Genteel Rhetoric

Book excerpt: They were part of a larger North American refinement movement - a movement interrupted by the Civil War. Broaddus argues that the genteel and coherent voices with which these writers discuss literature and high culture break apart when they begin to write about material issues related to slavery, abolition, and war against the background of growing dissent between North and South. Genteel Rhetoric examines the writers as they live through and write about the Civil War - Emerson and Lowell from a safe distance, Holmes searching for his wounded son in Maryland, and Higginson in the thick of action as colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first regiment of former slaves in the Union army.