was burned by rebel forces under
Gen. Magruder. They were prevented from burning the bridge by
skirmishers of Max Weber’s New York regiment.
7· The privateer York was burned by gunboat Union, which also
recaptured the schooner G. V. Baker.
8. Rebel cavalry routed at Lorrettsville, Va., with loss of 1 killed
and 5 wounded, by 100 men of 19th N. Y., under Capt. Kennedy.
 8. Messrs. Breckinridge and Vallandigham partook of a banquet at
the Eutaw House, Baltimore. Mr. Breckinridge, in an attempt to
address the people, was prevented by popular clamor.
9. Skirmish at Potosi, Mo. Rebels driven off with loss of 2 killed, 3
wounded.
10. Battle of Wilson’s Creek, Mo. The Federal army under Gen.
Lyon, 5,200 men, was defeated by the combined forces of Gens. Price
and McCulloch, 20,000. Gen. Lyon was killed. Federal loss, 223
killed, 721 wounded, 292 missing. Rebel loss, (McCulloch’s report,)
265 killed, 800 wounded, 30 missing; Price’s report of Missouri
troops, 156 killed, 517 wounded.
12. “Bangor (Me.) Democrat” office destroyed by a mob.
12. C. J. Faulkener, ex-minister of U. S. to France, arrested on a
charge of treason.
13. Skirmish near Grafton, Va. 200 rebels routed, 21 killed and
wounded, by Capt. Dayton’s company of 4th Virginia, without loss.
14. Mutiny in New York 79th regiment, near Washington.
14 Gen. Fremont declares martial law in St. Louis, Mo.
14 “War Bulletin” and “Missourian” journals suppressed at St.
Louis.
14. Mutiny of 60 men of 2d Maine at Arlington, Va.; who were
arrested and sentenced to be sent to the Dry Tortugas.
14. All loyal men notified by Jeff. Davis to leave the Confederate
States in 40 days.
15. Two Federal sailors killed and 2 wounded, of the U. S. steamer
Resolute, in a skirmish at Mathias Point, Va.
16. Col Hecker’s regiment surprised 400 rebels at Fredericktown,
Mo., capturing 12 men and all the camp equipage.
16. Five New York newspapers were presented by the Grand Jury
as hostile to the Government.
16. A “Peace” meeting at Saybrook, Conn., broken up.
16. $58,000 seized by U. S. troops at Genevieve, Mo., and taken to
St. Louis.
16. Proclamation of Pres. Lincoln, declaring commercial
intercourse with the eleven States in rebellion unlawful, excepting
such parts thereof as have or may become restored to loyal
government, and forfeiting all vessels therefrom or bound to the
same, after 15 days.
17. Railway train near Palmyra, Mo., fired into by rebels. One
soldier was killed, and several wounded.
18. Privateer Jeff. Davis wrecked on the bar at St. Augustine, Fla.
18. Gen. Wool assumed command at Fortress Monroe.
19. Capt. Haleman with 50 mounted men left Bird’s Point for
Charleston, Mo., and encountered a body of rebels, killing 2 and
capturing 33 men and 35 horses, without any casualty themselves.
19. Skirmish at Charleston, Mo. Two hundred and fifty of 22d
Illinois under Col. Dougherty, and Lieut.-Col. Ransom of 11th Illinois
defeated 300 rebels under Col. Hunter of Jeff. Thompson’s army. 20
rebels were killed and wounded, and 17 prisoners taken. The Union
loss was 1 killed and 6 wounded.
19. Two hundred and forty Union fugitives from E. Tenn. arrived
at Danville, Ky., and were fed in the Seminary yard.
19. Office of the “Sentinel,” Easton, Pa., destroyed by a Union mob.
19. A. L. Kimball, editor of the “Essex Co. Democrat,” Haverhill,
Mass., was tarred and feathered, and ridden on a rail by a Union
mob.
19. “Passports” required, by notice from the Department of State,
from all persons leaving or arriving within the United States.
19. Office of the “Jeffersonian,” Westchester, Pa., destroyed by a
Union mob.
19. Office of “The People’s Friend,” at Covington, Ind., destroyed
by a Union mob.
20. Skirmish at Hawk’s Nest, in the Kanawha Valley, Va. A body of
rebels attacked the 11th Ohio, but were driven back with loss. Union
loss, 2 wounded and 1 missing.
20. The Wheeling (Va.,) Convention passed an ordinance to erect a
new State, to be called Kanawha.
20. A railway train from Jefferson City, Mo., when near Lookout
Station, was fired into by rebels, and 1 soldier killed and 6 wounded.
2 rebels were killed, several wounded, and 5 prisoners taken.
 20. Gen. McClellan assumed command of the army of the
Potomac.
20. Gen. Butler assumed command of U.S. Volunteer forces near
Fortress Monroe.
21. Surprise of part of company K, Ohio 7th, near Cross Lane, W.
Virginia, 2 killed and 9 wounded, 5 of whom were taken prisoners,
including Capt. Shutte.
22. Disloyal papers were rejected from the U. S. mails. Large
bundles of papers were seized by the U. S. Marshals in Philadelphia
and other cities.
22. The “Stark County Democrat” office, in Canton, Ohio, was
destroyed by a Union mob.
22. The steamer “Samuel Orr” was seized at Paducah, Ky., by
rebels, and taken up the Tennessee river.
24. A portion of the Cherokee Indians made an alliance with the
“Southern Confederacy.” The Cherokees and Creeks raised 2,000
men for the rebel army, and were promised payment of their
annuities by the Confed. Commissioners.
24. Arrest of Mayor Berret, of Washington.
24. The office of the Bridgeport (Conn.,) “Farmer” was destroyed
by a Union mob.
24. Office of the “Alleghanian,” Cumberland, Md., was destroyed
by a Union mob.
25. A band of rebels at Wayne Court-House, Va., was routed by 53
Federals under Capt. Smith, from Camp Pierpont, Ceredo, Wayne
co., Va. 4 rebels were killed, and 8 taken prisoners.
25. All vessels and boats on the Potomac seized by Government
authorities.
25. Gov. H. R. Gamble, of Mo., issued a call for 42,000 State
militia, to serve six months, unless sooner discharged.
26. Surprise of 7th Ohio, Col. Tyler, at Cross Lanes, near
Summersville, W. Virginia, by a large force of rebels. 15 killed, 40
wounded, and 30 prisoners. Rebel loss not known.
26. The War Department prohibited the transmission or
publication of any intelligence of army or naval movements
calculated to give information to the enemy.
 26. The Postmaster-General directed postal agents to arrest
express agents or others engaged in transmitting letters to seceded
States in violation of the President’s proclamation of 16th inst.
26. Com. Foote ordered to the command of U. S. naval forces on
the Western waters.
26. A naval and military expedition to N. Carolina coast sailed
from Hampton Roads, Va., under command of Com. Stringham and
Maj.-Gen. Butler.
26. Skirmish of two companies of N. Y. 23d, with a large force of
rebels at Ball’s Cross Roads, Va. One Federal killed, and one
wounded.
28. A party of Federal troops under Capt. Smith attacked and
dispersed a force of rebels at Wayne Court-House, W. Virginia, and
returned to Ceredo without loss. Five or 6 of the rebels were killed or
wounded, and 8 captured.
28–29. Bombardment and capture of Forts Hatteras and Clark, at
Hatteras Inlet, N. C. 30 pieces of cannon, 1,000 stand of arms, 3
vessels with valuable cargoes, and 750 prisoners were taken.
29. Fight at Lexington, Mo. The rebels, under Col. Reed, were
driven off with loss of 8 killed and several wounded. The Federals
had 5 or 6 wounded, and several loyal citizens were captured.
30. Martial law was proclaimed throughout Missouri, by Gen.
Fremont, and the slaves of all persons found in arms against the U. S.
declared free.
Sept. 1. Skirmish at Bennett’s Mills, Mo. Attack on Home Guards
commanded by Lieut. Chandler, by a large force of rebels. Federal
loss, 3 killed, 6 wounded. Rebel loss unknown.
1. Fight at Boone Court-House, Va. Rebels defeated, with a loss of
30. Six Federal soldiers wounded.
2. Fight near Fort Scott, Mo. 600 rebels under Gen. Rains, were
attacked and pursued by 500 Federals under Col. Montgomery. The
rebels falling back on reinforcements, Montgomery retreated.
2. The Mass. 13th captured 20 Charleston, S. C., cavalry, after
killing 3 and wounding 5, 2½-miles from Harper’s Ferry.
2. Col. Crossman, of Gen. Kelly’s staff, with two companies,
attacked 400 rebels, at Worthington, Marion co., Va., by whom he
was repulsed with the loss of two men.
3. Passenger train on the Hannibal and St. Joseph railway, Mo.,
was thrown into the Platte river, by the giving way of a bridge, partly
burned by the rebels. 17 persons were killed, and 60 wounded.
4. An engagement on the Mississippi river occurred, near
Hickman, Ky., between national gunboats Tyler and Lexington and
the rebel gunboat Yankee and shore batteries.
6. Paducah, Ky., was occupied by Federal forces under Gen. Grant.
7. Gens. Pillow and Polk occupied Columbus, Ky., with 7,000
rebels.
7. Five schooners were captured by Federal officers at Hatteras
Inlet.
8. Gen. Pope broke up a camp of 3,000 rebels near Hunneville,
Mo., under Gen. Green, and captured a large quantity of stores.
9. A revolt occurred among the N. Y. Rifles, at Willett’s Point, N. Y.
Two men were killed and 5 wounded.
9. A government steamer conveying prisoners from Lexington,
Mo., to Fort Leavenworth, broke her rudder, and being obliged to
land, the vessel was seized by the rebels, the prisoners liberated, and
40 Federal soldiers captured.
10. 156 Union prisoners, among them all the principal officers held
captive by the rebels at Richmond, were sent to Castle Pinckney, in
Charleston harbor.
10. Battle of Carnifex Ferry, near Summersville, Va. Federal
commander, Rosecranz, rebel, Floyd, who retreated with small loss.
Federal loss, 16 killed, 102 wounded.
11. Skirmish at Lewinsville, Va. Federal loss, 6 killed, 10 wounded.
11. The President modified Gen. Fremont’s emancipation
proclamation.
11. The Kentucky Legislature, by a vote of 71 to 26, ordered the
Confederate troops to leave the State.
12. A rebel camp at Petersburg, Hardy co., Va., was broken up by
Capt. Kid’s cavalry, and large amount of stores captured.
12. Skirmish at Black river, near Ironton, Mo. A detachment of
Indiana cavalry, under Major Gavitt, defeated a body of rebels, under
Ben. Talbot, killing 5, capturing 4, and 25 horses and a quantity of
arms.
12. The Legislature of Kentucky authorized the Governor to call
out the State military to repel the Southern invaders.
12. Two slaves, the property of T. L. Snead, a secessionist of St.
Louis, were manumitted by Gen. Fremont.
13. A large body of rebels, under Col. Brown, were repulsed from
Booneville, Mo., with a loss of 12 killed and 30 wounded, by Home
Guards under Capt. Eppstein, who lost 1 killed and 4 wounded.
12–14. Two engagements occurred on Cheat Mountain, Western
Va., in which the rebels, under Gen. R. E. Lee, were defeated with a
loss of 100 killed and wounded, among the former, Col. J. A.
Washington, and 20 prisoners. The Federal forces, under Gen. J. J.
Reynolds, lost 13 killed, 20 wounded, and 60 prisoners.
13–18. The provost-marshal of Baltimore, Md., arrested Mayor
Brown, Ross Winans, and Messrs. Pitts, Sangster, Wallis, Scott,
Dennison, Quinlan, Lynch, Warfield, Hanson, and J. C. Brune, of the
Legislature, also editors Howard and Hall, by order of the War
Department.
13. An expedition from the U.S. frigate Colorado, under Lieut. J. H.
Russell, cut out and destroyed the privateer Judah, under the rebel
guns at Pensacola. The Federal loss was 3 killed and 15 wounded.
14. A rebel camp near Kansas City, Mo., was broken up; 7 men
killed and 6 taken prisoners.
18. Col. F. P. Blair, Jr., was arrested at St. Louis for disrespectful
language when alluding to superior officers.
15. A body of rebels attacked Col. Geary’s 28th Pennsylvania
regiment, stationed on the Potomac, three miles above Harper’s
Ferry, and were repulsed with severe loss. One of Col. Geary’s men
was killed, and several slightly wounded.
16. A naval expedition from Hatteras Inlet under command of
Lieut. J. Y. Maxwell, destroyed Fort Ocracoke, on Beacon Island, N.
C.
16. The Federal gunboat Conestoga captured the steamers V. R.
Stephenson and Gazelle, on Cumberland river, Ky.
 16. Ship Island, near the mouth of the Mississippi river, was
occupied by Federal forces from the steamer Massachusetts.
17. A fight took place at Mariatown, Mo., between 600 Federals,
under Cols. Montgomery and Johnson, and 400 rebels, who were
defeated with a loss of 7 killed, and 100 horses and their tents and
supplies captured. Col. Johnson and 2 Federal privates were killed,
and 6 wounded.
17. A train on the Ohio and Mississippi railway, with a part of the
19th Illinois regiment, broke through a bridge near Huron, Ind., by
which 26 soldiers were killed and 112 wounded.
17. 500 of the 3d Iowa, under Lieut.-Col. Scott, attacked and were
repulsed by 3,000 rebels, under Gen. D. R. Atchison, at Blue Mills
Landing, Mo. The Federal loss was over 100 in killed and wounded.
18. Skirmish at Barboursville, Ky., between the Home Guard and
Zollicoffer’s men. 7 rebels were killed, and 1 guard wounded and
another taken prisoner.
18. Eighteen secession members of the Maryland Legislature were
arrested and lodged in Fort McHenry.
19. Ex-Governor Morehead and others, of Louisville, Ky., were
arrested by the U. S. marshal on charges of treason, or complicity
with treason.
20. Surrender of Col. Mulligan’s command, at Lexington, Mo., to
the rebel Gen. Price, after 4 days’ siege.
21. Gen. Lane’s command surprised a superior force of rebels at
Papinsville, Mo., routing them with a Union loss of 17 killed and 40
wounded; rebel loss, 40 killed, 100 prisoners, and all their tents and
supplies.
21. Two detachments of troops from Union gunboats, near
Glasgow, Mo., encountered each other, while reconnoitering at night,
and by mistake four were killed and several wounded.
21. Gen. Robert Anderson assumed command of Federal and State
troops in Ivy.
21. J. C. Breckinridge fled from Frankfort, Ky., and openly joined
the rebels.
22. Skirmish of the 7th Iowa, at Elliott’s Mills, Ky., with rebel
cavalry, who were defeated with the loss of three of their number.
 23. Ross Winans, of Md., took the oath of allegiance.
23. Capt. Goldsborough succeeded Com. Stringham in command
of the Chesapeake blockading fleet.
23. Detachments of 8th and 4th Ohio, and Ringgold’s cavalry,
under Cols. Parke and Cantwell, advancing from New Creek toward
Romney, Va., attacked and drove out 700 rebels from Mechanicsville
Gap, and pursued their combined forces of 1,400 from Romney to
the mountains. Federal loss 3 killed, 10 wounded; rebel loss 15 killed,
30 wounded.
24. The Comte de Paris and the Duc de Chartres, grandsons of
Louis Philippe of France, were attached as aids to Gen. McClellan’s
staff, and commissioned as captains.
25. Successful expedition of 3,000 men, under Gen. W. F. Smith,
for reconnoitering and forage, from Chain Bridge to Lewinsville, Va.
A large quantity of stores were captured.
25. Engagement at Chapmansville, Western Va. Col. Pratt, with
560 of the 34th Ohio, defeated a body of rebels under Col. J. W.
Davis, killing 29, including their commander, and wounding a large
number. Col. Pratt’s loss was 4 killed, 8 wounded.
25. A body of rebels were defeated near Osceola, Mo., by Federal
troops under Col. Montgomery, who set fire to the town. 10 rebels
killed; 1 Federal killed, 4 wounded.
25. James B. Clay (son of the illustrious Henry,) and 16 other
rebels were captured near Danville, Ky., while on their way to
Zollicoffer’s camp.
26. At Lucas Bend, Ky., 75 of Captain Stewart’s cavalry attacked
and routed 40 rebel cavalry, killing 4 and capturing 5, without loss
themselves.
26. By Presidential proclamation of August 12, this day was
observed as a day of fasting and prayer throughout the loyal States.
27. A body of Kansas troops, under Montgomery and Jamison,
engaged the advance guard of McCulloch’s rebel army near
Shanghai, in Benton co., Mo., and drove them back with loss.
27. Gen. Fremont, with 15 steamers and 15,000 men, sailed from
St. Louis up the Missouri river.
 27. The rebels evacuated Munson’s Hill, Va., which was occupied
by Federal troops.
28. Baker’s California regiment, and Baxter’s Philadelphia
volunteers mistook each other for rebels, at Fall’s Church, Va., and
fired, killing 15 and wounding 30.
Oct. 1. The U. S. steamer Fanny, with 35 men of the 9th N. Y.
volunteers, was captured by the rebels on the north coast of Hatteras
Inlet. She was loaded with government stores.
2. A secessionist camp at Charleston, Mo., was broken up, and 40
rebels captured.
2. $33,000, deposited in the St. Louis Building and Savings
Association, for the part payment of a U. S. annuity to the Cherokee
Indians, declared confiscated to the Government in consequence of
the secession of that tribe.
3. Attack on an entrenched camp commanded by Gen. H. A.
Jackson, at Greenbrier, Western Va., by Union forces under Gen. J.
J. Reynolds. Union loss 8 killed, 32 wounded; rebel loss greater. A
drawn battle.
3. Gen. Price, and the rebel army under his command, withdrew
from Lexington, Mo., leaving a brigade as a guard.
3. Gustavus Smith, formerly Street Commissioner of New York,
was appointed a Major-General in the rebel army.
4. Commander Alden, U. S. steamer South Carolina, captured two
schooners off the S.W. Pass of the Mississippi, with four to five
thousand stand of arms.
4. A company of 110 Texas rangers were defeated by 100 U. S.
troops from Fort Craig, at Alimosa, N. M. 10 Texans and their
captain killed, and 30 wounded.
4. Two boats from U. S. steamer Louisiana, Lieut. A. Murray,
destroyed a rebel schooner, being fitted out for a privateer, at
Chincoteague Inlet, Va. They engaged and repulsed the rebels with a
loss of 4 U. S. seamen wounded.
4. A large force of rebels, under Col. Wright, attacked the 20th
Indiana, Col. Brown, at Chicamacomico, near Hatteras Inlet.
Federals retreated, leaving their pickets, wounded, and camp
equipage in the hands of the enemy.
 4. Gen. Butler, commanding the Military Department of New
England, had his headquarters at Boston.
5. The rebel forces under Col. Wright were driven from the
Chicamacomico with severe loss, by U.S. steamer Monticello.
7. John Ross, principal Chief of the Cherokee Indians, negotiated a
treaty of alliance on behalf of that people with the Confederate
Government.
7. 57 released prisoners, taken by the rebels at the battle of Bull
Run, arrived at Fortress Monroe from Richmond.
7. U. S. gunboats Tyler and Lexington exchanged shots with rebel
batteries at Iron Bend, 3 miles above Columbus, Ky.
8. Brig.-Gen. William T. Sherman appointed to command the
Department of the Cumberland (Kentucky), in place of Brig.-Gen. R.
Anderson, retired from ill-health.
8. 200 rebels under Capt. Holliday, encamped two miles from
Hillsboro’, Ky., were attacked and defeated by a body of Home
Guards, under Lieut. Sadler. Rebel loss 11 killed, 29 wounded, 22
prisoners; also 127 rifles and other arms. Federal loss 3 killed, 3
wounded.
9. Attack upon Wilson’s N. Y. Zouaves, at Santa Rosa Island, four
miles from Fort Pickens, at 2 A. M., by 1,500 rebels under Gen.
Anderson. The regulars from Fort Pickens, and the Zouaves, defeated
the rebels, killing and wounding about 100, and taking 35 prisoners.
Federal loss 13 killed, 21 wounded.
9. Federal troops under Gen. Smith advanced from Chain Bridge,
and occupied Lewinsville, Va.
10. Cavalry skirmish 4 miles from Paducah, Ky. 2 of the 4th U. S.
cavalry mortally wounded, and 2 taken prisoners.
11. The rebel steamer Nashville, commanded by Lieut. R. B.
Pegram, escaped from Charleston, S. C.
11. Lieut. Harrell, of U. S. steamer Union, with three boats’ crews,
cut out and burnt a rebel schooner in Dumfries Creek, on the
Potomac, and escaped without loss.
11. Missouri State Convention met at St. Louis.
11. Marshal Kane was transferred from Fort McHenry to Fort
Lafayette.
 12. Rebel steamer Theodora ran the blockade at Charleston, S. C.,
having on board Messrs. Mason and Slidell, Commissioners to
England and France, with their secretaries.
12. Capt. P. G. Morton captured a train of 21 wagons, 425 cattle,
and 35 prisoners, with stores for hostile Cherokees, at Chelsea,
Kansas.
12. Cavalry skirmish south of Cameron, Ray co., Mo. A company of
Major James’ cavalry routed a large body of rebels, who lost 8 killed
and 5 prisoners. One Federal was killed and 4 wounded.
12. Six rebel gunboats, the ram Manassas, and a fleet of fireships,
attacked the U. S. fleet at the mouth of the Mississippi, and were
repulsed by them with slight loss on either side.
12. A party of 12 of a N.Y. Zouave regiment, under Lieut. Zeller,
were captured by the rebels near Newport News, Va.
12. Forty men of the 39th Indiana attacked and defeated a superior
force of rebels, 8 miles from Green river, Western Va., without loss
themselves, killing 5 and wounding 3 of the enemy.
12. Night skirmish near the residence of Cy. Hutchinson, Barren
co., Ky. Ten Federal horsemen, under Cols. Hobson and
Pennebraker, and Capt. S. Taylor, encountered 100 rebel cavalry, of
whom 4 were killed and several wounded. Federal loss, 3 killed.
12. 500 men of the Piatt (Cincinnati) Zouaves, under Lieut, Col.
Toland, and two companies of the 4th Va., drove out a large body of
rebels from Winfield, 20 miles below Charleston, on the Kanawha,
Western Va., who had been committing depredations. The Federals
captured a large quantity of military stores.
12. Skirmish between a detachment of the 39th Indiana, under
Lieut.-Col. Jones, and 58 rebel cavalry, near Upton’s, 14 miles below
Camp Nevin, Ky. The rebels were repulsed with a loss of 5 killed and
3 wounded.
12. A woman and five children, from families of U. S. soldiers from
Utah, were drowned while attempting to cross the Platte river on a
raft, near St. Josephs, Mo., the rope having been cut by an enemy.
13. Eighteen miles N.E. of Lebanon, Mo., Major Wright, with two
companies of U.S. cavalry, routed 300 mounted rebels, under Capts.
Lorrels and Wright. 62 of the rebels were killed and wounded, and
30 taken prisoners. One Federal trooper was killed.
 13. Skirmish at Beckweth’s farm, 12 miles S.E. of Bird’s Point, Mo.
20 men under Lieut. Tufts, encountered a superior force of rebels,
and after engaging them retired. 2 were killed, 5 wounded, and 3
missing, of the national force: 12 were killed and wounded of the
rebels.
13. Brig Grenada, of New York, was captured by the privateer
“Sallie,” of Charleston, which ran the blockade on the 10th instant.
14. 150 voters of Chincoteague Island, Accomac co., Va., took the
oath of allegiance to the U. S., in the presence of Lieut. Murray, of U.
S. ship Louisiana. The inhabitants of the island, 1,000 in number,
were loyal: no other flag than the national had thus far been allowed
to float on the island.
14. Major White, with one company of Missouri Scouts, captured
45 rebels at Linn Creek, Mo., commanded by Capt. Roberts.
14. The U. S. Secretary of State, Wm. H. Seward, issued a circular
to the Governors of all States bordering on the ocean and the lakes,
recommending that their defences should be put in effective
condition to meet the contingency of foreign war, instigated by rebel
emissaries.
5. U. S. steamer Roanoke, off Charleston, captured and burnt the
ship Thomas Watson, which ran on Stono reef while attempting to
evade the blockade.
15. Ten of the N. Y. 14th killed 2 rebels in a skirmish near
Lewinsville, Va.
15. Gen. Wool, at Fortress Monroe, declined to receive a flag of
truce from Norfolk.
15. 600 rebels, under Gen. Jeff. Thompson, attacked and captured
40 U. S. soldiers guarding the Big river bridge, near Potosi, Mo.
Federal loss 1 killed, 6 wounded; rebel loss 5 killed, 4 wounded. The
rebels paroled the U. S. soldiers and burnt the bridge.
15. The rebel batteries at Aquia creek and Shipping Point, on the
Potomac, fired on all vessels passing, but inflicted no serious
damage.
15. Three U. S. steamers sailed from New York in pursuit of the
privateer Nashville.
 16. Col. J. W. Geary, of the Penn. 28th, with 400 men from his
own, the 13th Mass, and 3d Wis., crossed the Potomac at Harper’s
Ferry, and captured 21,000 bushels of wheat, stored in a mill near
Bolivar Heights. A severe skirmish occurred with a body of rebels
who disputed the ground, from whom the Federals captured a 32-
pounder, and made good their retreat, accomplishing the object of
the expedition. Federal loss, 4 killed, 8 wounded.
16. Major F. J. White, with 220 Missouri scouts, surprised the
rebels at Lexington, Mo., and without loss, captured 60 or 70
prisoners, released Cols. White and Grover, and 12 other captives,
and seized 2 steamboats, with arms, ammunition and stores.
16. 1,000 rebels under Gen. Thompson and Col. Lowe, near
Ironton, Mo., were defeated with a loss of 36 killed and wounded, by
Maj. Gavitt’s Indiana cavalry, and 5 companies of Col. Alexander’s
21st Illinois. Union loss, 11.
19. Col. Morgan, with 220 men of the 18th Missouri regiment, and
two pieces of artillery, defeated 400 rebels on Big Hurricane Creek,
Carroll co., Mo., killing 14, and taking 8 prisoners. Col. Morgan had
14 men wounded—two mortally.
19. Twenty rebel N. C. prisoners were sent to Fortress Monroe, to
be released on taking an oath not to bear arms against the
Government.
21. Battle of Edward’s Ferry, Va. 1,900 men from Gen. C. P. Stone’s
division, under command of Col. E. D. Baker, U. S. senator from
Oregon, were ordered to cross the Potomac at Harrison’s Island, or
Ball’s Bluff, to support reconnoissances above and below that point.
At 4 P. M. they were attacked by 3,000 rebels under Gen. Evans, and
driven to the river bank, where, there being no adequate provision
for crossing, they suffered severe loss, by the enemy’s fire, and by
drowning. Killed, 223, wounded, 250, taken prisoners, 500. Rebel
loss about 200 in killed and wounded.
21. About 2,500 rebels, near Fredericktown, Mo., under Jeff.
Thompson and Col. Lowe, were attacked by 3,500 Federal troops,
commanded by Col. J. B. Plummer, of 11th Missouri, with Missouri,
Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana troops, under Cols. Ross, Marsh,
Hovey, Baker, Lieut.-Col. Pennabaker, Maj. Schofield, Capt. Stewart
and Lieut. White. The rebels were defeated with great loss, and Col.
Lowe was killed. They left 175 bodies on the field, and had a large
number wounded. Eighty were taken prisoners, and 4 heavy guns
were captured. The Federal loss was 7 killed and 60 wounded.
21. A portion of the rebel General Zollicoffer’s command was
repulsed from an advanced position of General Schoepf’s brigade,
near Camp Wild Cat, Laurel co., Ky. The Federal loss was 4 killed
and 21 wounded.
22. Flag-officer Craven, of the Potomac flotilla, reported the
Potomac river commanded by rebel batteries, at all important points
below Alexandria.
22. A detachment of U. S. cavalry broke up a rebel camp at Buffalo
Mills, Benton co., Mo., killing and wounding 20, taking 60 prisoners,
22 wagons and a number of horses.
23. Col. Len. Harris, with the 2d Ohio, two guns of Capt. Konkle’s
Ohio battery and Capt. Laughlin’s cavalry, drove out a body of 200
rebels from West Liberty, Morgan co., Ky., after a skirmish in which
10 were killed, 5 wounded, and 6 made prisoners, of the rebels, with
no loss on the part of the Federals. A small quantity of stores was
captured.
23. Fifty men of the 6th Indiana while skirmishing near
Hodgesville, Ky., were attacked by a superior force of rebels, whom
they repulsed, killing 3 and wounding 5. Three of the Federals were
severely wounded, including Lieut. Grayson, their commander.
23. Gen. Fred. W. Lander was appointed to command the brigade
of the late Col. Baker.
24. President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, so far
as related to military arrests, in the District of Columbia.
24. The steamer Salvor was captured while attempting to run the
blockade at Tampa Bay, Fla.
24. Western Virginia voted almost unanimously in favor of a
division of the State.
24. The western section of the California telegraph was completed
to Salt Lake City, connecting the wires from the Pacific to the
Atlantic ocean.
24. Skirmish between the pickets of Gen. Wm. T. Ward and a
scouting party of rebels near Campbellsville, Ky. Several of the rebels